The enemy of my enemy is my friend, Trump and THAT sermon

I think this one is about right. It is possible to recognise truth spoken without endorsing everything a person might believe. It is possible to believe a person we may not like has some good things to say at times. It is certainly possible that many of us let our politics rule our theology and it comes out in what we are happy to overlook and excuse when it suits our predisposition. It is not a uniquely Liberal or Conservative tendency; it is a people tendency.

Subtle strategies

This is a helpful and insightful one about our church culture. Some useful questions to think through.

Babel & the Sin of Glorifying Ourselves

‘The great sin of the city of Babel is not tower-building, or unified labor [sic] toward a societal goal. The sin of Babel is the sin of seeking independence from God.’

Is Joining a Church as a Member Actually Necessary?

‘Church membership is an assumed reality on nearly every page of the New Testament Epistles, but the language is different. Membership in the church is membership in a family. It comes with family obligations. It’s membership in a body. It comes with all the dynamics of being connected to every other part. Every biblical metaphor for the church helps us to understand what membership is, and all of them are necessary, because there is nothing else in the world like the church.’

Small injustices

‘If we aren’t careful, we can allow the small injustices to make us spiritually blind. It’s like staring at the sun. If we focus on the small injustices, that’s all we’ll be able to see, and then pretty soon, we won’t see anything at all.’

A chastened, New Testament cultural mandate

I agree with John Stevens, who did not write this article but said the following about it: ‘I think this is a very helpful perspective on the mission of the church. If I read him rightly, he is saying that the salt image is one of ‘preserving’ the influence of the gospel, not of preserving society per se. It is a metaphor for the church and about the church. I would want to go further and say that the cultural mandate is now transformed into the Great Commission. We fill and subdue by making disciples for Jesus. We are gathering the new creation and displaying it to the world in the life of the church. We do not redeem the world. We call it to receive salvation ahead of the coming destruction.’

From the archive: Pouring cow urine over the text

‘All too often, we allow potential dangers to drive what we apply from the text. Rather than allowing the text to speak for itself, on its own terms, and applying it as such we worry that people may reach all sorts of terrible errors if we do that. And so, we dampen the force of the text… We spend so much time ensuring that nobody could go away with any potentially errant beliefs on the text that we fail to do proper justice to what it says on paper and the point it is actually making.’