Tried With Fire

Pastor Ryan started teaching a Sunday school class on how to read the Bible. He mentioned something briefly in his introduction that was very interesting -  The majority of believers in the past would have learned the Word of God in a corporate setting via preaching and public reading, not from their own Bibles. Think about it. Until the invention of the printing press, copies of the Bible were written and bound by hand. A laborious and time-consuming process. Until the Reformation, the Bible was not written in the language of the average person in the pew. Also the cost would have been prohibitive for the average person. But even after the Reformation, how long did it take for copies of the Scriptures to be readily available? Was it after the Industrial Revolution that books became more affordable via mass production? Even then, there was the issue of literacy, which I don't think became as widespread until reforms in public education. This brief aside in Pastor Ryan's c...

Last week, Lisa and Aimee got the ball rolling with their posts ( here and here ) on women's ministry and specifically where middle-aged women fit into the picture. As a woman in her 50's, I appreciate that my friends have started this discussion, so if you haven't read their posts, please do. However, I want to take a step back even further and consider what are the expectations of women's ministry ? I've broken this one question into three sub-questions which have spawned even more, so consider yourself forewarned. Who is the focus of women's ministry? The go-to verses about women's ministry are Titus 2:3-5, older women teaching younger women what is good. There is no question of the need to train those who will carry on after we are gone. But is this the sum total of what women's ministry should be? Namely, is the focus only on the younger generation? If so, could this lead to the possibility of older saints falling through the cracks? What is the...

There is a real spiritual “presence” of Christ with the hearts of all true-hearted communicants in the Lord’s Supper. Rejecting as I do, with all my heart, the baseless notion of any bodily presence of Christ on the Lord’s table, I can never doubt that the great or­dinance appointed by Christ has a special and peculiar blessing attached to it. That blessing, I believe, con­sists in a special and peculiar presence of Christ, vouch­safed to the heart of every believing communicant. That truth appears to me to lie under those wonderful words of institution, “Take, eat: this is My body.” “Drink ye all of this: this is My blood.” Those words were never meant to teach that the bread in the Lord’s Supper was literally Christ’s body, or the wine literally Christ’s blood. But our Lord did mean to teach that every right-hearted believer, who ate that bread and drank that wine in remembrance of Christ, would in so doing find a special presence of Christ in his heart, and a special revelation of...