I’ve been a Bob Dylan fan since 1963, when he was often described as a “protest singer”. But after only a few albums of “protest music”, he turned his back on it all, and wrote a song with the refrain: “Ah but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.” Sometimes I […]
I am looking at some of the core convictions of the Anabaptists, not because I am an Anabaptist, but because I think we learn from them. Today: the relationship of the church and the world.
Christians disagree, and sometimes argue, about many things. Current hot topics include: homosexuality, divorce, hell, evolution and Genesis, the place of women in the church, Biblical inerrancy, war, climate change, and the importance of ‘good works’ like social justice and social welfare. Some christians get very worried about the failure of many of their fellow […]
I am looking at some of the core convictions of the Anabaptists, not because I am an Anabaptist, but because I think we learn from them. We have seen that they emphasise following Jesus, not just believing in him or worshiping him. What does this mean for how we read the Bible?
Jesus is arguably the most influential person who ever lived. But what is his influence? How should we understand him, and how should we respond to him? I think the Anabaptists have something worthwhile to tell us here. (See my previous post on the Anabaptists.)
“You can tell a lot about a place by the way they treat their own …. The way they treat their own deserters.” David Bridie, ‘The Deserters’ Statistics (see below) show that a significant number of people, active church members and apparently believers, are leaving their churches and in many cases leaving the faith. In […]
The Anabaptist are a often forgotten part of the christian church. We know about the split which separated the eastern Orthodox churches from the Roman church. In the west we are more familiar with the Reformation, where the Protestant churches split from the Roman Catholic church. But there was a third group in the Reformation, […]
LLM posted an interesting quote from Tim Keller in her blog, Enough Light. Here is a part of it: “in general, religiously observant people were offended by Jesus, but those estranged from religious and moral observance were intrigued and attracted to him. We see this throughout the New Testament accounts of Jesus’s life. In every […]
Mike has questioned the point of my last post (Christians and Chick-fil-a), about when and how christians should speak out in the public arena, and when and how we shouldn’t. So I thought I would clarify in a new post.
Chick-fil-a is apparently a chain of about 1600 chicken fast food stores in the US. Being an Aussie, I wouldn’t know. But apparently the chain has been in the news recently because of an allegedly anti-gay stance, mainly, as far as I can tell, seen through large donations to christian anti-gay causes. Recently protests by […]