House Church, Anglican, Vineyard, Non-Denominational, …

“What is ordination?” my oldest daughter asked a few months ago as we attended my friend’s ordination celebration. My friend has been on staff at my family’s non-denominational mega-church for something like seven years. I think she was called pastor at her prior church, but I’m not sure. She acts like a pastor and has basically functioned on the church staff as a pastor for a long time. But, historically, my mega-church has held the view that women should not be pastors and only recently have they amended their view and begun ordaining women. My friend was the second woman to be ordained there. The lead pastor was wandering by as my daughter posed her question, so we asked him to help us understand. Artfully, he described ordination as a recognition of God’s calling on a person’s life and mentioned some passage in one of the books of Timothy, I think, about the laying on of hands. (I should have written it down.)

Atheism and Creative Love Theism

“Killing God?!” I received many warnings from concerned Christians about the movie The Golden Compass. I was warned to avoid the movie because the author of the books it was based on was an atheist and the goal of his books was killing God. I rarely take these type of forwarded emails seriously but decided to investigate this claim for myself. I googled the author and discovered indeed, he is an atheist. And indeed, the books do culminate in the killing of the “God” character called “The Authority”. But, I wondered, was this an assault on the God of the Bible? Was there really any danger to Christians if we watched such a film and allowed our children to watch it? Since I am not one who is easily motivated by fear, I took my kids to see the movie and we even bought the DVD. I have since bought the trilogy it was based on and read it from cover to cover. “The Authority” portrayed in Pullman’s trilogy is nothing like the God I have come to know and love. If the “God” portrayed by Pullman were real, I would want to kill him too! Where did Pullman get this idea of God from? Why are so many Christians afraid of Pullman’s view of God? Pinnock and Clark seem to have wondered something similar inspiring them to write Unbounded Love: A Good News Theology for the 21st Century.

Reflections on Trinity in Everyday Life – Trinity Sunday

“I wonder if he’ll accept my friend request,” I said to myself after clicking on that wonderful add-as-friend button on Facebook. I’d only met him once, and even though we had almost 50 friends in common, I wondered if he would remember me and want to be my friend. Seriously, when you have thousands of friends on Facebook – what’s one more? Then my mind started envisioning that he was just too busy to respond to friend requests and certainly too busy to respond to my personal message that I sent with my friend request – I don’t request to be friends with famous people unless I have met them and had a conversation with them.

"With God, All Things are Possible" Gye Nyame - Painting by Andrea Gladen

Whenever I met new people or request new friends on Facebook, for some reason I expect rejection. Even though I may be able to come up with rational and logical reasons why I might be accepted, emotionally I default to the expectation of rejection. So, I asked myself why? I did not ask this in isolation – though conversations between me, myself and I can be very engaging – I invited the holy Trinity to join me in this quest of self-discovery. This has become a spiritual discipline for me – it’s my personal variation of Healing of Memories, Theophostic Prayer, Victory over the Darkness, and Inner Healing. Jesus promised the Holy Spirit would lead us into all truth, and one place I need to know the truth is in my inner being. As David declared, You desire truth in the inward being; therefore teach me wisdom in my secret heart. (Psalm 51:6) I am confident it was the Holy Spirit that opened my eyes to see this pattern of expecting rejection. So, I set aside some time to process in prayer.

MAML and GMLDMIN @ Seminary

September of 2007 I started grad school at George Fox Evangelical Seminary. I started out part time to test the waters and see if I could handle going to school with four kids still at home. I took what George Fox calls hybrid classes, where weekly class work is performed in an online environment with an all day Friday/Saturday classroom intensive scheduled sometime during the semester. I thoroughly enjoyed learning the hybrid way, but was planning to enter the traditional MDiv program taking up to 10 credit hours of classes offered in one day, commuting on the train down to Portland from Seattle on Sunday evenings, taking classes all day Mondays, and returning home Tuesdays. While I was testing the waters I heard about another degree program that was based on the hybrid model of learning with the added element of learning with a cohort.

Evangelism Book Idea

Recently I had a conversation with an editor who rejected my book proposal. It was not as depressing as it could have been. But, the bottom line is that books on Evangelism just aren’t the biggest sellers out there. So, I’m scrapping my book idea on Evangelism.

For those who may be disappointed by this – even if it is only a few of you – I wanted to let you know that I will be writing on the topic, just not for the purpose of a book. I plan to continue writing and try to get articles published. Recently, I published some of what I had written for the book proposal on the Deep Church blog (I am a guest author there now, blogging about once a month) and the article got picked up by Doable Evangelism as well. If you are not a regular reader of those blogs, I encourage you to check them out and join the conversation.

If you are interested in this topic, I’d love to hear from you. Please comment here after reading the chapter summary I worked up for my book proposal and vote on which topic you would like to hear more about next.