With my responsibilites for developing and coordinating our church's work in the community here in Hull, I'm always interested in finding out what other churches are doing. This video was encouraging, with some brief snapshots of a few churches across the north of England working on different projects to reach out to their communities. We run a debt counselling service here, although we work with Community Money Advice. We're also working on starting up English classes. I have also tossed around the idea of something like a drop-in centre to help those who are looking for employment, given the economic situation in Hull.

These initatives are exciting. What sorts of things are your churches doing in your communities?

(HT: David Keen)

When I read James Davison Hunter's book, To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World, last year, one of the things he talked about repeatedly was the need for the church to work out a theology of vocation. In the video below, Mark Greene, of the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity, talks about how believers should understand their Monday-Saturday work as part of the call of God's people to make known the Kingdom of God. There are a lot of misconceptions about work among Christians – that we work just to pay the bills, that working as a pastor or missionary is a higher calling, that being a Christian in the workplace means just evangelising your co-workers – but these do not square with the fact that humanity was designed to work.

(FYI: the sound quality on the video is not great and Greene's voice is often washed out by the music, so listen carefully.)

As I mentioned above, Hunter argues that it is the church that needs to work out a theology of vocation. This is about the formation of disciples. These are the sorts of big questions we need to be addressing in our local contexts.

The bottom line is that believers need to understand that what they do matters.

To modern society's credit, it has become increasingly popular to talk about injustice and to try and find ways to fight against and eradicate oppression. Strategies and methods for tackling these various problems vary, as does their effectiveness. One important thing to understand is that most injustices are not isolated things, but are symptoms of deeper problems.

Poverty is a particular concern of many people today. As I mentioned in my last post, a lot of proposed solutions to the problem of poverty are limited to the distribution of material goods, such as money and food. But, we need to understand, as Harvie Conn and Manuel Ortiz argue in Urban Ministry: The Kingdom, the City, and the People of God, that 'injustice and oppression are at the root of most poverty in this world' (p. 328). That is, there are systems and structures in our societies and cultures that are unjust, and that are a direct cause of problems like poverty.

When we understand the poor to be people who do not have enough food or enough clothes or enough money, our solutions will aim at alieviating those immediate problems. However, we need to have a broader understanding of the poor, and the Old Testament can help develop this. In their book, Cities: Missions' New Frontier, Roger Greenway and Timothy Monsma write, 'A careful examination of the Hebrew words translated "poor" reveals a much wider meaning than we might have expected. The poor are those who are forced into submission, reduced to subservience – the oppressed and the violated' (p. 173).

You cannot read the Bible, even cursorily, without noticing the frequent repetition of the command to care for the poor. God has always entrusted his people with this responsibility. Society in the time of Old Testament Israel, when they lived according to God's law, was the epitome of justice, a society free from the structures that oppressed people. The same could not be said of the pagan nations surrounding Israel, whose autocratic rulers demanded total obedience from their subjects and subjected them to endless tyranny. Yahweh demanded total fidelity as well, but in submitting to his rule of love, humanity flourished. And Israel was charged with embodying this rule of love toward everyone who lived within her borders.

As the church, this will help us begin to think about how to deal with poverty in our communities and cities. As we work in our neighbourhoodsand seek to bring shalom to the city, we must remember that bearing witness to the rule of Christ over all of life involves a committment to 'act justly and love mercy' (Micah 6:8). We want people to acknowledge Jesus as their Lord, but that mission involves more than just addressing their hearts. That is certainly a major part of it, but it goes hand in hand with embodying an alternative reality that reflects the love of Jesus and that manifests itself when we fully submit to our King.

