John Meunier (Trouble Enough) has been reading William Abraham’s book Waking From Doctrinal Amnesia and making a few comments. Since the Wesleyan Quadrilateral was one of the things that attracted me to the United Methodist Church in the first place, I’m not sure that this is an amnesia I’d like us to wake up from….
I’m not one to spend a great deal of time criticizing the media for their treatment of Christianity, but I do think that in general journalists in this country have a really good idea for what’s not the most important story, and as soon as they detect such a thing, they print it immediately. That’s…
In part 9 of Adrian Warnock’s interview with Dr. Wayne Grudem the subject turns to church leadership. While I disagree with much of what Dr. Grudem says about church leadership, I could wish he would show some similar sensitivity to different points of view on male-female authority issues that he does on church leadership. Certainly…
I’ve had a day or so delay in responding to sections of Adrian Warnock’s interview with Wayne Grudem, so I’ll take on the last couple of sections and do my own reflections post today. This post takes a small sample from Part Eight – What Does the Future Hold for the Church? The main part…
Some time ago I posted an entry that dealt broadly with apportionments and accountability in churches. A very good friend of mine, Dr. Bob McKibben, author of Holy Smoke! Unholy Fire!, which I publish, wrote me an impassioned and information filled e-mail in response. Some of the contents of that e-mail were not appropriate to…
My wife and I have had several discussions recently about apportionments in the United Methodist Church. For those of you who are not Methodist, apportionments are funds paid by the local church to their conference or other higher authority to support the work of the broader church. Many of these funds go to administrative functions…
God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself. 2 Corinthians 5:19 Do you feel the depth of that statement? Can I recommend that you stop now and read 2 Corinthians 5, or at least verses 11-21 before you continue this? I often think that we Christians don’t nearly get the meaning of this passage,…
Peter Kirk has a post on one of my favorite topics, order in worship, titled God is not a God of disorder but of peace. I want to call attention to a couple of points in his post. First, on the context of the passage from which his title was taken, he says: It seems…
Suzanne McCarthy has been blogging on complementarianism over on the Better Bibles Blog. I have been following her posts with interest, and I would like to commend them to my readers. The entries to date are: Modes of Communication I, Modes of Communication II, Modes of Communication III. Suzanne obviously doesn’t subscribe to the “snazzy…
Recently I wrote a couple of entries, first on diversity and liberalism, and then on the Together for the Gospel statement. The issues I discussed in those two posts raise quite a number of questions about truth, unity, and Christian fellowship. Many might decide from my comments thus far that I don’t care about truth…