SAMS & CMS

I was interested to see that The South American Mission Society (SAMS) has announced that it is in merger talks with The Church Mission Society (CMS UK).

I could be totally wrong about this, but in my mind SAMS has a more evangelical flavour than CMS? I had a quick browse on their websites and whilst CMS has some stuff about vision and values, I couldn’t see a doctrinal basis for either organisation.

Does anyone know anything about the theological stance of these two societies?

A quick hunt on the Crosslinks (the old "Bible Churchman's Missionary Society") website (Ethos statement page) revealed the original Basis of the Society and a modernised Statement of Faith. I guess even the fact that a doctrinal basis pops up easily out of their website is significant.

Psalm 95 sermon

The handout for my sermon today on Psalm 95 (which is here as a Word document) would have looked something like this, if the church office computer hadn't decided it was junk (mail)!

Famous Anglican Texts (2): Psalm 95 (page 602)

O Come, Let Us Sing To The Lord

(1) An Invitation / Command: Worship With Joy

What to do: vv2-3, v6

Joyfully sing & shout humble, confident, thanksgiving & praise to God

Why to do it: vv3-5, v7a

Because God is our supreme great LORD, Rock, Saviour, King, Creator, controller, Shepherd

(2) A Warning / Command: Obey God’s Voice Today

What not to do: v7b-8

Don’t harden your heart to God’s Word

Why not to do it: vv9-11

Because God’s angry judgement against his people could cut you off from his rest

(OT context: Massah & Meribah = Rephidim, Exodus 17:7)

(NT application: Hebrews 3-4)

Here are some notes for the sermon as a Word document.

Romsey 1 Pathfinder Camp 2008

Our CPAS camp for 11-14s based at Hampshire Collegiate School in Romsey is planned for Saturday 2nd - 9th August 2008.

It should be fantastic fun and a great opportunity to learn about Jesus. Bookings open in the new year.

There may be space for a few new leaders. Its a brilliant way to serve and grow.

Calvin on Supper in LCC Theological Treatises

I haven't been entirely wasting my Thursdays. I've been spending them typing out large chuncks of Calvin!

Here are some notes on Calvin's doctrine of the Lord's Supper from the Library of Christian Classics Theological Treatises (Word document, 19pp, 8300wds).

Now its the turn of The Institutes to be typed out. Then the commentaries. Then whatever's left, and myabe even some other people's books.

Glory and Beauty in NT worship?

It is interesting to note that Exodus 28 repeatedly points out that the priestly garments are given "for glory and for beauty" and are to be skillfully made in a variety of spelendid colours.

Granted that the Lord Jesus Christ is our supreme and final High Priest and that the Old Covenant is fulfilled and the ceremonial law radically changed, how do the OT cultic laws regulate New Testament worship today?

Of course there is great glory and beauty to the New Covenant and all of it is fulfilled in Christ (2 Cor 3 springs to mind), but what are the implications for our church buildings, our clothing and our collective public worship today? Is it still appropriate to look for glory, beauty and skill on a Sunday morning?

Surely such things are not necessarily Judaizing returns to the Old Covenant shadow-lands? The Book of Revelation would suggest such symbolism in heaven and in the New Creation too. So why not a little foretaste of heaven coming on earth too?

It feels quasi-Marcionite to say that the OT no longer regulates public worship and semi-Gnostic to say that simple invisible spiritual worship is best.

Ritual, buildings and clothes would seem inevitable. Neutrality would seem impossible.

So what should it look and sound and feel and smell like?

Pictures, please

Mrs Lloyd and I have been reading through Exodus together and we could do with some lovely coloured pictures, please. We'd like a labeled diagram of a priest (Ex 28). And surely someone must have made a model of the tabernacle and all its kit for teaching purposes (Ex 25-27).

Mrs Lloyd wanted to know what an Ephod is, and I'm very sorry to say that the IVP Bible Dictionary, to which I directed her, doesn't seem to have an entry for it.

I'm glad to say there is an entry for the Urim and Thummim though it does say: "Almost everything about this provision [for giving guidence, esp. to the leaders of the people] remains unexplained. The words Urim and Thummim have recieved no satisfactory etymology..." (p1219)

I need to gen up on my gems too (Ex 28:17-20). And I couldn't really have picked out "filigree" either, though now I am much the wiser: my dictionary tells me its "ornamental work of fine wire formed into delicate tracery" or some such.

