What needs to change in evangelical culture after the publication of the Makin Report? The harrowing details of its contents have been covered in some detail on the en website.
That such things should happen among those professing the soundest of doctrine is repugnant, vile and wicked. Many leaders knew – and yet Smyth was able to continue abusing for decades.
This week, the Archbishop of Canterbury rode roughshod over two millennia of established Christian theology to declare boldly, indeed recklessly, that sex could take place with his happy approval 'within a committed relationship' --- whether marriage or a civil partnership, gay or straight.
Apart from its more major achievements, the Congress produced a staggering number of photographs chronicling the event, and browsing through them it is hard not to be encouraged by the sheer breadth of those attending and the evident joy. It is worth taking a moment to flick through some of those pictures online.
The news that 47% of the estimated 280 million migrants around the world are Christians (see report here) should bring us all up short.
Our brothers and sisters are, it seems, the largest single bloc of people among those moving across the world because of persecution, poverty, war, and so on.
‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,’ is a reasonable comment sometimes made about human beings’ propensity to fiddle with things that are already working quite well, thus making them worse.
But what about US politics? Few would argue that the system is working well, or that the choice of candidates being offered in presidential elections over the last decade or so (perhaps much longer, in fact) is particularly edifying, inspiring or encouraging – especially from a Christian point of view.
The issue of abortion will always be close to the hearts of us as evangelical Christians – and many others of course too.
How can it not be? The slaughter of so many millions of unborn children in the West in the last few decades is one of the great blind spots of our decaying culture. (Of course, there are always situations – for example rape, incest and imminent danger to a mother’s life – where we cannot be so black and white, but they should not distract us from the wider tragedy where no such contingencies apply.)
The recent ‘commissioning service’ at St Helen’s Bishopsgate has attracted predictable criticism.
In that bastion of Church of England liberal thinking, the Church Times,Angela Tilby decried ‘the voice of the angry Puritanism that has been channelled down from the Reformation,’ before adding (oddly): ‘Today’s Puritans find it as hard as their ancestors to live with the creative ambiguity that, many would claim, is the lifeblood of the Church of England and defended by canon law.’ Er, come again? Many would argue that the ‘lifeblood of the Church of England’ is the 39 Articles with their insistence that ‘it is not lawful for the Church to ordain any thing that is contrary to God’s Word written’ etc.
How do we foster evangelical unity? Where do the boundaries of ‘unity’ fall? And how does the New Testament emphasis on unity apply to evangelicals in the Church of England in its current dire state? Some of these questions are helpfully tackled by Andy Mason (see his article). And one terrific example of healthy evangelical unity is the Keswick Convention, ongoing at the moment.
But how should such unity be manifested organisationally elsewhere the rest of the year? Ongoing discussions about a Gospel Coalition UK are an interesting part of this debate. The role of the Evangelical Alliance is also key.
Lament and repentance
What needs to change in evangelical culture after the publication of the Makin Report? The harrowing details of its contents have been covered in some detail on the en website.
That such things should happen among those professing the soundest of doctrine is repugnant, vile and wicked. Many leaders knew – and yet Smyth was able to continue abusing for decades.