everyday evangelism
How you can be a pastoral evangelist
Glen Scrivener
Picture an evangelist. What springs to mind? Perhaps a motormouth with the enthusiasm of a labrador pup, the skin of a rhinoceros’s hide, the social skills of a boisterous toddler, and the patter of a ‘Phones 4 U’ sales rep.
Now picture someone you’d describe as ‘really pastoral.’ What are the images now? Surely it’s endless cups of tea, frowns of concern, head cocked permanently to a 45 degree angle. ‘Aw bless’ they say with an empathy perilously close to patronising.
history
Learning gentleness
Michael Haykin
In recent days, I have been again impressed with the significance of a name that was well-known among British evangelicals in the last decades of the long 18th century, but today is mostly forgotten, namely, that of Abraham Booth (1734–1806).
The son of a Nottinghamshire farmer, Booth became a stocking weaver in his teens. He had no formal schooling and was compelled to teach himself to read and to write. His early Christian experience was spent among the General, i.e. Arminian, Baptists, but by 1768 he had undergone a complete revolution in his soteriology and had become a Calvinist. Not long after this embrace of Calvinism he wrote The Reign of Grace, from Its Rise to Its Consummation (1768), which the 20th-century Scottish theologian John Murray regarded as ‘one of the most eloquent and moving expositions of the subject of divine grace in the English language’.
the ENd word
What are you hoping for?
Elizabeth McQuoid
As winter turns to spring, what are you hoping for? To get the vaccine, the end of restrictions, to get back to work, to take a holiday?
These glimpses of normality have been dangled in front of us for months like the proverbial carrot. The waiting has led to frustration, despair, and often a sense of hopelessness. But, perhaps that’s the point. Perhaps, among all the other lessons to learn from this pandemic, God wants to reorient our hope – for us to see the ultimate fruitlessness of earth-bound hope and long for something better.
Have we lost confidence in the Bible?
Google’s Ngram Viewer is a fun way to waste time online. You can search Google’s book database and discover how common a word’s usage has been over time.
If, for example, you searched for the word ‘depression’, you will see two peaks, one in 1934 and another in 2011. ‘Shell shock’ peaks in 1919. Type in the word ‘trauma’, and you will see its usage rise on a continual uphill graph from almost nothing in 1900; similar happens to the word ‘triggering’. The term PTSD rose from nothing in the 1970s to a sharp peak today.