August 2012

Brother Phil Jensen was here in Bloomington with his wife, Helen, about nineteen years ago. Phil preached and he and Helen were our houseguests. The conversation over three or four days was wonderful and Mary Lee and I learned much that we've copied in our work here in Bloomington.

Over the years we have been grateful for the work Phil, his brother Peter, and the men and women of St. Mattias have been doing in Sydney. More recently Peter has been appointed the Archbishop of the Sydney archdiocese. Not surprisingly he and his brother have been under almost ceaseless attack by the media.

If you keep your eye on the ball, you know sex is the gap in the wall of the church's service to Her Lord as the pillar and foundation of His Truth. And to God's glory, here is where we find Peter, Phil, Helen, and the men and women of Matthias Media standing, particularly. Principially. Which is to say they confess their Christian faith in the aggressively pagan city where God has called them.

As part of that confession, the Anglican archdiocese is in the process of adopting a prayer book which will keep intact the sexual specificity of Christian marriage ceremonies...

This post is deleted on the advice of my better half. She's wise. 

I am very encouraged that Wheaton College joined the Roman Catholics in filing suit against President Obama's nationalized health care some weeks ago. And now, two other Evangelical colleges are doing so also: Grace College and Seminary here in Indiana and BIOLA out in Los Angeles.

So here's where our brother Tim Keller is tonight. Likely he knows nothing of what he's dealing with--the PC(USA)'s a whole 'nother beast.

But come to think of it, why doesn't he simply move on over...

Woman pastors and deacons and elders and bishops (err, executive presbyters) and all that. It might be a good fit. In the PC(USA) he'd be on the side of the angels. He'd be a conservative among liberals rather than a liberal among conservatives.

When I was serving my former churches (a yoked parish of two congregations) an hour north of Madison, Wisconsin, a young man working toward a graduate degree at UW(Madison) served the congregations as a pastoral intern and we became close. As time went by, he decided to enter the ministry and to train at the Christian Reformed Church's Calvin Seminary.

Even then, back in the eighties, Calvin Seminary was going down the tube. Turning our backs on God's Order of Creation, Adam first then Eve, was all the rage and Calvin was drowning in this rebellion. Dutchmen were reaping the fruit of their diffident-to-cold relationships with their wives and children and, having sown the wind, they were about to reap the whirlwind.

Ortega y Gasset pointed out that true thinking begins with exaggeration, you understand.

Another pastor in the area was on the board of Calvin and he told us the school was going liberal and it was only a matter of time before the Christian Reformed Church would follow...