Doing this will bring us into direct confrontation with the economic, political, and religious systems that govern our communities and cities. However, as Robert Linthicum has said, 'If the church does not deal with the systems and structures of evil in the city, then it will not effectively transform the lives of that city's individuals' (Empowering the Poor, p. 11). Viv Grigg, who has spent many years living in the slums and among the poor of cities like Manila, Calcutta, São Paulo, and Los Angeles, says,

The cause of the poverty of the slums has to do not only with the spiritual condition of the slum dweller and the lack of resources among the poor. It has to do also with oppression and the political and economic structures of society that operate in favour of the rich. Holistic ministry cannot avoid confronting the principalities and powers that perverty and corrupt the structures of society in ways that bring abundance to the few and grinding poverty to the many... If the poverty of your squatter area is caused by oppression, the pastoral response will involve actions that may conflict with the interests of those who oppress (Cry of the Urban Poor, pp. 176-178).

So, the question then is, how do we do this?

Last week I suggested that our theological formation should be something more than simply adopting the thinking of celebrity figures (or anyone, for that matter) in the church, and stated that instead we should understand theological formation as something that happens locally. I finally found some time yesterday to jot down a few thoughts in this vein.

The first thing to note is that doing theology is a communal task. This simply flows from the reality that the church is a community of believers united in Jesus Christ who together determine, by studying and indwelling the revelation of God in his Word, what they must believe and how they are to live. Throughout history, theology has always been done in the context of community. The early church councils were groups of leading churchmen gathered together to address certain points of theology (and other matters). The creeds and confessions of the Reformation were produced by a gathering of church leaders. Even when men like Calvin produced their theological works, the intention was that they serve the community they were a part of.

What's more, theology is always done in a specific context. Both place and time factor into the theology that emerges. This is not to say that theology is only relevant for a certain time and place, but merely that theology is not produced in a vacuum and is always to be understood within the context it emerged from. For instance, during the second and third centuries, the church was developing its theology regarding the person of Christ and how to understand the Trinity. The purpose was not just to construct these doctrines at random, but to answer the myriad of heresies that were emerging with orthodox formulations. The church needed to be able to say, 'Here are where the boundaries are; you cannot go beyond this.' Their Christological and Trinitarian formulations are no less valid today because they were produced centuries ago, of course, but without the historical framework we cannot understand why we speak certain ways about the person of Christ and the Trinity.

Theology is never a completed task. We have never said all there is to say. To be sure, we must take the formulations from history and from our traditions that are biblical and adopt them as our own. Sometimes this may require some reconfiguration so that a particular doctrine makes sense in our current context, and sometimes it means holding fast to the understanding that has prevailed for generations. But we have never said all their is to say about everything; God, for example, is an infinite being who can only be partially comprehended by those who he has created. The Bible is a treasure mine so vast that even if every person spent every day studying it, we could never uncover all it says to us. And so we must recognise that the act of doing theology is never complete.

Because of this ongoing task, we need to always be thinking and continuing our theological formation. In the previous post, I may have implied that every Christian must be an original thinker. One of the more regular commenters on the blog noted that perhaps not every Christian needs to be original, but they do need to be independent thinkers. He is right, and that is more or less what I was wanting to say, even if it didn't come across as clearly (see, this is why I am grateful for those of you who comment). The point I wanted to make was simply that Christians have a responsibility, as they grow in Christ, to cultivate some sort of theological framework that enables them to understand their faith and gives them a tool for looking at the world and learning how to live faithfully in it.

I do think, though, that among the leadership of our churches there must be minds that are theologically astute and able to think with a degree of originality. This does not mean that every leader in the crhurch should have a doctorate in theology, but that there should be people in the local church – pastors, academics, and so on – who are capable theologically, who can clearly articulate the doctrines of the Christian faith, and who can help the believers in their midst make sense of reality and of their calling in the world. It should be clear that theology, then, is not limited to how we talk about Christ or the church or salvation, but encompasses a great deal more.

