Two highlights from the Cafe on Facebook this week, including the fast action on this morning’s news from Nigeria and a young person answering the question of how to get young people in the church.
Saddleback Church’s pastor is apparently chummy with Santa – they’re both keeping naughty-and-nice lists.
Perhaps it’s no mere coincidence that on a week in which preachers were sweating over how to make sense of the Holy Spirit as the Third Person of the Trinity out of their pulpits – a task that seems to turn theology into an unhappy sausage-making exercise – The Guardian asked a few theologians how to define the substance of their work.
Archbishop Nicholas Okoh, the Primate of the Church of Nigeria, has called for his country to pull out of the United Nations because the organization opposes bias against gays and lesbians. Can we expect Rowan Williams to express displeasure as quickly as he condemned the election of a lesbian bishop in the Episcopal Church? No, because that deadline has already passed.
“Let us give thanks for this joyful saint of God,” Olympia’s Bishop Rickel said of Knirk, “who brightened our lives and led us in new and faithful ways in this church.”
Updated with video. Resist the urge to “liven things up” with percussion; music that works well is perfectly alive. What it wants is support and accent, not a personality transplant. Learn to listen thoughtfully, a skill infinitely more valuable than hand speed and dexterity. Give me the percussionist with hands of clay and ears of gold any day.
I have already said that God reared this fabric of the world out of nothing, by his word, wisdom, or power; and it is evident that your sages of old were of the same opinion, that the Ao’yos, that is, the Word, or the Wisdom, was the Maker of the universe, for Zeno determines the Logos to be the creator and adjuster of everything in nature.