Threads from Henry's Web

Author: henry

  • Looking for a UMC Pastor in the West or Northwest

    My wife Jody is looking for a pastor in the west or northwest to answer about 5 questions regarding ministry in the UMC, with the interview to be published in the Bible Study Paths WebZine. She’s looking for someone who is currently pastoring a church. Your interview responses will be published in September alongside those from one pastor in the southeast and one in the midwest.

    No, there’s no money in it, and Bible Study Paths is new and small, but we hope the answers to these questions will help others in ministry.

    Please respond by comment to this post. She’ll e-mail you with the questions.

  • Dismissing as Wrong

    In an article that I find very agreeable, Chaplain Mike of the Internet Monk site discusses the way in which some churches major on the minors, making people who disagree with specific doctrinal positions uncomfortable.

    But I want to object to one line in that post, and it’s one I hear frequently in real life as well. It’s this:

    Furthermore, the Biblical teaching was pure dogmatism, completely dismissing all other views as wrong.

    What I find troubling about the part I highlighted is that there should be any problem with calling a view “wrong.” “Dismissing” I don’t like so much. What you do with a “wrong” idea is study and discuss it. But I think there’s nothing wrong–and much right–with deciding that certain ideas are wrong and other are right.

    If I get into a discussion with a young earth creationist I will begin with the fact that I consider him wrong. I assume he considers me wrong as well. Otherwise we would have nothing to discuss. For some reason it seems that many people today think that all ideas must be regarded as equal else one is intolerant or worse. I would suggest instead that tolerance involves tolerating someone I actually think is wrong.

    Now in church, regarding someone else as wrong doesn’t mean that I also must regard them as unchristian, out of fellowship, or unworthy of leadership positions. In fact, if I did that, I’d have to make a church of one, and even that would be a problem as I’ve been wrong many times in my life, as evidenced by changing my mind! I was either wrong before or perhaps I’m wrong now.

    I’ve disagreed with just about every church budget I’ve seen passed. I’d go so far as to say that some of these budgets are wrong. For example, I think that spending less than 2% on missions and outreach is wrong, and I’m going to call it wrong. I consider it the right thing to do!

    I think we need to learn to live together whilst being wrong and working with other people who are wrong. Only when we keep the categories of right and wrong can we try to learn to be more right.

  • Christian Perfection – Not So Plain to Me!

    One of my early experiences teaching in a United Methodist Church involved giving a series on the Wesleyan doctrine of Christian perfection. That may seem surprising for a new member of a United Methodist congregation, but my background in the Seventh-day Adventist Church involved a good deal of Wesleyan talk (though not the doctrine of Christian perfection), and the pastor was also well aware that I had borrowed the United Methodist Discipline before joining his church, and had read all the doctrinal sections. Further, I’d read Wesley’s compilation, A Plain Account of Christian Perfection.

    To make a long story short–and I intend this to be short!–I discovered that of the group of 30 or so people who arrived for the first class, only the pastor and I were aware that there actually was any such doctrine.

    To be honest, I still wasn’t the best one to teach such a doctrine. I suspect that if I were trying to be a United Methodist pastor, rather than a theologically educated layman, I would choke on the “going on toward perfection” question. And yes, I know that the words come from the book of Hebrews, one of my favorites. (I’ve even written a study guide!) Nonetheless, I think I’d want to nuance my answer, perhaps to such an extent that it wouldn’t be an answer at all.

    In any case, I like short descriptions of this doctrine so that United Methodists, and others who are curious about it, can get a good idea of what John Wesley was teaching. (Hint–he wasn’t teaching what most people think when they first here the phrase “Christian perfection.”)

    So all this verbiage (never use one word where 1,000 will do!) is to introduce a good link on the subject, from Craig Adams’ web site Commonplace Holiness. He is presenting a public domain book, and the whole thing is there, but section 2 provides a good definition. If you are interested, you can follow this further by going to the table of contents and finding more.

    In any discussion of a controversial topic, it’s a good idea to get the definitions straight, and this topic certainly qualifies.

  • Devotionals on 2 Corinthians

    My wife Jody notes that in my talk at a local church last Sunday night I commented that people read 1 Corinthians more than 2 Corinthians.  I must add that I also said they read more Romans and Galatians than any Corinthians, but that’s beside the point.  In any case she’s meditating her way through 2 Corinthians for her devotional list, and I’m finding the posts pretty interesting.  The first one is here.

  • What I Get for not Blogging

    … #50 in the Biblioblog Top 50.

    I’ll have to try to be more diligent!

  • Quote of the Day – June 23

    From Dave Black Online, Rhino Evangelism:

    What a tragedy that some Christians, while having a commendable zeal for evangelism, also display the sweet approachability of a rhinoceros!

  • HCSB Interview

    Some notes and a link on my book’s (What’s in a Version?) page.

  • Bruce Epperly on Prayer Changing Things

    I wrote recently that I prefer “prayer changes you” to “prayer changes things” but I don’t deny that prayer changes things. But how?

    Bruce Epperly contributes a post to Ponderings on a Faith Journey that looks at this along with the idea of human freedom. I know that any form of open theism tends to make some people crazy, but I think many of us talk and behave as though something like this is true, even while affirming God’s eternal plans. In fact, I might suggest that living with such tensions is something God intended us to do! Nonetheless I find this discussion challenging and useful.