Theologians are important to the local church because, first, the church needs guides. The people of God need others who will say to them, 'This is what you need to believe about X, and this is why.' It should be said that this is not some sort of heavy-handed imposition of a particular belief, but instead is instruction and guidance that is borne out of love. There must be those who will open up Scripture for the people of God to help them see what it says about Jesus or about the Spirit, and so on. And not only that, but believers must also be helped to see the whole unified story of the Bible, each act of creation, fall, and redemption, how God has been active in history and how they can understand their place in this great narrative.

Reading Scripture requires theological lenses in order to provide a framework for interpreting them. Though many claims to the contrary have been made throughout history, an individual cannot approach the Bible and read it without any sort of theological paradigm coming to bear on his interpretation. As strange as it may sound, there is a sense in which we can say to an individual, 'The Bible is not for you.' By this I certainly do not intend to abrogate an individual of the responsibility of reading and studying Scripture, but want to recognise that the Bible was given to the church. When a person approaches Scripture they are unwise to do so without first looking to the church as their guide. What was noted above about thinking independently is important here, because using the church as a guide always requires the believer to take this teaching and weigh it against Scripture.

Second, in order for the people of God to live faithfully in the world, they need to learn how to do so. We can best understand this by talking about worldview. Al Wolters, in his masterful book, Creation Regained: Biblical Basics for a Reformational Worldview, says, 'Our worldview functions as a guide to our life. A worldview, even when it is half unconscious and unarticulated, functions like a compass or a road map. It orients us in the world at large, gives us a sense of what is up and what is down, what is right and what is wrong in the confusion of events and phenomena that confronts us' (4). This sort of roadmap requires us to think theologically about all kinds of things (indeed, perhaps everything), from business, to politics, to justice, to vocation, to art, to education, and so on. As we think about these things, all kinds of big questions will be raised that we need to deal with. And so we study the Scriptures together in our local communities, working together to answer our questions and formulate a worldview that is thoroughly biblical and that acknowledges the Lordship of Christ over all of life.

And this is where it really becomes important to do theology locally. All these big questions certainly have answers that have universal application, but there are also a lot of context-specific applications that need to be figured out. How do we do that? One thing I am sure of is that we do not simply take the answers from celebrity leaders or from those in different contexts without careful consideration of their conclusions. This is far too often the case and the very reason I raise the subject in the first place (as I noted last time). What we can do with the conclusions of others is to take their insights, weigh them against Scripture, evaluate them for our specific context, and determine what is good for us. To some degree, that may sound like some sort of relativism, but I am certainly not advocating that. At this point, I am just not sure how to state it differently. I hope you understand what I mean.

Further, here is where the idea originality comes into play. In some cases, some of the questions we are asking may not have any good answers so far. Perhaps others have reached unbiblical conclusions, or no one has even addressed the question yet. In this case, let's not wait for our celebrity leaders to give us the answers, but let us together think through these things and produce a theological response that will benefit not just our community, but maybe even the church as a whole.

Theology has so often been construed, especially in evangelical circles, as something that takes place far away in the halls of academia. But theology can and should be done in our local churches and communities. When we are confronted with big questions, we shouldn't ignore them or push them aside hoping that someone else will answer them for us, but we should embrace the opportunity to think together and read the Bible together as we seek to find an answer that will help us in our ongoing quest to bring our beliefs in line with Scripture and to live faithfully in this world. This is part of our life together as a local community of believers.

These conversations happen all over the place – in church fellowship halls, in classrooms, in coffee shops and pubs, on street corners, in living rooms and around dinner tables, in cars on long drives. There is no one place because these are conversations that we can be having all the time. Theology does not need to be a formal affair. If we believe that theology is not only about believing the right things but also about our ongoing formation as disciples of Christ, what better place to do it than in our local communities where we are together working out what it means to follow Jesus?

Everyone has heroes. There are people in the world who we want to emulate, who have played major roles in shaping who we are, how we think, what we do. This is certainly a good thing – some people have much more wisdom than we do, some have a better understanding of how to live the Christian life than we do, and these are worth studying and learning from. But the line between hero and idol seems to blur rather easily in Western culture.

