pastoral care
Slow change can be good change
Helen Thorne-Allenson
Corporate change takes time. Whether we’re thinking of the serious challenges facing our whole constituency or the more localised struggles of the church of which we are part, we all have to wrestle with the fact that community progress towards Christlikeness comes in the form of gradually growing fruit.
If we’re honest, many of us don’t like that fact. Often, we’d quite like it if God could just change things now. We may never say it, but we can act as if progressive sanctification isn’t one of God’s better ideas.
everyday evangelism
How you can be a pastoral evangelist
Glen Scrivener
Picture an evangelist. What springs to mind? Perhaps a motormouth with the enthusiasm of a labrador pup, the skin of a rhinoceros’s hide, the social skills of a boisterous toddler, and the patter of a ‘Phones 4 U’ sales rep.
Now picture someone you’d describe as ‘really pastoral.’ What are the images now? Surely it’s endless cups of tea, frowns of concern, head cocked permanently to a 45 degree angle. ‘Aw bless’ they say with an empathy perilously close to patronising.
history
Learning gentleness
Michael Haykin
In recent days, I have been again impressed with the significance of a name that was well-known among British evangelicals in the last decades of the long 18th century, but today is mostly forgotten, namely, that of Abraham Booth (1734–1806).
The son of a Nottinghamshire farmer, Booth became a stocking weaver in his teens. He had no formal schooling and was compelled to teach himself to read and to write. His early Christian experience was spent among the General, i.e. Arminian, Baptists, but by 1768 he had undergone a complete revolution in his soteriology and had become a Calvinist. Not long after this embrace of Calvinism he wrote The Reign of Grace, from Its Rise to Its Consummation (1768), which the 20th-century Scottish theologian John Murray regarded as ‘one of the most eloquent and moving expositions of the subject of divine grace in the English language’.
The unseen cost of boarding school: pain, healing, and the gospel
There is a malady which affects the souls, bodies and lives of many men and women, but is barely spoken about. Few understand it, while many subconsciously deny it, whether through ignorance or fear or shame. It may affect someone you know personally, and almost certainly affects people who have had an influence on your life.
What is it and how is it caused?
This malady is called 'Boarding School Syndrome' (BSS). I call it 'Prep School Pain'.