Archive for June, 2008

Packer on Williams

by Hugh on June 28, 2008 in Faith with 2 Comments

So it seems my post reporting on Jim Packer’s comments while speaking at Holy Trinity Eastbourne have caused a little bit of a stir in the virtual and real-life press. Few people were interested with Packer’s insightful analysis of Liberalism, or his thoughts on the future of the Anglican church, but on one sentence – “I would say with great respect Archbishop, I believe that the way of wisdom is for you to resign.”

The story has been mentioned by Martin Beckford in the Telegraph, Ruth Gledhill in The Times and on the Church Times Blog. It’s also been discussed on Peter Kirk’s blog. Now personally I don’t think it’s a huge story by any means, but it just goes to show how the media has changed, I can blog something which otherwise would go unheard outside its original audience, isn’t technology good?!

You can listen to Dr. Packer’s talk yourself, and the question time.

Wallace Benn on GAFCON and Lambeth

by Hugh on June 26, 2008 in Faith with No comments

Wallace Benn How he’s been enjoying GAFCON and why he won’t be going to Lambeth…

Video on SydneyAnglicans

There’s loads of other videos there, little snippets from the conference including Vaughan Roberts.

My Best Mate’s Wedding

by Hugh on June 26, 2008 in Life with 1 Comment

Hugh and Adam

So I won’t be at the rest of EMA, today I’m heading to Haverfordwest for Adam’s wedding, which is a stupid amount of miles from here, really people should get married at Oxford Services or somewhere easy to get to… Best Man’s “speech” has come together, sort-of… my inspiration has come from ‘Have I Got News for You’, hopefully there’ll be no libel cases afterwards!

As you can see there was a day when I had lovely blonde hair, and looked slim standing next to Adam. Mmm custard creams!

EMA 2008 (Day 1)

by Hugh on June 25, 2008 in Faith with No comments

EMA 2008

Today I went to the first day of a 3 day conference called the Evangelical Ministry Assembly, it’s run by the Proclamation Trust at St. Helen’s Bishopsgate in central London. This is the 25th year of the conference and the theme this year is Preaching – “Him We Proclaim”.

Christopher Ash – Why Preaching?

He gave a defence of preaching, stating that preaching works because it transcends cultural differences – although we can add our own constraints to it. He spoke about the authority of the preacher (a borrowed authority) and the ‘prophetic’ nature of preaching.

Simon Austen – Ephesians

This was an expostion of Ephesians 1 and 2 focusing on the themes of identity and what it means to be Church.

Steve Timmis – ‘Getting in touch with God’s global mission’

This was my choice from the seminar stream, ended up sitting next to the Big Moon Man. Steve started with two underlying principles: Theology – Who is God? and Ecclesiology – What is the Church? He took us to Revelation 4 & 5, revealing that God’s mission is all about his Son. Then to Ephesians, seeing that Christ rules his Church (his body) and that it is called to live as “communities of light”.

He then went through ’10 Top Tips’ answering questions along the way, here are those tips;

Be ravished by Christ
Preach, teach and gossip Christ
Extend your boundaries of application beyond “read Bible, pray more, tell someone about Jesus”
Plant churches among unreached people groups around you
Get your church involved in another part of the world
Work from a realistic, achievable activity to a transforming one
Work from realistic giving, to sacrificial giving
Give away your best
Recognise mutual benefit
Keep it about God’s Kingdom, not yours

John Woodhouse – Colossians

Whoever does the last session has a tough job, it’s pretty stuffy, a lot of people are tired from the day plus travelling to get there… I’ll be gracious and say I was too tired to concentrate.

Packer in Eastbourne

by Hugh on June 25, 2008 in Faith with 5 Comments

Last night I went to Holy Trinity Eastbourne to listen to Dr. J.I. Packer speak, the title of his talk was ‘Lessons to be learned from the Canadian Church Experience’. This comes in response to the rumblings in the Anglican church and the personal experiences of Jim Packer and other Canadian ministers in dealing with their liberal Bishop, Michael Ingham. 3 months ago I blogged about these issues, Packers De-licensing and his response to Ingham.

