Living

I hope every parent of young children has discovered the delights of Wibbly Pig and Percy the Park Keeper:...

“If we love them, our objective will not be to impress them with our learning but to help them with theirs.”

A brief and very helpful reminder from Doug Wilson (quoting and summarising Stott) about the vital necessity of preaching with simplicity and clarity. [Edit: Wilson’s blog post is a paragraph long. The post is, indeed, brief – but not as brief as the sentence I’ve quoted above. Just to make clear!]

“Avoid divisions!”, say the closing three chapters of Romans. And I don’t know one Christian who doesn’t agree with that. We all hate division in church life. It is ugly. It distracts from evangelism. It causes personal pain and grief.

The important thing to notice is that Romans 14-16 offers us two very different ways in which division might arise, and therefore two very different ways of avoiding it.

Version 1

Hello everyone!

Some of you may have wondered why I took a two week break from posting as I didn’t let on much. Others will have seen the issues clearly. Personally, I’ve valued having a couple of weeks to give serious thought to some of the issues that were raised with me. It’s easily to be cheaply dismissive or (equally easily) blown here and there by everything everyone says. I wanted to be neither, but to listen and think with care.

I’ll be taking a 2 week break from posting on this site from now.

Comments still welcome of course – especially in response to this post. I had a really useful conversation with two good friends yesterday about the tensions of blogging. Specifically, what we were talking about was how blogging sits with serving the church in pastoral ministry.

• Is it wise for a minister of a local church to blog?

• How is that changed if I am, more precisely, an assistant minister?

Thanks to Neil Robbie for pointing me to this one.

How do you come up with a policy for a church on paedocommunion that allows for:

• difference of opinion on the issue, and

• clarity on how responsibility and government are apportioned between church and family?

Well, Neil pointed me to the policy adopted by Trinity Presbyterian Church in Birming ham, Alabama. Very helpful indeed.

Jesus said: “Let the children come to me, and do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of God.”

I noticed the other day that Luke uses a different word for “children” here than either Matthew or Mark. Luke uses bre,foj==. Both Matthew and Mark use paidi,on==. (Again, you’d have to have the BW font to see that correctly – the words are brefos and paidion, for those without the fonts.)

Thanks, Peter Sanlon, for your permission to post a copy of your article from Churchman, entitled The Embers of Preaching and the Flames of Piety.

A stimulating read, folks. It’s easy to point to those outside of evangelicalism, or outside of our bit of evangelicalism, and point out deficiencies in the preaching we find there. It’s easy to exhort one another to address every deficiency that we find in such preaching. But it’s refreshing to find a brother who has had the courage and patience to reflect on the deficiencies within one’s own camp.

To whet your appetite to read the whole thing (13 sides of A5 – not over long!), here’s a paragraph from the introduction:

A very interesting article on the advent of independent Christian Schools appeared in the Association of Christian Teachers magazine for Spring 2007.

James Cary is very helpful on the importance of refusing false choices between evangelism and other kinds of work.

Thanks Jam.