Leithart again:
Historically, a pastoral candidate’s desires often had little to do with the Church’s call to serve in pastoral office. Far from seeking out positions of leadership, the greatest of the church fathers resisted with all their strength.
Neil’s 8 biblical personality types offers a very helpful analysis of the kinds of people we find in the church and in the world at large. I, for one, find his Venn diagram most helpful to see the map at a glance.
He concludes with one of the right questions: “As a minister, the question is, how should God’s word be ministered and applied to each personality type?”
See also my earlier post on William Perkins’ categories of hearer
“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!]
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.
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:
Well, Neil pointed me to the policy adopted by Trinity Presbyterian Church in Birming ham, Alabama. Very helpful indeed.
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:
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.
At St James, Audley we are about to start a sermon series on Exodus – the whole book in 8 sermons.
I get to preach on 1:1-7:7, 12-14, and the first of the tabernacle sections.
Phew… it’s hard work. And I’m trying to work out why.