In many ways, the media has served to blur the distinction because of the false sense of reality it creates. James Davis Hunter observes in his recent book, To Change the World, that the way media is used in our culture 

[fosters] a reality that exists primarily if not only within the surfaces of sensory awareness and understanding. This is a world constituted by image, representation, simulation, and illusion. This is, of course, a highly engineered reality that distances us from our natural surroundings and the immediacy of primary relationships. It is a simulated reality that, in many ways, supersedes lived reality (209).

The media creates the illusion that we have some sort of relationship with the people we see on television, a sense of familiarity and intimacy. For someone to be our hero, we need to have some personal knowledge of them. In the past this meant having a personal relationship with them, or finding out enough of them by other means (such as an objective, balanced biography) that we have some knowledge of their character. Modern media is selective, however, in its portrayal of celebrities, and thus we only know of them what the media shows us, creating the illusion that what we see on the screen is an honest representation of the individual. Yet we make heroes out of the people we see projected in this simulated reality. In point of fact, however, we turn them into idols.

In recent years, the church has made a lot of use of technology, which in many ways has benefited the community of believers. But the church has also not been immune from using media to create an illusion of reality that fosters a kind of idolatry. The cult of personality has arisen because of the way certain pastors and leaders with their exceptional gifts have been cast into the limelight. Again, Hunter warns of the problems that arise from our misuse of technology:

All of the faith-based work that comes through these technologies bends to fit the technology's requirements, fostering a reality that exists and operates primarily on the surfaces of sense perception... Reality becomes constituted by the ephemera of image, representation, and simulation. Pseudo-intimacy with well-known personalities provides the primary form and style of communication for a population hungry for significance. Here too the message is fragmented, creating a context in which the distinctions between simulated and lived realities are largely dissolved. And because these media are used as a sales media within the Christian marketplace, this material is packaged in the same way as any other consumer goods in the marketplace are promoted, offering sensational appeals but making no demands and providing no accountability. How much spiritual fruit actually comes from the frenetic symbolism created by these media is debatable, but there is no question that in all of these ways, these technologies unwittingly weaken the connective tissue "between word and world" (222-223).

You do not need to spend much time in Christian culture here in the West before you have become acquainted with the glut of pastors and leaders that have become celebrities. Their names are everywhere, their sermons and talks are on nearly every Christian's iPod, every one of their tweets are re-tweeted hundreds of times over, their books are constant bestsellers, their image and style is adopted by pastors all over the country. They have become idols.

The damage this does to the local church is not insignificant. It puts extraordinary pressure on the pastor to fit the mould of the celebrity leaders that many people in the pews idolise. When their pastor does not preach as dramatically as the celebrity pastor, they begin to take his preaching less seriously and get their fill throughout the week elsewhere. They begin to wonder what their pastor is doing wrong when he is not headlining national conferences or publishing books or drawing in lots of 'outsiders'. And for the church that is without a pastor, their search committees put together a list of qualifications that one wonders if Jesus himself could even meet. All the while, lots of seminary graduates who want nothing more than to preach the gospel and shepherd God's people find themselves working at Starbucks because they are deemed inadequate until they have had ten years of experience learning to model this or that celebrity preacher. Having just gone through three years of seminary, I personally know many godly and faithful men who have such a passion and desire to serve Christ's church but are not given the chance because of the unrealistic standards churches have for their pastoral staff.

In part, this is just another manifestation of Western culture's rampant individualism and unwillingness to submit to authority. Since you, as the parishioner, know what you need best, you take it upon yourself to find what you think you need. In some cases, this may be a legitimate quest, but often it is driven by the consumer mindset of this culture that has us constantly shopping for something better than what we currently have. It is no exception within the church. How many people do you know who have left your local church to go to a celebrity pastor's church across town because the preaching there is just 'so much better'?