    For my own notes on prayer, which come to a somewhat less firm conclusion, see my essays The Hand of God, The Hand of God – Miracles, and The Hand of God – Prayer. They date from ancient times, or rather 2003.

  • On Publishing, Page Layout, and Busy-ness

    Along Bible Paths front cover
    I’m finally getting back to blogging, and even a little of my own writing on other subjects. I thought I’d comment on what has been going on here that kept me away from my blogs for so long. I note that my post Why I Am Blogging Less was published on May 6, so that’s a bit over a month, but my blogging was fairly sparse for a month before that.

    No, there have been no family disasters, nor have I been out climbing mountains. It has all related to business. Two years ago my company, Energion Publications, was a one person operation, and even for that one person (me) it was part time. Since then, we have had quite an explosion of activity. As of June 1, there are two people working full time with the company and two working part time, plus a few tasks, such as cover design, that we contract out. My wife Jody has joined me full time.

    For the first five years of this company’s existence we published an average of four books per year. During the past year we added more than ten. We used to work on one book at a time, now we have books already scheduled for completion in 2011. In fact, we only have enough space left in our 2010 schedule for a couple of books, and the only reason that space is left open is that we’ve been holding it open for special projects.

    Soup Kitchen for the SoulThis is what took me out of the loop for a couple of months. I did the page layout work on three books that have already been released, The Character of Our Discontent, Soup Kitchen for the Soul, and Along Bible Paths: Summer Devotions, and on one additional book’s advance copies, the paperback edition of Preserving Democracy.

    Preserving DemocracyI had to learn some new software. For those interested, we’re now doing page layout with a combination of Scribus, LaTex, and Lyx. For those who may not be aware, Scribus is an open source desktop publishing system. It does many things well on its own, but one important feature is the ability to include elements from LaTex. Lyx is a document processor which, put very briefly, is a sort of cross between WYSIWYG word processing and the text coded layout. It can produce LaTex files, amongst others. I won’t go into detail on why I’m using this combination, but getting used to the setup has been an interesting and worthwhile learning experience.

    I almost forgot to mention that I had the truly odd experience of creating the covers for two of these books working via phone and e-mail with the designer. He had no computer available to do the layout, and I am not great at visual things, to put it mildly. He gave me directions, I’d do the layout, and then e-mail him a jpeg of the result. Those two books are The Character of Our Discontent (image lower right in this post), and Along Bible Paths (image top left in this post).

    I’ve already written about The Character of Our Discontent, but I will post reflections on the other three books and on several more that are coming up soon. I simply haven’t had the time to reflect a great deal, much less to write my reflections on the blog. There is a bottleneck of books on which work is progressing, but for which I don’t have press releases and catalog entries created. So watch for lots of new material coming from Energion Publications.The Character of Our Discontent

    While I’m still busy, I think 16 hour days are largely a thing of the past, and I will also have more time for some of the things I enjoy more, such as blogging and keeping in contact with authors and readers, not to mention my own reading.

    (I’m linking this post to my most recent post on the Participatory Bible Study blog and on The Jevlir Caravansary so readers of those blogs can catch the explanation for my absence. Doubtless they’ve been waiting impatiently for my next words! More likely, not so much!)

  • Lectionary and Mosaic Bible – Pentecost + 3

    I’m ending a hiatus in blogging of just over a month.  I see my last post was dated May 8, 2010, but I was pretty sparse for a month before that.  I’ll get a post up about what I was doing during that time.  No, nothing adventurous; just trying to do necessary work to grow my publishing business.

    This morning I looked again at the lectionary passages for the week, and compared them to the Mosaic Bible.  Three of the lectionary passages do have material connected with them in The Mosaic Bible, though there is no overlap in the texts for this week.  The lectionary gives us 1 Kings 21:1-21a (again deleting what I think is some relevant material starting with 21b),  Psalm 5:1-8, Galatians 2:15-21, and Luke 7:36-8:3.  Of these, only Psalm 5 is not connected, though Galatians only overlaps with verse 20 used for Easter in the Mosaic Bible.

    This simply reaffirms the way in which I think the Mosaic Bible is most useful for those who already use a reading plan oriented to the church year–it provides a rich range of readings that relate to the various church seasons that will be helpful in lesson and sermon preparation.  For those who do not use a reading program tied to the church calendar, I think the Mosaic Bible provides a more friendly starting point than simply diving into the lectionary.  Often the lectionary texts prove a challenging combination–individually helpful, but seeming quite scattered as a group.

    The focus for this lectionary reading seems to be evil men.  One interesting twist is just how you read the story in Luke.  Naboth’s vineyard gives you a pretty clear set of bad guys and good guys, with Ahab in the role of very bad guy.  One interesting approach might be to contrast the response of Jesus to the woman who is a sinner as opposed to the judgment meted out to Ahab.  That could lead to really interesting discussions of varying types of sin as well.  No matter how often we claim that sin is sin, I think we really do have “clean” sins and “dirty” sins. Most commonly “dirty” sins are the ones you commit, and “clean” sins are the ones I commit.  (See the host in the story in Luke.)

    I find the possible range of topics presented by each collection of lectionary texts quite fascinating, and this week was no exception.