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    On Why I Still Need You To Defend Me

    This post is in answer to the post published on the Scroll on May 5th and entitled "NO DEFENCE NEEDED!" Hannah Swithinbank has a PhD in ancient history, a diploma in professional writing, and an inherited tendency to read anything that comes to hand, including the back of the cereal box at breakfast. She is currently working as a research assistant, which goes well with her overdeveloped sense of curiosity. The following column is her response to Steve Holmes' [more]

    Is Egalitarianism on a Slippery Slope?

    I don’t know about you, but I have evangelical friends with all kinds of different views on gender. Come to think of it, I have evangelical friends with all kinds of different views on a whole host of topics: child baptism or believers baptism, just war or pacifism, Arminianism or Calvinism, and, yes, even egalitarianism or some form of gender hierarchism (often called, somewhat misleadingly, “complementarianism”). Since evangelicalism has no official magisterium, such diversity is [more]

    No Defence Needed !

    Why I Can No Longer Defend the Ministry of Women in the Church Steve Holmes is a Baptist minister, currently teaching theology at St Mary’s College, St Andrews, Scotland. He blogs about theology and culture from an Evangelical perspective at Shored Fragments.  The following column is posted with permission from his blog.   I have defended the ministry of women in the church in public for a while now, including on my blog. I don’t think I can do it any longer. Not [more]

    It Works Both Ways

    I would suggest that most, if not all, women would have been the subject of ridicule in some form or other simply because of their gender. Sometimes it is felt even without words - the scorn, belittling behaviour and condescension. Then of course we know of the way many men talk of their mothers, wives, sisters and women in general when with their friends; berating women as being silly, emotional, talkative (fill in the dots). BUT....what [more]

    Wrestling with Young Marriage

    The blogosphere is buzzing with backlash about recent articles that are advocating for "young marriage." Apparently, the millennials (18-29 yr olds), my generation, have a low marriage rate at 21 percent in the U.S., compared to other generations during this age range. I posed a question on my Facebook status to my unmarried or later-married friends: Why are YOU delaying marriage? (Besides not knowing anyone you WANT to marry.) I chose to get married instead of waiting, [more]

    Small Steps to Change

    This photo is of an apple.......no question about that. Now it's cut we can see inside but before then we had no idea what was inside. So it is with people.....we can assume things without knowing 'what's inside'. There's an old saying 'don't judge a book by its cover', and yet it happens all the time. We see someone and make assumptions. Hopefully it remains in our mind and we control ourselves from making statements [more]

    Is Real Faith Getting Skewed Today

    There are a number of ways that godly faith in the God who is GOD, the REAL Messiah and the ONLY HOLY Spirit can get skewed is when humans step in to contain and control. I believe that what I’m going to say needs to be said and spread. I’d like to see it defined concisely and plainly. But for now I’d like us to just define it well. At this time in my church, I’m [more]

    On Modesty and Male Privilege

    The new issue of Mutuality, themed “Rape and Sexual Violence,” is hot off the press. It includes the following piece by Christian blogger Luke Harms (lukelivingthetension.blogspot.com). Harms critiques what he sees as a culture of rape present in the church, which holds that women are responsible for the sexual violence committed against them. We invite you to join in this important conversation. Recently, a fellow blogger wrote a great piece about the problems with modesty rules [more]

    True Story

    That same day two of them were walking to the village of Emmaus, about seven miles out of Jerusalem. They were deep in conversation, going over all these things that had happened. In the middle of their talk and questions, Jesus came up and walked along with them, but they were not able to recognise who he was. He asked "What's this you are discussing so intently as you walk along ?"  They just stood there, long [more]

    In Memory of Her

    In Mark 14 and Matthew 26 we read of Jesus being anointed by a woman while visiting the home of a man called Simon the Leper. The story ends with Jesus' words, "Truly I tell you, wherever this gospel is preached throughout the world, what she has done will also be told, in memory of her" (Matthew 26:13, TNIV). We should take Jesus' comment seriously and thus look for ways to remember and honor this woman. [more]

Willing to Help

You know, of course, the story of The Little Red Hen and her friends—a duck, a cat and a pig (or a goose and dog and whatever animal your favorite version has). The Little Red Hen found a grain of wheat and, deciding to plant it, she asked who would help. “Not I,” said the [...]

The Whole Gospel for the Whole World

How many of us come from traditions where we have been told that women cannot serve in positions of leadership because Jesus was male? And, as denominations consider where women may hold positions of service, inevitably the gender of Jesus becomes a consideration. Previous generations of Christians have also asked important questions about the gender [...]

CBE “Down Under”

We arrived at the Jasper Hotel in downtown Melbourne at midday on Friday and found that already the organising committee were hard at work preparing to receive those who would come early to register for the first CBE conference in Australia. This was the culmination of a year’s hard work by a dedicated group who [...]

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Poor Christians

I have worked in Legal Aid offices for some 15 years. I can tell you that many poor are not the kind of people most of us associate with. They tend to be undereducated, unorganized, and often buried under their financial burdens. Many come from longer generations of poverty. Many are weak and do not [...]

Note from the Admin. Team

Wondering how many of our Scroll readers have used the Arise link on the r/h side of the home page. Rob has enabled us to view this weekly column with the click of a button and the articles are always worth a look. If you haven’t done so before…click on the icon and enjoy!

Serving or Subservience

Sometimes we hear Christian jargon batted about so much that we lose our grasp of what is meant by the terms. Because words like servant and servanthood have been used so much, I’ve chosen to use different ones. If one has a spirit of helpfulness, it is easy to slip from freedom in serving into [...]

Three Arguments

One of the instruments God used to convince me that holding office in the church ought to follow calling rather than gender was an article written when I was four years old. I’m grateful for the pastor who gave me a copy of John Jefferson Davis’s insightful piece entitled, “Ordination of Women Reconsidered: Discussion of [...]