Another damaging result of this trend, then, is that it breaks apart the community of the local church. Parishioners begin to find the community life of the church less important when they no longer see it as an integral whole. They get 'awesome' preaching daily on their iPod, they get 'awesome' worship from the live stream of the mega-church four hundred miles away, but really like the potluck dinners with the folks from their own church and so they will show up for those once a month. They begin to live a fragmented ecclesial life that erodes their commitment to the local church and to the ministry and ordinances Christ has entrusted to the church.

Not only is damage done to the local church, but celebrity leaders cannot minister faithfully if they are not fully connected a local church. Even those who have become celebrities and are still connected to a local church find their ministry to the congregation they have been called to hindered by the demands of the celebrity culture. Because they are suddenly a draw for consumers from all over, they find their buildings overflowing with people who might drive two hundred miles each Sunday to hear them. They are forever preaching to an audience they have no personal knowledge of, they cannot hold their listeners accountable (nor can they always be held accountable), and the temptation to become prideful and arrogant becomes an exceedingly easy trap to fall into. Yet because the demand is ever-present, the will power to resist stepping into this role is continually weakened.

The celebrity model of leadership is entirely alien to the biblical conception of leadership. It is driven by consumer culture and a misguided quest for significance. Hunter notes that faithful, Christian leaders practice their leadership 'in all spheres and all levels of life and activity. It represents a quality of commitment oriented to the fruitfulness, wholeness, and well-being of all.' He continues,

It is...the antithesis of celebrity, a model of leadership that many Christians in prominent positions have a very difficult time resisting. Celebrity is, in effect, based on an inflated brilliance, accomplishment, or spirituality generated and perpetuated by publicity. It is an artifice and, therefore, a type of fraud. Where it once served power and patrons, in our own day it mainly serves itself and its pecuniary interests. Celebrity must, of necessity, draw attention to itself. In American Christianity, the relentless pressure to raise funds within churches and para-church organizations reinforces the pressure toward celebrity, with an endless flow of direct mail, advertising, and ghost-written sermons, speeches, articles, editorials, and so on. These pressures are difficult to resist even for those who, by instinct, might find celebrity either tasteless or problematic. The reason is that celebrity is not just a certain kind of status one achieves but it is also a powerful institution the entire structure of which is oriented toward burnishing a leader's image and projecting his or her visibility. The justification one often hears is that more people are reached in this way, yet there are often financial interests at stake for the celebrity leader and his or her organization, and these can either obscure or undermine the ends of outreach.

And so, whether leadership is expressed within the dynamics of celebrity or outright arrogance rooted in a sense of superiority, such leadership is artificial, unbiblical, organizationally unhealthy, inherently corrupting, and all to common in the Christian world (260-261).

It would be easy to continue on about this, but I think Hunter's summary of the problems with the cult of personality is sufficient at this point. Celebrity culture erodes the church's faithful witness to the gospel and destroys the community God intended the church to be.

Local churches need to free themselves of the self-imposed burden to be more like the church down the road or the mega-church on the other side of the country that everyone is talking about. It is time to turn our focus to ministering to the people God has called together in this particular time and place, and ministering to the community he has placed us in. For pastors, this means faithfully preaching the Word and shepherding God's people, their primary concern being to love, serve, and disciple them. For the parishioners, it means recognising that God has called the pastor that serves them to do this task in this time and in this place, and submitting to the authority God has granted that pastor. It means a wholehearted commitment to the local church they belong to, and a willingness (indeed, a desire) to participate in all parts of its ministry.

You learn from your heroes, and seek to use what you have learned from them to benefit others or to live more fully to the glory of God. But you copy idols, and seek to adopt their style and image for your own benefit, under the guise of benefiting others, and to live more for the glory of yourself. It is one thing for pastors to have heroes who they seek to learn from in order to edify and build up the people of God in their congregation. It is another when pastors seek to imitate their idols for entirely self-serving purposes. The danger of the latter is all to real in the culture of the Western church. And the same goes for parishioners – you can have heroes who have played a major role in deepening your knowledge of God and your understanding of Christ's Lordship over all of life. But you can also have idols who you cling on to in order to meet your demands for dynamic preaching or your hunger for self-help tips that end up turning you into a clone of the celebrity instead of someone transformed by the gospel.

