Living

Today is Ascension Day, when we celebrate Jesus’ return to his Father, the completion of his work on earth, and the fact that he is now Lord of all the kingdoms on earth.

Yesterday I listened to Doug Wilson’s third talk from the Auburn Avenue Pastors’ Conference. Less content than the first two of his talks there, but very worth listening to. His main point was that we don’t see, on the ground, a world ruled by Jesus Christ. And then made the point that we are better at

Now that Sunday has passed, and our church members at St James Audley have had time to read their notice sheet, I can post this.

We have appointed Samantha Pentlow to be our next Schools and Youth Worker. She'll start working with us sometime in the summer - when she's finished her Part Time Oak Hill diploma in Youth and Children's Ministry, and finished off her youth work commitments at All Saints, Riseley, in North Beds.

Welcome to St James, Samantha! It'll be great to have you here. Many people spoke to me yesterday morning to tell me that they were thrilled to read of your appointment.a href=

Well I would say that – I went there. But not everyone is proud of institutions they attended, and it is with some envy that I look at a college that has got stronger every year. How good it would be to start over again in 2007!

In last week’s Church Times (4 May) a letter was published by a recently retired DDO of St Alban’s Diocese. She picked up on some of the critical things that Tom Wright has said about the recently published book, Pierced for our Transgressions, and concluded that Oak Hill was not fit to be an Anglican Training College. Actually, she thought Oak Hill was not fit to train for Anglican ordination long before the publication of said book, but she doesn’t show that card in her hand.

I’ve just read (in the transcript online – I’d got home long before this point) Andrew Brown’s conclusion to the programme:

But what can we change? What should our arrangements be? We can’t disentangle the problems of children from those of adults. The government, too, sends families mixed messages. They are to be, in Gordon Brown’s great phrase, “hard working families”. But do the hardest-working families have the happiest children? The evidence suggests that they don’t and that it’s the family which plays together that stays together. In fact it’s hard to resist a rather heretical conclusion. Most of what we have seen as the peculiar horrors of modern childhood seem to arise from a lack of authority: they can, in shorthand, be blamed on the Sixties. But that was a complicated decade, with good as well as bad; and one of the distinctive attitudes of the Sixties was a distrust of money, and a belief that material success should not be the measure of everything. We’re never going to get away from a society that cares about status. But one in which status is measured only by material success makes us, and our children, needlessly miserable.

I had to laugh out loud in the car on the way home from standing committee last night. I often have Radio 4 on in the car, engine starts up for a ten minute journey, and I catch some snippet of something.

Last night, the programme was Analysis, looking at the UNICEF report that said Britain’s children are amongst the unhappiest in a developed nation. No, the laugh-out-loud (shortened to LOL, by the way) moment wasn’t the continuity reader accidentally calling us an undeveloped nation, although that was funny.

Looks like David F is about to deliver a splendidly helpful talk.

Yes, the notes on his blog leave us with a lot of gap-filling to do. But better to have these notes to fill the gaps in that not even have those. Thanks, David.

That's exciting news.

Phil Sowerbutts is to be the next vicar of Castle Church, Stafford. He starts after Easter.

Welcome to Lichfield Diocese, Phil - it'll be a joy to work near you.

Bailey’s article can be found here: http://www.theologymatters.com/TMIssues/JanFeb00.pdf. Significant because of the respect Bailey is increasingly commanding in Britain. Bailey has worked for 40 years in the Middle East, mainly in Syria. He has extensively studied contemporary Middle Eastern culture with a view to shedding light on the cultural background to the teaching of the New Testament.

Also N T Wright claims his own indebtedness to Bailey for the interpretation he adopts in his paper (see previous post).

At the moment, I’m reading various people on various texts. At some point, I’ll be interrupted, and have to stop this enterprise, but for now, it’s my current task. Those people have (at least) two things in common: 1. I generally respect their writing. 2. They all take a (slightly or majorly) different view on women’s ministry than me.

Start with N T Wright on 1 Timothy 2.

If I'm right about 2 Corinthians 5-6, there are big implications.

A lot of people today make 3 moves. 1. Jesus is more important than Paul. I trust in Jesus. I'm saved. 2. Paul is misogynistic, 1st century, badly phrased, and slightly above his station. 3. But that is a secondary issue because of #1.

Instead, 2 Corinthians 5 says that a view such as #2 requires reconciliation to God. It is to turn your back on the offer of new creation, of sins not counted against oneself, of dying, of new life not to oneself but to Christ etc. To write off Paul's ministry in that fashion is not a secondary issue, but a central and gospel issue.

I suspect the end of Colossians 1 and the beginning of Colossians 2 makes the same point.