The things they don't teach you at vicar factory!

Update: Thanks to Ros for mentioning that she heard about this at vicar factory:

http://www.thefeltsource.com/Tabernacle-Felt-Set.html

I was rather hoping for something free on the interweb somewhere, though?

The guys at the Temple Insitute are wasting a lot of time, money and effort re-creating stuff for the temple they expect to see rebuilt in Jerusalem, when they should be trusting in the Lord Jesus Christ and making him known, but nevertheless, they've got lots of pictures and some interesting stuff at:

http://www.templeinstitute.org/gallery.htm

A few more labeled diagrams would have been helpful.

The because approach: innovationg church for all

In our local Christian book shop I just stumbled across a book I didn’t know existed: The because approach: innovating church for all by Rev’d Andrew Baughen, Vicar of St James, Clerkenwell (Milton Keynes, Authentic Media, 2005). I don’t remember ever hearing a mention of it at vicar factory.


John Stott “heartily” recommends it as having solid theory and experience leading to a realistic plan, passionately committed to Christ, the gospel and the local church. He says: “I cannot imagine that any individual or group could study it without being profoundly challenged and inspired”.

My own Bishop, Wallace Benn, says: “This is exactly the kind of book we need right now…. This is a superb book that should be read by all concerned about the mission of the church.” So I guess I ought to have a look at it!

Rico Tice said: “This book cuts you open. I found it confronted me with the realities from the Bible, from my local church and from the culture. Page after page provokes carefull reflection.”

Chris Green said: “I am thrilled with The Because Approach: gospel driven, evangelistically passionate, warm hearted, culturally relevant, and – above all – practical and achievable stratergies for us to be the people Christ wants us to be.”

Its recommended by Chris Wright, Christopher Ash and The Bishop of London too, amongst others.

On page 1 Andrew Baughan notes lots of debts including to Bill Hybels of Willow Creek, Rick Warren, Nicky Gumbell and Tim Keller of Redeemer Church, Manhattan.

The book is about the local church as God’s hope for the world with the promise that Christ’s church will prevail. The book suggests a six-fold strategic review for each local church.

The six steps (and main chapters of the book) are:

(1) Preparation

(2) Relationship building

(3) Respect Building

(4) Relevance building

(5) Response building

(6) Participation

Within each chapter there’s a section on Scripture, Setting and Solution followed by a study guide. Each section begins “Because…” and the chapter close with an “Expert Witness”, Mark Greene, Paul Perkin, Nicky Gumbell, Rico Tice & J. John

There’s a website at http://www.becauseapproach.com/index.htm which looked pretty rudamentary when I looked at it. Could be a problem at my end!

How To Lead The Prayers

Here's a helpful little memo from John, our vicar, with some pointers on how to lead the intercessions in Sunday services.

First of all, a big thank you for contributing to this important ministry.

I would like to share with you 4 guidelines, which I trust will enable this ministry to be even more effective.

1. Intercessions should be intercessions – i.e. prayers for the church and the world, not meditations or mini sermons!

2. They should last no more than 5 minutes. Time yourself beforehand, saying the prayers in an unhurried fashion – not gabbling through them at a rate of knots, in order to keep within the time limit!

3. If asked to pray at a Family Service, with children present – make sure the intercessions are even briefer – i.e. less than 5 minutes. Also make them simple and child-friendly, not using long words that would be unintelligible to small children.

4. Get to the lectern during the previous item (creed / Lord’s Prayer), so that you are ready to pray immediately, without a hiatus in the service.

I hope the above is helpful,

Once again, many thanks

John Cheeseman

(on behalf of the staff team)

Holiday Club

We're planning a Holiday Club for Primary School Age Children (5-11 year olds) in the Easter / Spring holidays from Tuesday 15th April - Friday 18th April 2008, 9:30am -12pm. There'll be a families event on Saturday 19th April and a special holiday club service on Sunday 20th at 10:30am.

Please pray for the club and for the core team. Volunteers welcome!

