Multicultural Ministry Matters

Over at Reformation Theology ,  Nathan Pitchford has posted an excellent review of A Theological Guide to Calvin's Institutes , edited by David W. Hall and Peter A. Lillback.  In this Calvin's 500th year, give yourself a gift!

Tomorrow,  MEPC  going to start a new church service.   Until now, there were four (!)  meetings at 10:30am: Arabic-language service, English-language sunday school, English-language youth group, and English-language church for young adults (post-high school).  From tomorrow, the Arabic meeting, sunday school and youth group will be at 10am.  The English service is moving to 12pm.   By moving to the new time, the English service gets access to the main church hall.  Until now, we've been in the side hall, which is small, and the acoustics are hopeless.  By moving to the main church hall, we double the capacity, and the main hall just has a better "feel" about it.   For years, MEPC has been trying to make its English congregation accessible to the local area, and reach out not just to people from an Arabic background, but all nations.  We want this new service time to be a key step forward for that part of our mission.  This new service is basically open to everyone who sp...

Ford Lewis Battles was one of the 20th century’s greatest scholars on John Calvin. His greatest work of course was his translation of Calvin’s Institute s , published in 1960. He’s written extensively on Calvin, the Institutes, and on early and Medieval Christianity – his writings span Augustine, Boethius, Peter Abelard, Peter Lombard, Hugo Grotius, and more. He and Charles Miller created a computerised concordance for Calvin’s Institutes (1559 ed.). Here’s Battle’s summary of Calvin’s view of idolatry: … [A]n idol can be either a construct of the human mind that reduces the majesty of God and his ways of revelation to a mere shadow, or it can be a physical, palpable construction of the human hand that itself becomes an object of that worship and honor due to God alone. The one is a defect of the truth; the other, an exaggerated imitation of it. Both are false… Page 163 of ‘Calculus Fidei: Some Ruminations on the Structure of the Theology of John Calvin’, pages in 139-178 in In...

Yesterday evening I visited Windsor, in the NW of Sydney metro area, for a meeting. To avoid the traffic, I drove early - which allowed me to take in the changes that have happened in the last ten or so years. Back in the good old days, when I was just a little lad, Old Windsor Road was one lane each way. And was surrounded by pleasant green rolling farm paddocks. Now, the new suburbs of Kellyville and Rouse Hill have been built amazingly quickly. The place feels like California (well, it's what I imagine California would look like...): big, multi-lane roads, freeway overpasses, enormous shopping centres, totally inadequate public transport (!)... and everything looks to NEW and FRESH and ATTRACTIVE! Then I got to Windsor, which is still a cute country town perched on the edge of encroaching suburbia. This reminded me of a passing comment that Peter Hughes made once in a seminar on evangelising Sydney. He said it's useful to think of Sydney as a bunch of separate countries cobb...

Kevin Martineau has just posted some very insightful thoughts on the connection between the health of a pastor's marriage and the health of his ministry .  Well worth a read.