Greenhouse go
Naomi Dawson
A new project mentoring women to help them produce evangelistic content has been launched.
The project is titled The Greenhouse, and its aims are as follows: ‘Over the five weeks each guest will produce a piece of evangelistic content that they will commit to sharing in the build-up to Christmas. Our training will be focused on how the incarnation shapes our evangelism, and how we seek to share the Christmas message in a way that connects with people.’
‘Read the Bible through the
lens of trauma’
Naomi Dawson
Six hundred people from 32 countries and six
continents met online for this year’s ‘Church
as a Refuge’ conference. Among the themes
talked about were ‘reading the Bible through
the lens of trauma’. Naomi Dawson reports:
The ‘Church as a Refuge’ conference was
born out of a desire to help churches better
understand power, control and abuse within
the church. Jacqui Wright and Cliff Turner
(both health-care professionals) planned and
hosted the conference. This conference was
not just academic, but real, personal and tragic
for so many
involved. Having benefitted
from the teaching of Dr Dianne Langberg,
Jacqui wanted the wider church to benefit from her teaching too.
A God who cares about women
Hagar’s story is surely one to be retold. In Genesis 12, Abram and Sarai were promised “descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky”. Yet Sarai remained childless and the pressure of this over decades would have weighed heavily.
So they took matters into their own hands. In Genesis 16, Sarai “gave Hagar to her husband to be his wife” and they used their slave to be a surrogate and she fell pregnant.