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Showing posts from July, 2021

How Institutions Change Their Original Mission, Values, and Practices

We all know that institutions change.  Even when started with clear mission statements, their mission drifts.  Their values change, their practices change, and they change into something very different from what those pouring their lives and money into them at the beginning intended.  The prominence of a chapel at the centre of a secular university is often more an embarrassing, bad joke than the statement of faith that the layout of the university originally intended.  Even when started with orthodox Christian convictions, a generation or so later the institution tolerates and eventually espouses unorthodox views.  We need historians (my preference) to help us understand this change.  Here are some of my own reflections based on nothing else than my own experience over many years of study and ministry with different institutions on three different continents.  As such, this is meant to speak into a conversation that needs to be had at Christian institutions in perhaps the most volatil

Stoats and Weasels in the Church: Christian Ethics and the Culture of Cohabitation and Homosexual 'Marriage'

 A small, declining denomination in the United Kingdom with a great heritage has recently changed its position on gay 'marriage' and cohabitation.  The UK Methodist Church, with a reported membership of only 164,000, has recently affirmed by vote that they wish to advocate their anti-Biblical and post-orthodox teaching on these issues.  They join other dwindling denominations (the Scottish Episcopal Church, the United Reformed Church, and the Quakers in Britain) in their misguided attempt to survive by caving to post-Christian culture.  Such denominations first reject the instruments of orthodoxy--the authority of the Word of God and the four affirmations of the Church: unity, holiness, universality, and being in continuity with the apostolic Church of the New Testament.  (The Nicene Creed says, 'We believe in one, holy, catholic [universal], and apostolic Church.')  After bolting the front door of the Church to orthodoxy, these stoats and weasels open the back door for

How and Why Paul Avoided Celebrating 'Diversity' as a Christian Value--and Why This Matters for Us

Paul’s universalism for the Church is not about diversity but about inclusion of all through confession of Christ as Lord.   ‘Diversity’ is a postmodern value, and recently some have attempted to use certain New Testament texts to make it a Christian value.   This is a misreading of the texts, and it leads to very bad theology. In Colossians 3:10-11, Paul encourages believers to “put on the new self being renewed in knowledge of the One who created it, wherein there is no Greek or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, or free person, but Christ is all and in all.”   Notably, Paul locates his sociological groups in a Creation and Christological framework.   By doing so, he relativizes the examples of distinctions he mentions.   In fact, he obliterates them in the alternative “knowledge” of creation and Christian existence.   His argument is that human distinctions of ethnicity and society do not apply to creation, on the one hand, and they are dissolved in the