Celebrating Lynn Green’s election
Today, the Revd Lynn Green has been elected as General Secretary of the Baptist Union of Great Britain. (Report here.) On one level, this news is distant from me. It happens that I do not know Lynn – we have met, more or less in passing, but I certainly cannot claim any close relationship with her. And it is eight years or more since our family moved to Scotland, and so I transferred my ministerial accreditation from BUGB to the Baptist Union of Scotland. That said, BUGB is the denomination into which I was baptised, which tested and affirmed my call to ministry, which ordained me, and in which I began my ministerial service. The two General Secretaries before Lynn are personal friends, as are several other national and regional leaders. I owe BUGB more than I can say, and retain many relationships with individuals, churches, and translocal structures within the denomination; I still feel as if I belong to some extent – I do not know if BUGB would still want to own me as one of theirs, but I would want to be so owned; for me, there are deep ties of history, loyalty, and friendship here. So today, knowing from friends that something exciting – I did not know what – was in the offing, I repeatedly checked my Twitter feed between sessions of our church awayday. I saw that Lynn had been proposed, and then that she had been elected; I saw the rejoicing from brothers and sisters ‘down south’ at the election; I shared in the rejoicing; I saw at least one friend, an Anglican priest, express a wish that she were a Baptist today; I began to reflect. The General Secretary of BUGB is the leading Baptist office in the UK. This is, so far as we have one, the equivalent of the Archbishopric of Canterbury, or the See of Westminster. Lynn is the first woman to be called to the role. I saw numbers of friends down south tweeting ‘proud to be a Baptist today’ – and, as I say, at least one Anglican friend wishing to be a Baptist. What did all this mean? Of course, the calling of the first female General Secretary is a moment of history; this will be recorded and remembered as the moment when a decisive change became visible. And many – perhaps on my timeline 75-80% – of the comments were celebrating this moment in history. They did not know Lynn; they had no doubt that the selection committee had made a wise choice; but the celebration was for the crossing of a Rubicon: now there is no office left in (British) Baptist life that is not open to women and men indifferently. The other 20-25% of the people I heard celebrated because they knew Lynn and had no doubt that this was a transparently excellent appointment, to be rejoiced in because Lynn is Lynn, not because Lynn is female. It seems to me that both reactions are valid, and both are important to understand why today should be a day of rejoicing for British Baptists. The second first: Lynn was called because, simply, she was the best candidate for the post. Nothing I saw even began to0 suggest any element of ‘tokenism,’ or even of a desire to right a lasting injustice, appropriate though such a desire might have been. I was not privy to the internal discussions, but I feel completely convinced that I have heard enough today to assert with utter confidence that Lynn was called because she was the best candidate for the post. The first reaction: as I read the reaction – and the reports of voting percentages – this was not a moment where the view of the denomination changed; rather, this was the visible working out of a change in view that had already happened. Almost nobody in BUGB is worried about the highest office being occupied by a woman now. Many of us knew, or suspected, or hoped, that that was the case; the Assembly’s calling of Lynn, however, was a public and visible confirmation of what we knew, or suspected, or hoped – as such it is worthy of great celebration, not as a moment of change, but as a moment when a change that happened before became transparently visible. I have read dozens of tweets announcing ‘Today, I am proud to be a Baptist’. Yes. Today, I am proud to be a Baptist. Not just proud, but hopeful. Lynn’s calling is profoundly important because she is the first woman to be called to this position, and that will, I pray,...
Read MoreThe Los Angeles Theology Conference
If you’ve not already heard, Oliver Crisp and Fred Sanders have organised the first in what promises to be a series of conferences on Christian theology, to be held in LA, CA, 17-18th January, 2013, on the theme of ‘Christology: Ancient and Modern’. The models are avowedly the Wheaton theology conference and the Edinburgh Dogmatics Conference – I am on the organising committee of the EDC – which suggests an intention to engage seriously with classical Christian dogmatics. The choice of plenary speakers only reinforces this impression: George Hunsinger, Katherine Sonderegger, Alan Torrance, Peter Leithart, and Oliver Crisp. This promises to be a significant addition to the presently available contexts for really serious theological discussion. More details available at...
