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'These fragments I have shored against my ruins' (TS Eliot, The Waste Land)
Browsing All posts tagged under »Evangelicalism«
‘Egalitarianism’ as a slippery slope?
I have heard or read a number of people recently arguing that an ‘egalitarian’ (hate the term…) position is to be rejected by evangelicals because it necessarily involves an approach to the the Bible which tends towards the erosion of Scriptural authority. This argument comes in two forms, one which has a degree of prima […]
Why ‘complementarianism’ matters: reflections occasioned by Carl Trueman
August 25, 2012
Carl Trueman has an excellent blog post on the Reformation21 site, expressing puzzlement at why so many (American, evangelical) parachurch organisations make complementarianism (male-only leadership) a defining point of their platform. He highlights the potential absurdity of this in characteristically sharp and witty fashion, pointing out that the historical divisions that these organisations choose to bridge […]
Reflections on Spring Harvest 2012
April 22, 2012
We’re recently back from Spring Harvest in Skegness, where I worked with Norman Ivison of Fresh Expressions each morning, and had my usual mixed set of lectures and seminars in the afternoons – this year discussing ecclesiology (SH’s theme this year), women and men in leadership, using social media, and dealing with divorce. I was also, […]
Translocal ecclesial identities
March 13, 2012
The theme of the recent – and excellent – Evangelical Alliance Council meeting was ‘It takes a whole church to raise a child’. Amongst the points made, two seem to me to connect interestingly. First, there was emphasis on the increasingly post-Christian, and so alien, nature of our society, which means that churches must become […]
The place of theology in exegesis: reflections inspired by Kevin DeYoung
March 6, 2012
I have seen several references – all positive – on FB & Twitter to a recent blog post by Kevin DeYoung, in which he asserts that, for evangelicals, systematic theology is the result of exegesis, and then argues that theology should in turn shape exegesis. His point is a fairly standard one: all reading is shaped […]
‘If God is male…’
February 5, 2012
‘… then the male is God.’ So wrote Mary Daly in a – perhaps the – classic text of early feminist theology, Beyond God the Father (Beacon, 1973). Daly’s argument in the book was that the predominantly masculine imagery deployed for God in Judaeo-Christian traditions inevitably led to a patriarchal society in which women were multiply […]
Old style evangelical gender politics
January 20, 2012
This post, by Mark Sayers, is well worth a read (ht Mike Bird on FB). It reflects briefly on the transformation of masculinity that occurred as part of the broader evangelical attempts at social transformation in the first half of the nineteenth century. Writing about the same phenomenon, John Wolffe comments: Evangelical concepts of manliness […]
Books on gender and ministry from an evangelical perspective
January 18, 2012
I’ve been asked by several people in recent months to recommend books on this subject. I can’t claim to have read everything on the topic, and I probably have a bias to British authors, but here are a few suggestions – not necessarily all the best books, but a selection that, taken together, will open […]
Could the evangelical gender debate be depolarised?
November 22, 2011
A conversation that some of us have been involved in privately has spilled over into the blogosphere and twitterverse in the last few days. It concerns attempts to get past the hard lines on gender roles in (family and) church that are being drawn within British evangelicalism. (There is of course a similar discussion in […]
Contemplative prayer and contemporary worship
November 19, 2011
A recent conversation with our pastor, Andrew Rollinson, about those spiritual practices which I find useful/generative/satisfying/whatever the right word is, brought to mind a blog post from Vicky Beeching which noted that she, as a leading worship leader in the contemporary evangelical style, finds broadly contemplative practices of spirituality most nourishing for her personal spirituality. […]
August 31, 2012
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