Religion universal

"The universality of religion on this planet is not due to men and women being seekers after God... Rather it is because they will not have God, yet need something to take God's place."

p33, Foundations of the Christian Faith by James Montgomery Boice. IVP 1986

Things I didn't know: No 14

The last player to move directly between Liverpool FC and Man Utd was Phil Chisnall in 1964. Stories today suggest Pepe Reina - who is only 28! - is a Man Utd January transfer target.

HT: mirrorfootball.co.uk

My Top 5 Abba songs

The Name Of The Game
Knowing Me, Knowing You
Chiquitita
The Winner Takes It All
Lay All Your Love On Me

Christian anarchy

"Worldly power is beguiling and attractive and in each generation its temptations need to be faced and resisted anew. The temptation is to seek power ostensibly in order to do good things. Yet the fallenness of the powers needs to be taken into account. Those who seek to bend the powers to their will eventually find themselves being bent. In this sense, Christians are 'anarchists'; they are suspicious of worldly power and do not believe that God's redeeming purposes are achieved by seeking to control the system of domination and use it for supposedly good ends. The goodness of the ends becomes lost in the manner of their achievement. In keeping with Jesus' mission, the church as church is to remain detached from partisan power struggles and to concern itself with truth rather than propaganda."

p241, Free Church, Free State by Nigel D. Wright. Paternoster Press 2005

Guess who's back?

Shedy's back.

Here's the quote I wanted to share so badly that I couldn't resist re-starting the original Shed blog:

"We live in the shadow of the structural distortions in the post-apostolic Church and the subsequent abandonment of such structures in the Reformation. The Reformation led to a healthy reformation of theology but an unwitting, tragic deformation of structure in the biblical model of the Church. In the iconoclasm of the Reformation, the dismantling of monasticism destroyed more than a system, it destroyed the only extant channelling mechanism for initiating and promoting mission. Whatever our misgivings about the monastic system, we must still recognize that for 1,500 years monasticism in its various forms was virtually the only initiator for mission advance."

p154, The Church Is Bigger Than You Think by Patrick Johnstone. Christian Focus Publications 1998 (2005 reprint edition)

Reflections on this and other reading will follow. But, oh my! How much has the blog world changed in three years?