Holy Trinity, Eastbourne Facebook Group

Cos we is such a techy savy with it church, wot we need is:

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=6236714391

No more noticesheets. Well, not quite, but perhaps oneday.

I think I noticed in the Church Times by the way that if you have more money than sense your church can buy a piece of whizzy kit called "Gabriel" which will Blueberry the notices to everyone on a Sunday morning. Amazing.

Halloween: Trick or Treat?

Here are some jottings (in a Word document) for 'Listen and Lunch' talk I gave today entitled Halloween: Trick or Treat? I agued that on the whole its a bad thing. It probably has unwanted comercialism and trick or treat is antisocial. Above all, it might encourage wrong attitudes to Satan and evil, either leading people to trivialise and understimate evil or, possibly in a few cases, to be fascinated by the devil and be drawn into the occult.

Happy Birthday, Mrs Lloyd!

Perspectives on Love & Holiness in OT

Rev’d Dr James Robson gave his excellent Tyndale House paper on ‘Forgotten Dimensions of Holiness’ in the Oak Hill Masters Seminar this week. He argued that it can be shown from the text of the Bible that love is a dimension of or is linked to God’s holiness in the Old Testament, though some texts might not make it seem so. Yahweh’s holiness and love are shown through his self-disclosure, his saving activity (including his hearing of prayer) and his presence. This rightly takes account of narrative and contexts as well as including word studies and depending on explicit statements.

All this seemed impressive and true, and fits in with a few systematic perspectives. For example, by the time one has said that God is simple and that all things are related, it is unsurprising to say that love and holiness are related or even that they are perspectives on one another. Interesting that the Old Testament should make this so obvious. The question is exactly how they are related. There is some danger in saying everything in that one will end up saying nothing. God’s holiness needs to be sharply defined if it is to be distinguished from other aspects of his character (and likewise with love). If holiness is simply seen as the Godness of God or that which makes God unique and separate then not much has been said.

In other words, the systematican will want to ask both how are we to distinguish God’s holiness and his love and how we are to relate them.

A few random vaguely relevant thoughts:

All the attributes of God are strictly incommunicable. No one is powerful as God is powerful, for example.

All talk about God is analogical. Love is not the same in God as it is in the rest of experience.

I think James suggested that interestingly in the economy of revelation there is a sequence that we know God’s holiness first and other things are holy since they are declared so by God or are somehow related to him. With Fatherhood, human fathers play a much greater part in the order of our knowing. Perhaps. God is always the prototype and standard. I reckon if you took holiness to mean specialness or set apartness, or even purity / cleanness, this would be much less obvious since we can think of human or creaturely analogues which we could and often do know before knowing much of God or having a Word from him.

Having said that, James rightly argued that we must first of all be attentive to the language and narrative in which God has chosen to reveal himself. Systematic questions of how we might categorise and integrate or summarise all this in various ways are secondary, even if necessary, and indeed influencing our first reading of the Bible. The old virtuous hermeneutical spiral agaisn.

The systematician can be encouraged that the Bible seems to speak in a way which is wonderfully appropriate to the simplicity of God and perspectivalism. The attributes and actions of God are not hermetically sealed by flow from his nature and though each has a “core” they flow into one another. The picture is clear at the centre but the colours at the edges are beautifully run into each other. Indeed, that’s something like how words (including the language of Scripture) work, having a semantic range and being defined by usage and difference from other words.

No single attribute of God is to be totalised or used to exclude others. Even God’s wrath is loving and his love is wrathful. One might even say that God is wrath with respect to sin but a distinction could be made here since God is not wrath in the inner Trinitarian life considered without respect to creation. Yet creation and therefore wrath is in a way “necessary” given who God is and chooses to be, but that is another story.

It was good to hear a systematically informed biblical scholar using arguments about the immanent Trinity, simplicity and analogical language, and obviously knowing his Hebrew and his Bible a billion times better than I! No surprise there either. Here’s to such conversations at Oak Hill and elsewhere.

