A post from a couple of weeks back.

I’ve just received an email about which I have very mixed feelings, advertising The Ligonier 2014 Alaska study cruise with RC Sprouls (father & son) and Michael Morales.

One half recoils a bit at enormously wealthy Christians studying theology in bourgeois surroundings (the boat looks like a real gin palace) while drinking in the beautiful surroundings. The other side says ‘why not choose to take a beautiful holiday and get built up along the way? Isn’t that a good thing?’.

Chris and I were talking in the car about what we might have done with my redundancy money instead of setting up the business and investing our lives in the chapel. The idea of travelling for 6 months or a year (or more) has enormous appeal, but I’m convinced we did what we were called to do. And yet at times it feels like, just by being us, we do more harm than good and we’d have been better off blowing the lot on a year off than sticking round.

This is, of course, living in abstract, and we could never have done that for the sake of my mum, if for no other reason. But y’know.

I guess there’s a bit of bourgeois Christian alive and well inside me too.


What winds me up?

Otherwise potentially sensible people taking a deliberately diametrically opposite stance and trying to argue as though you have taken the extreme opposite viewpoint and they themselves are holding some orthodox middle ground: twisting all you say to fit a view they would be embarrassed by in different circumstances.

So.

Much.

Dumb.

Sure the internet is a great place for it. Somebody is wrong on the internets and all that. Makes me sad when it happens in real life too, in church, when you’re trying to have a discussion and build people up. When young Christians see, instead of people growing in unity and purpose together, someone coming up with ‘devils advocate’ contrived answers to pull your discussion off-line and invalidate anything good.

It’s not happened recently in a Christian setting, but a silly online discussion just reminded me.


Somewhere along the line I’ve downloaded an html version of The Book Of Common Prayer. One of the chapter titles under ‘occasions’ is Scrofula, which made me grin a little, even though there’s nothing funny about the condition.

Another was Commination, which was all about recognition of and repentance from sin, and some of the words were good, though the older English does it no favours (smiting has all the wrong religious overtones).