We need to keep the church free of the simulated reality than can so easily be created when we let our guard down. We need to focus on the objective, tangible reality that God has placed us in. Let's abandon the cult of personality, the culture of celebrity, and concentrate on being faithful in our own contexts for the building up of the people of God and for the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Earlier today I found a nice used copy of John Stott's book on preaching, Between Two Worlds (which now, somewhat ironically, sits right beside Martyn Lloyd-Jones', Preaching and Preachers, on the bookshelf). I opened the book at random to page 69, where I found this:

It is difficult to imagine the world in the year A.D. 2000, by which time versatile micro-processors are likely to be as common as simple calculators are today. We should certainly welcome the fact that the silicon chip will transcend human brain-power, as the machine has transcended human muscle-power. Much less welcome will be the probable reduction of human contact as the new electronic network renders personal relationships ever less necessary. In such a dehumanized society the fellowship of the local church will become increasingly important, whose members meet one another, and talk and listen to one another in person rather than on screen. In this human context of mutual love the speaking and hearing of the Word of God is also likely to become more necessary for the preservation of our humanness, not less.

I guess he was off by a few years, as the social networking revolution came along a little later than 2000, but he made a pretty fair assessment back in 1982 when the book was published.

What do you make of his call to the local church in response?

On Monday, I walked into the bookstore and my eyes were immediately drawn to a new book on the shelf, Teaching the Faith, Forming the Faithful: A Biblical Vision for Education in the Church, by Gary A. Parrett and S. Steve Kang. I immediately grabbed it, scanned the back cover and the table of contents, and rather impulsively purchased it.

There is a lot to say about educational ministry in the local church. Most important, perhaps, is its declining influence. Quite a lot of churches have done away with extensive educational programs for any number of reasons, and these programs have been replaced by others aimed at things like "spiritual formation." Perhaps it is unconscious, but this fosters a sharp dichotomy between the two when, in fact, they go hand in hand. I do plan on returning to this topic more extensively here in the coming months, because it is one that I am especially passionate about. Also, as I'm considering seeking out a position in which I can be involved in that sort of ministry on a vocational level, I am frequently reflecting on it.

But for now, I just wanted to share this small portion from the first few pages of the book. Parrett and Kang begin their discussion by narrowing in on what they think should be the guiding motif or central part of a church's educational ministry. They use this brief story to illustrate:

Some years back, New Testament scholar Gordon Fee was sitting with other attendees at a workshop about the power of story. The speaker was Eugene Peterson, his faculty colleague. Peterson mentioned an episode in which his four-year-old grandson jumped onto his lap and demanded, "Grandpa, tell me a story, and put me in it." Upon hearing this account, Fee began to weep, overwhelmed by the fact that this is precisely what God has done for all of us. God is unfolding the great Story, and he has invited us to take our places in that story.

This great story into which God has invited us...is the grand drama of redemption and reconciliation. Growing in our understanding of the Story, and of our places in it, is critical for teaching and formation in the Church.

This echoes very closely something I quoted from Robert Webber a few months ago. The point of education in the context of the local church is not simply that members would download the necessary information they need to be saved, or to be able to explain various points of theology, or to answer the arguments of atheists (recall Jamie Smith's discussion on what education is all about). Instead, the goal of the church's education is one of formation, teaching those who belong to the church what it means to inhabit God's story and what it looks like to think and live rooted in that story. God has told us a story, and we are in it.