Rt Revd Dr N T Wright

It was great to be with Bishop Tom at Oak Hill College last week. He preached an excellent sermon in the packed-out chapel on “If they will not believe Moses and the Prophets they will not believe even though someone rise from the dead” from the Parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man in Luke. I’d be delighted to be able to preach like that. The sermon was clear, faithful and well applied. The saying was placed in the context of Luke and of a Biblical worldview and understanding of the history of salvation. Not sure Dr Wright and I would agree on what Fair Trade and ecology should look like but that is a questionable quibble about half a sentence. The sermon was wonderfully world affirming and showed a full orbed understanding of God saving individuals from his judgement but also transforming communities and putting the whole world to rights. We were called to get on board with what God is doing, and invited to help out in the Diocese of Durham, I think.

Dr Wright then gave a lecture on an overview of a few thoughts on Acts. His new book, Acts For Everyone, may or may not be ready for Christmas stockings. Surprised by Hope, on eschatology and something or other (ethics, was it?) sounds good.

In his lecture, Wright could have been James Jordan! Paul’s Shipwreck is his cross but he is saved through it. He expects to be justified / vindicated before Caesar.

The Purpose of Acts

Wright tentatively suggested that Acts was prepared for Paul’s trial before the Emperor. Wright said this was something of an old theory. Though I wrote an essay on the purpose of Luke-Acts in 1999, that was partly a new view on me, I think. Certainly others say that Acts is an apologia to the Romans or a defence of Paul, but Wright’s theory seems nicely to explain the very specific cliff-hanger ending and give the document a realistic situation in life. I don’t remember reading that it was prepared particularly for Paul’s trial before the Emperor, but I’m probably mistaken. Much of the material might seem pretty irrelevant to the Emperor.

Obviously Luke-Acts has other bigger purposes too and seeing Luke-Acts as a literary whole might be one problem for an exclusive form of this theory since Luke’s gospel preface suggests another (not necessarily unrelated) aim.

Thanks be to God for...

For Mrs Lloyd, a week of study leave / retreat, for trains, the underground, for mobile phones, money, Oak Hill college, libraries, books, Calvin, cleaning, admin. and catering staff, chapel, the Bible, fellowship in the gospel, friends, catching up, laughter, sausages, coffee, Brains SA, family, weddings, sleep, generosity, liturgy, the Book of Common Prayer, the Lord’s Supper, MP3 players, the greatness of God, alert minds, friendly disagreements, work to do, sunshine, countryside, home comings, the prospect of Sunday.

DP's portrait

The Rev’d Prof Dr David Peterson’s portrait is now up at Oak Hill with the other former Principals.

One can play spot the difference.

Like some of the others DP is holding a book. Like one of the others it is open. Unlike the others it is not the Bible but his own book, Hebrews and Perfection. Like the others his has a clerical collar on. Unlike the others he is not wearing a surplice but an academic gown. Unlike the others he is not in the chapel but in the library.

What signals are being deliberately and unintentionally communicated here, do you think?

Oak Hill primarily as academic institution not churchy?

Gideons Needed at Oak Hill

In the college guest room there was no Bible. But its okay, there was a copy of Witness to the World: The History of Oak Hill College. Ideal if one couldn’t sleep. But I do think we should put in a request for Bibles to the Gideons. The room could do with a few pictures while they are at it. Don’t know if that’s something the Gideons can help with? Maybe if the Gideons want to stick to Bibles, some for chapel, the studies and the library would help too. (From memory, there aren’t as many multiple copies of ESV, NIV, KJV, ASB etc. in the library as there could be).

Bishop's Theological College

Bishop Tom mentioned that Bishop Lightfoot of Durham, the 19^th Century New Testament Scholar, (?) had adapted his home, Auckland Castle (?) into a kind of theological college. I wonder how this sort of thing might fit with the Hind Report if Bishops did it today. It would certainly be good for Bishop’s to take seriously their charge to teach the true faith and drive away false doctrine, including to and from their clergy. The Bishop of Chichester was good enough to host our pre-ordination retreat in The Palace in Chichester. I wonder if Bishop George Bell House in Chichester will have these aims in its founding documents?

Sin Bin

From my train window I notice the Chewing Gum Action Group telling us of the “Sin Bin” and warning us to bin our gum to avoid a fine of up to £80. Thanks. A similar poster carries the words, “Guilty Not Charged”. Surely there is a sermon illustration here. What does our culture regard as sins and crimes? I’ve not spotted any such posters about adultery or abortion lately, nor on the spot fines for disrespect to parents or false worship.