With that background in mind Packer set out to define 4 terms involved in the current debates:

Orthodoxy - Packer sees this as a synonym for Evangelicalism which focuses on the teaching of the Bible (because it acknowledges the authority of the Bible) and on the message of the Gospel (being based on Faith and Repentance).
Anglicanism - He highlighted two different views, those who saw Anglicanism as being bound up with historical practises (defined by traditions) and those who saw it as being defined by principles, as contained in the Creeds, Prayer Book, 39 Articles etc. Packer made it clear he stood in the 2nd camp – Anglicanism is based on principles. He also stated that he believed Anglicanism is “the richest version of Evangelicalism that the world has seen”.
Liberalism - Dr. Packer used 4 S’s to define liberalism…
- Subordinates Scripture to the culture and individualistic Christian experience
- Sanctifies the Secular
- Scales down the Supernatural
- Sweeps away Biblical Standards
Homosexuality - He basically made it clear that he was talking about the practise and not the temptation. Packer gave examples of temptations and how we should not yield to them and included homosexual temptations in this – we should not yield to the temptations because the actions are defined as sin by the Bible.

Dr. Packer went on to give the basic facts about his situation in the Canadian church, the history, how it happened and how things stand now. He highlighted the changing situation, that Bishops are no longer just theoretical heretics but are heretics in what the practise. He referred to Acts 27:27, Paul in the storm and used this as a metaphor to speak of being faithful through the storm in the hope of reaching land.

Big Jim then addressed 4 questions in conclusion…

What is God doing to the Anglican Communion?
- Purging of liberalism
- Preparing faithful Anglicans for counter-cultural and enterprising mission
What is the pattern of ‘alternative oversight’ doing to the Anglican Communion?
- Drawing together a fellowship of the Orthodox
- Parallel jurisdictions are disrupting the traditional diocese/province model
What are those who have ‘realigned’ to do now?
- Pioneer faithful Christian outreach
- Renewal of teaching, mission and discipleship
How should English Evangelicals react?
- Watch and Pray

The question-time that followed came up with the usual questions from slightly ‘un-balanced’ folk, and a few good ones – “Dr. Packer, if you could have 5 minutes with the Archbishop of Cantebury, what would you say?”…

Packer stated that Rowan Williams’ views about homosexuality (documented before becoming A of C, and not changed since) mean that he is not qualified to lead the Anglican Communion and enforce rules layed down at Lambeth in 1998. Big Jim was clear, “Rowan Williams should resign”!

It so happened that earlier in the day I’d done some computer training with the Holy Trinity office staff, so as payment I got 3 free Packer books – God has Spoken, 18 Words, and Growing in Christ… good times.

Live from GAFCON

by Hugh on June 22, 2008 in Faith with No comments

The future of the Anglican church is uncertain, but it seems inevitable that in the coming months things will start to move… the Lambeth Conference happens next month, but happening right now is GAFCON – Global Anglican Future Conference! This is essentially an ‘alternative Lambeth’, for 300 orthodox Bishops from the Anglican Communion.

Colin Slee (Liberal, gay-agenda-pushing, Very Revd.) described GAFCON on Radio 4 as a “a very small group” – Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, Southern Cone, Sydney, plus others – this represents at least half of the Anglicans worldwide.

Wallace Benn, Bishop of Lewes, and Michael Nazir-Ali, Bishop of Rochester are members of the GAFCON leadership team and are there in Jerusalem now. You can watch events unfolding at GAFCON as they are streamed live, see below…

In other news Wallace Benn has been very rude to me, he said in reference to my lovely girlfriend, and I quote – “It’s obvious that God must have given her to you… there’s no way you could have got her yourself!”

