Ballymena street signs





Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A wonky couple of days

Only two weeks to go before semester finishes. Students are pretty stressed out. They cheered on Friday when class finished. Had a visit last night from an ex-evangelical pastor who's joined the Catholic church and now teaches religion in a an upmarket monks' school. He was keen to justify his actions so feel he's not at peace with the move. It made me think how poor the care of pastors is when things get difficult for them. And how astute Catholic clergy are, more so than their evangelical counterparts. Reading New Testament Theology by Philip Esler, who's trying to justify praying to the saints. Feel it's been a wonky couple of days.
Read more

Night of the full moon

Image
It was the night of the full moon and we were invited to the cemetery. We were glad to have our street-wise friend Alejandro with us. There was a gap in the large railings that seal the entrance, just enough to allow a person to get through. Large bowls of fire lit our path as we walked amongst the towers of the dead. Burials are upwards in Latin American cities. We didn't really want to go and had no idea what to expect. The invite had come weeks before and without much thought I had given my word. Olwen put on a pair of comfortable shoes, Alejandro wore an american football top and I decided on my leather jacket for protection. That was justified when thunder cracked above the cemetery. Certain images still remain in my mind. There was the man completely in white who walked with a slow deliberate step: the angel of death. There was the young girl with a bouquet of flowers which she destroyed; we saw her entire life. And there was the patience and s...
Read more

Is church membership biblical?

Next translated offering from Ayuda Pastoral (Help for Pastors): Is it right to have a system of local church membership?   What principles are there for a balanced view of such a membership? The New Testament does not give us detailed information about local church practices.   We don’t know the times and forms of services nor what were the customs about admitting someone to church membership or even if such a list existed.   These things need to be worked out in our own context.  However there are some biblical principles involved: There existed a system of recognizing church members .  Passages which deal with church discipline show that there was a way of knowing who belonged to the church (Matt. 18:17;  3 Jn.  1:10).  Of the 75 uses of the word “church” in the New Testament,   most refer to a local one with people recognized as belonging to it. Basic knowledge about Christ was required for membershi...
Read more