Tonight marks the official start of the Presbyterian Church in America's 37th General Assembly, although some committee work has been going on already. With yesterday's negative ruling on Overtures 5 and 10 to appoint study committees to examine the role of women in the ministry of the church, the internet has been buzzing with all kinds of discussion on the matter. The Twitterverse in particular has come alive with people on both sides of the issues carrying on short discussions on the matter.

One the related issues I've seen discussed is whether a body of male elders is sufficient to address the topic. Some have said that to honestly sit down and deliberate on the matter, women should be present. Others argue that the structure of the PCA as determined in the Book of Church Order does not permit that, and that insofar as the dictates of the BCO are biblical in regards to church government and that the denomination is faithfully enacting the biblical mandates, we should trust that God will bless the discussions and wisdom of the body of elders dealing with the matter at the level of the General Assembly.

Here again, as I am wont to do in the midst of such discussions, I want to find the middle ground between these two positions. There are a few things that need to be taken into consideration here, so let me see if I can flesh this out a bit.

1. As far as the procedure of the General Assembly goes, I side with those who maintain that we should follow the instructions of the BCO. The churches of the denomination have willingly bound themselves to operate according to the document, and should carry out any matter of business according to the rules prescribed. For the present issue, if a church or presbytery feels that there should be a procedural change in how the matter is dealt with, the BCO should not be cast aside because it is seen as an inhibition or obstacle. Instead, the issue of amending the BCO (should it be found to be unbiblical in its current state) must be dealt with first.
2. I fully agree that to have a fruitful discussion on the role of women's ministry in the church, women should be present. However, this discussion does not necessarily need to take place at the level of the General Assembly. In fact, it would probably be most beneficial for a local church to have the discussion with its own members, for in that way all the women of each church can be involved in determining how they can serve Christ's church most effectively. Additionally, to work out these things together as a local body would serve to strengthen the unity and bonds of that church.
3. Although no one has accused anyone directly of doing this, there is an underlying concern in regard to how much authority we give the BCO. While we must certainly respect the governing documents of the denomination, we must nonetheless continue to recognize that they are man-made documents and subject to error (and thus revision). And the PCA has not hesitated to do this, as many amendments have been made to it over the years. My concern here is similar to that of my first point—that we respect the document we have willingly submitted ourselves to by not tossing it aside when it appears to be an obstacle, yet holding in tension our acknowledgement that it is not infallible, and in some cases may not be biblical. It must then always be open to revision, should that be found to be the case.
4. Watching this discussion unfold, it has become apparent that this goes deeper than just the subject of women in ministry. Another topic I've seen emerging is regarding elders and their ability to faithfully deal with this matter. As I mentioned above, some feel that an honest and fruitful discussion of the role of women in ministry can only take place with women present. On the other side are those who assert that when elders are fulfilling their roles in fidelity to the Scriptural mandates for eldership, God will grant them clarity and wisdom to come to biblical conclusions on the matter. Here I find myself in agreement with the latter. But the reply of the former side is worth considering as well—what happens if the elders who are discussing the matter are not elders in a way consistent with the biblical model (on both personal and ecclesiastical levels)? Maybe that is something to chew on.
5. Related to this is the question of how much authority we vest in the eldership of the church. In regard to the last point, there is a limit to how much we can say, and we must concede that oft-quoted dictum that only God truly knows a man's (and a denomination's) heart. With that, we must recognize that God has ordained leadership for His church to which He has given authority to rule the body. While we, as heirs to the Reformed tradition, do not grant our leaders unrestrained authority, we do nonetheless submit ourselves to the authority of the men ordained to lead the church. In the end, there are two extremes we want to avoid: first, the antagonism toward authority that is so characteristic of our culture; and second, allowing the leadership of our churches to rule with unchecked authority. I do believe that when our elders exercise authority within the bounds of legitimacy, we ought to submit to that.

I trust that this is sufficiently unclear and scattered. As with my post yesterday, I'm only attempting to think through some of the issues as they come up. In that regard, I'd greatly appreciate any thoughts you would have on the matter.