Palmer, Cunningham and Carson on New Word Alive

by Hugh on June 19, 2008 in Faith with No comments

Final day interview with Hugh Palmer, Richard Cunningham and Don Carson talking about New Word Alive and the future…

Click here to download as an MP3

Isn’t the Bible full of errors?

by Hugh on June 17, 2008 in Faith, Talks with 1 Comment

Here’s a little outline from the talk I did at Medical Christian Union at Sussex 2 weeks ago…

Isn’t the Bible full of errors?

The short answer is NO!

If the Bible is God’s word as it says (2 Tim 3:16), then it will be true.

That is a massive circular argument, BUT it has to be – just like the American Constitution!

God’s word must be ‘self-authenticating’, but we can look to other evidence to expand this circle of argument.

Expanding the Circle

Internal

One message from Genesis to Revelation
Harmony between 40 authors, over 1500 years, in 3 languages
Prophecies fulfilled, in detail!
Factual, eye-witness, reportage style of writing

External

Secular historians like Josephus and Tacitus
Christian historians like Tertullian and Justin Martyr
Dead Sea Scrolls (copy of Isaiah dated to 150 BC)
Archaeology (Ebla archive proves existence of Hittites)

Textual Errors?

Eyewitnesses still around when words are committed to paper
Huge number of copies to compare with one another for errors (see manuscript table)

Factual Errors?

Written when eyewitnesses were around, starting around 15 years after Christ
Early Church and historians have no problems with so-called errors
Eyewitnesses are named (Mark 15:21), 500 at one time (1 Cor 15)
Secular history is not 100% accurate – see Hittite example where the Bible was right from the start
If the Bible is fabricated then it’s a bad job – women witness the resurrection, first church leader denies Jesus, and the movement is based on a crucified leader

Social / Cultural Errors?

Different cultures are offended by different bits of the Bible (see Mark 14, example from Tim Keller – Reason for God)
We are arrogant when we assume our culture is more progressive than others!
The Bible should contradict us (see Keller, ‘Stepford God’)

4 Main Points of Christianity

We shouldn’t ignore possible errors in the Bible, we need to think, discuss and research.

But we shouldn’t use possible errors to dismiss the Bible completely or to avoid addressing the central claims of the Bible…

We were created by God, for God
We’ve been happy to live in God’s creation, but without God, we deserve to die because of this rebellion
Jesus Christ, God-as-man, died. His death acts as a substitution, he dies where we should have died.
When we face God in judgement, we can take the punishment for our rebellion on ourselves or trust in Jesus that his death in our place restores a right relationship with God.

There was about 15 people at the MCU meeting – I was going to talk about how we as Christians ‘make our own errors’ in the Bible by poor theology or poor handling of the Bible, and how we can best respond to non-Christians. However, there were I think 4 non-Christian guests, so I went more evangelistic, there was good discussion afterwards, although this inevitably focused more on Genesis 1 than on those 4 central claims of the Bible. But it was a good discussion anyway!

Packer in the UK

by Hugh on June 17, 2008 in Faith with No comments

Later this month Jim Packer will be in the UK, speaking at various places on his experiences with the Church of Canada and the future of Global Anglicanism. If you’re down near Sussex then why not come along to Holy Trinity Eastbourne at 7.45pm on the 24th June. The title of his address is �Lessons to be learned from the Canadian Church Experience�.

If you’re in London, then he’ll be speaking on the 1st July at All Souls, you need to get in touch with All Souls to book in for that event. I’m sure he’ll be doing some other talks round the country, leave a comment if you know where and when.

Dwell London

by Hugh on June 17, 2008 in Faith with 2 Comments

There’s only 150 tickets left for the Dwell Conference happening on Saturday 12th July in Central London. It’s for anyone interested in church planting in whatever form that takes. Speakers are Mark Driscoll, Scott Thomas and Steve Timmis, and it will cost you the bargain price of �21. To hear what kind of things go on you can listen to talks from Dwell New York conference from the Acts29 Network. Sign up for your tickets now from the Good Book Company!