Read MoreWhy ‘complementarianism’ matters: reflections occasioned by Carl Trueman
Carl Trueman has an excellent blog post on the Reformation21 site, expressing puzzlement at why so many (American, evangelical) parachurch organisations make complementarianism (male-only leadership) a defining point of their platform. He highlights the potential absurdity of this in characteristically sharp and witty fashion, pointing out that the historical divisions that these organisations choose to bridge (baptismal practice; church polity; doctrines of grace) are, or should be, far more basic than complementarianism, and asking some sharp questions about practice (he imagines a situation of a male, paedobaptist, Presbyterian minister and a female Baptist minister visiting a Baptist church that is part of one of these coalitions, and asks how this will be played out, indicating that every possible answer is absurd.) As a committed evangelical (indeed, someone who has defended inerrancy in print a couple of times), who is also committed to the principle that not only should all areas of church life be open to women, but that every local church should in fact have female leaders, I might be expected to applaud Carl’s post. He certainly makes his point well, but I think he misses something about the significance of praxis in defining unity. Reflection on that point illuminates something about British evangelicalism also. Carl’s post asks about theology, and considers practice in the local church; what he misses, I think, is any consideration of what organisations like the Gospel Coalition actually do. I have commented before that church division generally happens on issues of practice rather than doctrine: two people can probably find a way of negotiating a disagreement over (say) Christology, particularly if they both agree not to preach on it; if they disagree over how to celebrate the Lord’s Supper, they are fairly soon going to be worshipping in different congregations, simply because they cannot both practice their beliefs in the same one. The original genius of the first evangelical parachurch groups back in the eighteenth century was their ability to negotiate differences over church order and sacramental practice by removing their organisational activity from the context of the local church: a Bible Society meeting in a town hall can be attended by Baptists, Presbyterians, and Episcopalians indifferently. At this functional level, what a group like The Gospel Coalition does is hold conferences and write stuff; the fracture points for such a group, then, are going to centre on disagreements over how to organise a conference and/or what stuff gets written and by who. The question of who is allowed to speak in public, then, inevitably becomes a point of division, and so of identity. If the group is going to organise conferences, and is only going to invite men to preach/teach at them, then the restriction of the teaching ministry to men is a defining point of the group, and it is as well to be honest about that. Why has this not generally happened this side of the Atlantic? We might point to the generally more relaxed attitudes of British churches (Carl’s illustration of a Presbyterian pastor being refused admission to the Lord’s Table because he has not been baptised as a believer does not describe something that would happen in very many British Baptist churches, rightly or wrongly). We might also point to some more nuanced accounts of complementarianism that operate in Britain, largely due to the weight of influence of the Church of England. I suspect, however, that the most honest response would be to say that the same point of division has happened in British evangelicalism, but we have generally been less than open about it. To take the issue of nuance, a common form of British complementarianism has focused on the issue of authority, rather than the issue of teaching per se. So there are many British evangelical churches which have articulated a position where women are allowed to teach, indeed to be part of the ordained ministry team, but are not allowed to hold the senior role in the team. Churches holding such a position could cheerfully be a part of a conference with both male and female speakers, although they may want some visible asymmetry to reflect their theology. (In some cases this gets convoluted to the extreme, with certain central platforms being denied to women; I have never been able to fathom what theological principle is at play in allowing women to speak to only a certain size of audience…) That said, some British evangelical parachurch groups do in practice restrict their platforms to men only; I have been told by people on UCCF staff that this is, or recently has been, common amongst university Christian Unions, for example. The rhetoric deployed...
Read MoreReflections on Spring Harvest 2012
We’re recently back from Spring Harvest in Skegness, where I worked with Norman Ivison of Fresh Expressions each morning, and had my usual mixed set of lectures and seminars in the afternoons – this year discussing ecclesiology (SH’s theme this year), women and men in leadership, using social media, and dealing with divorce. I was also, for the first time, on the Event Leadership Team – a role which involved ‘early morning’ (7.45, but in SH terms…) prayer meetings, which turned out to be really good times, as wonderful stories were shared of what had happened around the site the previous day. The event was excellent; Ness Wilson, pastor of Open Heaven Church in Loughborough, gave the morning Bible readings and was, by universal consent, quite stunningly good; someone pointed out to me that the main platform speakers were about 50% female, and about 50% under 35/40 (the latter statistic depending on some guesses that, in view of the former, might be considered ungallant…). This was my sixth SH on team; for the first time, my big memory of the event is not the talks I gave. Two in particular were difficult in advance: divorce, because I know little about the subject; and women and men in leadership, because I care deeply about what people think. I did some work and coped, I think, with the former; the latter was rendered easy by the context. I spoke after Ness had given a Bible reading that morning, and after Bev Murill had preached powerfully the previous evening; my notes had a list of great female preachers and leaders from history, with the question – can you really believe God did not gift and call? To say to folk, given what we’ve heard and experienced over the last 24 hours, can you really believe… was easy – Ness and Bev were both wonderful – and powerful. (I think I said that almost any preacher must be jealous of the gifts God has given to the pair of them – certainly my feeling…) Working with Norman was great – an easy relationship from the word go, and we instinctively shared a vision of what the church is called to be, without having to work at it. My lasting memory, though, was not any of this, good though it was. Two snapshots, perhaps. First, Pete Greig, of 24/7 Prayer, preaching one night. It was an extremely powerful message, but in the course of it he recalled with much humour his first dabblings with friends into what an earlier generation would have called ‘experimental Christianity.’ These experiments in prayer and discipleship all took place in Pete’s mother’s shed, where they would meet together and see what God would do. Second, one of our daughters, arriving home at lunchtime, shyly telling me that she prayed for a friend to be healed, and that as she prayed, her friend was healed. She and friend (daughter of others on the team, so I could follow up the story) were astonished… Both snapshots capture a sense of God running ahead of us in ministry, doing more than we ask or imagine. And there was a sense for me, and for others on the speaking team who I talked to, that we were being taken places in ministry we’d not been before. No doubt other colleagues were well within a comfort zone, but I found myself repeatedly in a place where there was a temptation to look around the room/tent and say something like – ‘the guy there? with the beard? Pete Greig – he does this stuff; why don’t you go talk to him?’ A boldness that comes from grace, however, kept me going. The night I walked past the ‘Receive the Holy Spirit’ session, was grabbed by a despairing steward who needed backup because too many people wanted to come in, and ended up forgetting the party I was headed to and diving in to minister to all comers for ninety minutes – this is not my normal experience (altar calls at the end of lectures are frowned upon where I work…). There were other examples. It wasn’t just me, either. No names, of course, but one colleague told a lovely tale of seeing someone fall over in response to offered prayer ministry; a concerned friend asked ‘Does that mean God is doing something special?’ to which my colleague replied in the heat of the moment, ‘I don’t know – it’s never happened to me before…’ For much of the event, my overarching experience was the sense – familiar to many of us, I guess, from youth group/student days – that God was...
