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The secret life of an evangelical

Angry and dangerous

THE SECRET LIFE OF AN EVANGELICAL
By Beth Dickson
Partnership. 91 pages. £4.99
ISBN 0 900128 33 X

The title promised encouragement and I picked it up eagerly. It turned out to be a deeply disappointing, sad and unhelpful book.

Beth Dickson has been nurtured among the Scottish Brethren but what she has to say impinges on evangelicals generally. Her anger and resentment are palpable as she expresses her struggles with the gender issue, the felt lack of support from the church when facing family crises, and the difficulties of her prayer life. I am sure her motivation is to help others who struggle with the same problems, but the conclusions she draws seem to me to be dangerous.

Our great strength as evangelicals going through times of doubt and loneliness is the rock of Scripture beneath our feet. I am sure the author believes this too, but she does not turn us to it to give us guidelines and reasons for such experiences. As each problem unfolds, it appears that the Roman Catholics whom she has got to know in her job as an English teacher in a Catholic school are the ones who give her the answers, sometimes through music, but more importantly through St. Ignatius Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises for Daily Life. Many of us have met good and helpful friends from the Roman Catholic Church and recognised them as true children of God, despite our theological differences. But these differences are still significant. As evangelicals we stand on the Bible alone.

For instance, in this book, the gender issue is not brought under the scrutiny of what the Bible says, although the author does quote Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch! But for those of us who do not find this issue easy, we have Scripture to guide us. As Claire Smith says in the August 2005 issue of The Briefing: ‘A woman’s role in the church should be decided through careful study of the Scriptures… As Christians we are to dance to (God’s) tune, not that of our culture’.

And there we have it. This book seems to me to be trying to fit evangelicalism into modern culture when, in fact, the two are going in opposite directions. In her introduction Beth Dickson says: ‘I wonder if I haven’t been looking for God more deeply’. That is always good — and he is to be found in his Word.

Margaret Seccombe,
wife of retired pastor and living in Bodenham, Herefordshire