my life and my doctrine

I’ve recently been following many, generally painful and non-constructive, discussions on the SRE on trial page of Facebook. I don’t want to rehash the arguments here, but question an assumption of those who promote the ethics course. My bugbear is when people claim secular ethics as worldview-neutral and therefore isn’t a challenge to organised, for want of a better term, religion. If that were the case, how can it be considered for the SRE time slot? (However, I would like to add that this is more constructive than discussions about the appropriateness of SRE in schools at all. From what I understand, that’s not up for debate.)

This struck me as I heard about the recent French vote, in the lower house, to ban the burka.

Justice minister Michele Alliot-Marie says the approval was a success for French republican values of liberty, equality, fraternity and secularism.

I am yet to work out how it is a win for liberty. How a ban on public religious practise equals freedom. It seems to me, from a possibly ill-informed outsider looking in, that the desire for secularism is greater than the right to personal self-expression. In the end, it gives me the impression that secularism sits in judgment over religion and wants to push what it thinks is good or bad for an individual. Equality becomes less about equality, but uniformity. No longer the right the choose, but the assumption that all will choose the same.

Why did this particularly strike me this week?

I’ve been preparing sermons on 1 Timothy for later this year and have been dwelling on this very bold, very absolute, very modernist statement:

For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and humanity, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all (1 Tim 2:5-6)

Paul doesn’t have any sense of diplomacy or tact as he states the truth. Regardless of what the prevailing view might have been in the cosmopolitan Ephesus, regardless of the culture of the day, there is one God. And there is only one God. And the only mediation between God and humanity. Jesus Christ who died, that we might know this one God.

I wasn’t at the church planting conference held at Moore College today (and tomorrow). However, I read the exciting news that Al Stewart is going to be heading up Evangelism Ministries from January next year. Last year I was a student minister at Evangelism Ministries and benefited greatly from the experience. I was given opportunity to write talks which explained the good news about Jesus. These were then critiqued before I gave them at various church services or events.

Sure, it helped my preaching skills. Yet, more importantly was the great benefit of being reminded that God is the one who gives the growth. I learned this most valuable lesson after giving the same talk a third time and finding out that someone responded in repentance and faith. Certainly had nothing to do with my delivery of the talk or the content of it. Rather God’s Spirit was at work that particular night in the heart of that particular person.

May God give wisdom to Al and the EM board as they consider how to restructure to further promote evangelism and church planting.