Read MoreFestival preaching
Neil posted a comment today about what he hopes to get out of this year’s ‘Baptist’ (sic, ‘English and a few Welsh Baptist’) Assembly. In it he offered two version of a criterion for judging the quality of the preaching: I trust that those who speak in the main celebrations will ensure that their words are driven by the Biblical text, showing an appreciation of the theological questions that surround the text and their subject and communicate with clarity, conviction and character in a way that inspires us with a grander vision of God. (My private test is whether I would want to invite them to preach in church here, which is a marginally more humble way of asking if I think they are better than me). This caught my eye, because it chimed with one of my ongoing reflections from Spring Harvest. Dave Steell preached an excellent sermon to us one night; in trying to analyse what made it good, I commented to Heather that it was the first time I’ve heard a preacher at SH and wished s/he was my pastor. This is not quite the same as Neil’s ‘private’ criterion, of course, but it suggested to me that there might be an important sense in which everything else I’ve heard failed a basic test. As soon as I made the comment, it struck me as odd – SH gets some great preachers, after all, and I’ve heard many sermons there (and at similar large events, including the BUGB/BMS Assembly) that were powerful, inspiring, Biblical, and engaging. (Those adjectives in no particular order…) Many of them were preached by people who I knew for a fact had done great work in local church ministry over the years and decades. But they were not, generally, sermons that made me want to listen to that preacher week by week. Does this make them bad sermons? I have tentatively come to the conclusion in my musings that the answer was no, but that ‘festival preaching’ is a different genre from ‘normal preaching’. A festival sermon is a one-off, or at best a short stand-alone series, delivered to people you don’t know. There is thus a premium on offering something that is immediately accessible and engaging, that works to make the people comfortable with the preacher, trusting her and able to open themselves to the challenge she brings. (This is the function of the lengthy and amusing self-deprecating anecdote at the start, for instance, stuff sometimes dismissed as ‘entertainment’ – but to dismiss it like this is to miss the important homiletic function it is fulfilling.) There is also a heightened expectation – many people come to festivals expecting to hear challenge or direction from God in a way they don’t expect to hear Sunday by Sunday. This expectation seems to me to invite and almost require a level of directness and challenge that would be profoundly out-of-place if repeated every week. (I don’t need to be offered a new direction for my life every Sunday!) Being unable to build and develop and qualify a theme over weeks and months requires a high level of dexterity in handling exegesis and sermon construction: the text invites us to trust God in every circumstance; OK, but how to preach it as a one-off without either encouraging an unbiblical quietism, or weakening the force of the text by qualification? This isn’t to say that festival preaching is harder or better than normal preaching – in many ways it is much easier. You can (and, mentioning no names, some have) sustain an entire ministry on a diet of about six funny stories, for instance. You can probably get away with a lower level of exegetical skill. The pastoral sensitivity needed is perhaps no less, but it is of a different sort. Festival preaching is different, with different challenges, and asks for different skills. Some people have both skill-sets, and can work well in both settings; there are others who are fantastic on stage, but could not serve a pulpit well week-by-week; others again who do a great work in their local church could not preach in the festival setting. Of course, local church ministry is the primary place for the ministry of the Word and for growth in discipleship amongst the people. Festivals and assemblies, if they have any place at all, exist only to serve that primary context. But if they do have a place doing that, it is worth being aware that what goes on in the celebration is not the local congregational meeting writ large, but a different beast. Dave preached a sermon that was masterful, in...
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