6 LETTERS AND TWEETS
Letters
Time to talk
and tweets
Recently I read that some churches are trying‘ Chat Back services’. The idea is that you limit the length of the service to 30 or 40 minutes then you invite the congregation to give constructive feedback … I have found this to have been welcomed especially by small congregations who have no house groups and often do not speak to each other after the service about how God has touched them and so on. Also these services have led to members of the congregation giving testimonies such as how God supported someone when their husband came back from hospital for his last six weeks of life, or how God had been with a lady during her 28 years of widowhood. I would love to hear of anyone else’ s experiences of Chat Back services.
Trevor Bell, Radstock
With respect to Susan Thorne [ Preach Autumn 2016, page 6 ], the translation of 2 Corinthians 5:17 in the NIV, to which she objects, is perfectly legitimate. The Greek is simply‘ If anyone in Christ new creation.’ This can be interpreted in different ways, as a comparison of different English translations demonstrates. This is a good illustration of the fact that all translation involves interpretation, as no two languages coincide exactly, either in vocabulary or construction.
I guess we all have our favourite Bible version, but need to recognise that, to get the full flavour of the original text, we should consult other versions, too.
David Sharp, Bristol
How to preach about creation?
I [ often ] wonder what caused God‘ to create the heavens and the earth’. [ I can’ t ] help but wonder how God started it all. Surely he must have had something definite in mind – because it all began to take shape. God ' s universe was not created by accident. It was, and remains to this day, God’ s own work. Christians have always known that – and have sung that belief in worship for hundreds of years. In the world of the 21st century there are so many competing concepts about how all God’ s male and female creatures must live. How, where and when does a preacher face up to this? In more than sixty years of early morning prayer and meditation I am by no means sure. Are you?
Malcolm Pettit, via email
Salvation through other religions
Bill Bartle expresses his view that faith in Jesus is the only way of salvation, to the exclusion of all other religions [ Preach Winter 2016, page 7 ]. In support of this, he quotes words of John Wesley and Cecil Alexander, as though they were Methodism’ s final word on the subject. I don’ t think this is the case.
Some people described the words of one of my hymns as heretical, because of a more sympathetic attitude to other faiths. However, the Faith and Order Committee came to my defence, quoting from John Wesley ' s sermon,‘ On living without God’. Wesley said,
WRITE TO US
‘ Nor do I conceive that any man living has a right to sentence all the heathen and Mahometan world to damnation. It is better to leave them to him that made them, and who is“ the Father of the spirits of all flesh” who is the God of the Heathens as well as the Christians, and who hateth nothing that he hath made.’
… I don’ t expect any of this will make Bill change his view, but it would be something if he could concede that there is more than one valid view. In the same issue of Preach, David Jackson suggested that conservative evangelicals are more tolerant of other viewpoints than their liberal counterparts. That certainly has not been my experience. The Methodist Church is supposed to be a broad church. What do other people think?
Harold Stuteley, via email
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