Archives: 'The Local Church'

CT — June 23, 2007, 7:17 pm

Education and Immoral Corrals

Colleges are rejecting women at much higher rates than men, according to an article in this week’s U.S. News & World Report. In 1980 males and females attended colleges in approximately equal numbers, in 2006 women made up 57 percent and by 2010 are expected to increase to 60 percent of those attending college. […]

CT — February 26, 2007, 11:34 pm

When Pastors Make Mistakes

Christians of all stripes make mistakes, but usually they are not quite as public as when a pastor stumbles in a service. I was present at a very painful service earlier this month in Ecuador which started out with good intentions but ended in fiasco. A little girl of 13 in a gorgeous […]

CT — September 5, 2006, 11:20 pm

God is Dumb Once Again

Much has been written recently about a Watertown, New York, elderly woman who was fired after teaching Sunday School for 54 years for simply being a woman. See the Associated Press story, Ben’s blog post and Dan’s as well. It turns out that the story is more complicated than that — that the […]

CT — August 30, 2006, 6:42 am

The Continuing Presence of Women in Missions

I’ve just returned from Kenya where I was a part of a 27-person team which provided health care to Kenyans who could not afford health care in their own country. We spent the first week in western Kenya at Nyengena under the auspices of Global Health Outreach and the second week in Dandora, a […]

CT — April 30, 2006, 11:00 pm

What I Like About My Church

When one writes for awhile on the subject of gender and Biblical equality, one wonders whether all the words sound just a little too negative when all that is meant is to try to make things just a little better in church, at home, and in the world at large. So it’s good every […]

CT — April 15, 2006, 2:30 pm

The Men Churches Attract

I’m not so sure that feminists and egalitarians aren’t shooting themselves in the foot when they actively de-emphasize differences between the sexes. In my experience a high percentage of people not only see their spouses as quite different from themselves, but they see more similarities between themselves and their (same-sex) buddies. In fact, […]

CT — February 20, 2006, 4:20 pm

Mormon Sex

Ho, ho! The Feminist Mormon Housewives blog has finally taken up the subject of sex in Mormon families in a posting called Sex Talk. Comments approaching 250.

CT — February 19, 2006, 2:30 am

The RCA’s Inconsistency Concerning Supporting Women in Ministry

My denomination, the Reformed Church in America, permitted the ordination of women in 1979, and although over 200 women have been graduated from their seminaries since then, not many get pastorates or other Christian leadership positions. Kristine Veldheer, in “Finding Affirmation,” Church Herald, June 1989, p. 29, said the following: “The greatest frustration […]

CT — February 18, 2006, 9:00 pm

Shades of Meaning in the Greek: I Timothy

“Sometimes it is virtually impossible to translate a Greek word into a precise English equivalent or to show the force of the verb tenses,” says historian Ruth Tucker. Since the word “learn” in I Timothy 2:11 is in the imperative tense, the NIV translation of “should learn,” while good, may not be strong enough. […]

CT — February 15, 2006, 10:00 pm

Paul’s Principle of Accomodation

Quite a large percentage of Christian churches are not very open to winning the lost to Christ. They set up all sorts of barriers that put seekers off, including weird sub-cultural behaviors and even stranger theological interpretations based on non-understanding of ancient cultures, or worse, on just their own sub-cultures and ways of understanding […]