In a recent article in Evangelicals Now, Marcus Honeysett sets out ten reasons why churches stall. We need, he suggests, to look beyond the superficial (such as worship styles and service times) to the deeper problems that can occur.
Our churches stall when (I summarise):-
Noted atheist (anti-theist, really) Christopher Hitchens was once interviewed by Unitarian minister Marilyn Sewell.
The following exchange was enlightening:-
…Sewell: The religion you cite in your book [God Is Not Great] is generally the fundamentalist faith of various kinds. I’m a liberal Christian, and I don’t take the stories from the scripture literally. I don’t believe in the doctrine of atonement (that Jesus died for our sins, for example). Do you make any distinction between fundamentalist faith and liberal religion?
The Song of Songs is a strange, unique, beautiful book.
Strange – partly because God isn’t mentioned from beginning to end.
Unique – because it is the one book of the Bible that gives a sustained and detailed celebration of love between a man and a woman.
Beautiful – because it does all of this in wonderfully imaginative poetry. It has every right to be called ‘The Song of Songs’, the greatest love song of them all.…
Is church man enough?
Dave Hopwood thinks that it is not, and offers some interesting thoughts about this in a recent article in Church Times.
Dave argues that Sunday-morning church worship, as conventionally experienced, simply doesn’t work for many men. He urges us to a radical re-think of how we do church for men, based on the example of Jesus himself.
This is one of those articles that provokes excitement and alarm in me in roughly equal proportions.…
How far would you be willing to travel in order to meet, or see, or hear, someone you really admired? Your favourite musician, perhaps, or a dear friend.
How far would you be willing to travel to meet Jesus in the flesh? Without the benefit of modern transport? And what would you say to him when you met him?
Well, here are some people who came all the way from Jerusalem to Galilee to see Jesus.…
Bishop Tom Wright opposes the idea of the government setting up an independent enquiry to look at assisted suicide. Speaking recently in the House of Lords, he said that
‘Parliament is there not to bend to every media-manipulated public whim, but to take the larger and longer view.’
It is often the case that ethics debates taking on a special meaning when individual cases are considered. Bishop Wright drew attention to
…‘The old lady who last summer told me several times that she just wanted to go to sleep and not wake up, but who eventually made a full recovery and celebrated her 63rd wedding anniversary last month and greeted her sixth greatgrandchild last week.
In his excellent collection of essays and papers on the Puritans, J.I. Packer offers the following succinct account of spiritual authority:-
‘Spiritual authority is hard to pin down in words, but we recognise it when we meet it. It is a product compounded of
I’ve been listening to another of Premier Radio’s Unbelievable podcasts.
This one featured a debate between atheist Ed Turner (a lawyer) and Christian Meic Pearse (a historian).
The focus of discussion was Pearse’s recent book The Gods of War (IVP 2007). His contention is that while religion can play a significant part in armed conflict, that point is often over-stated, and the main factors leading to warfare are cultural and economic.
The debate was, as is usual for this show, thoughtful and civilised. …
I’ve been pondering recently some of the limitations of evidentialist apologetics. The problems become readily apparent when unsympathetic sceptics (Hitchens, Dawkins, Atkins et al) insist that apologists provide detailed and irrefutable evidence for this or that Christian claim (everything from the existence of God, say, to the reality of ‘miracles’). But it seems that the a priori commitments of convinced atheists are such that no evidence would satisfy them. They are either unable or unwilling to imagine their way into thinking about things from a theistic perspective.…
A scientific outlook becomes ‘scientism’ when it adopts the view that the scientific method is the only reliable way of knowing. ‘Scientism’ leaves no room for other ways of knowing, including theological approaches.
There are, however, several limitations to scientism:-
1. It is self-defeating. The assumption that the scientific method is the only way of knowing cannot itself be derived scientifically. It is internally inconsistent and must itself start with an act of faith.
2. …
