On professors and the cult of personality
‘It is often said that you cannot enter into a pulpit and make yourself look like a great preacher and Christ look like a great saviour at one and the same time. So it is in the classroom, on campus, at conferences: the professor, the theologian, cannot point to the power of the cross and simultaneously encourage a cult of personality.’
Sexual abuse in marriage
This is very important. ‘This is the first in a series of three blogs on the sexual abuse of women in marriage. My goal is to help counselors and pastors to recognize when a wife is being sexually abused by her husband and then offer appropriate help. In this first blog, we will define what marital sexual abuse is. In the second, we will talk about why women might not realize what is happening to them. And in the third installment, I will offer some thoughts on how to help women in this situation.’
Sex offenders groom churches too
On a similar note, this is also vitally important. It is so easy to be naively trusting in churches and put our children and youth at great risk. It is vital that we have proper safeguards and processes in place.
When the content police came for the Babylon Bee
‘We’ve somehow allowed ourselves to get to a point where information, before we are allowed to see it, is first filtered through a couple of uber-progressive tech companies. As arbiters of truth, we’ve granted Facebook and Google the power to decide what’s real news or fake news, what’s virtuous or malicious—for the love of everything, they literally decide what’s true and what’s false!’
Building distractions
Ian Williamson makes an important point here. ‘If we are going to choose where we plant based on infrastructure rather than gospel need, we are going to add to the spiritual poverty of council estates and other hard to reach places.’
The planter homage: there’s much shame in being a church planter: a response to Stephen Kneale
Last week, I published two comments on the use (and abuse) of the term ‘church planter’. You can read the first here. I wrote a clarifying post here. It would pay to read both before you read Ryan King’s response to me here. Needless to say, he didn’t really agree with me.
From the archive: If your ecclesiology stands or falls on the word “church”
‘If we are using congregation as a means of ridding ourselves of any structure within the church, these leadership passages speak against being able to do so. If we are trying to use church to insist on a greater level of formality and structure than members/deacons/elders then we are likely using that word in a way it was never intended. There are plenty of other examples but these two should suffice to make the point. Ecclesiology, that is the way we do church, is not only determined by our understanding of the word ἐκκλησία.’