Northern Souls

Elections and History So apparently the election we just had in the UK was going to be like the early 80s when the left-wing Labour leader Michael Foot took on Margaret Thatcher and was duly trounced - do you remember reading that in the papers a few weeks ago? The relevant piece of history told you all you needed to know. Corbyn, who was, if anything more left wing and more generally unpopular didn’t stand a chance and Theresa May would roll him and the Labour party over.

If you didn’t notice, things didn’t quite work out like that! But it’s a powerful illustration of the dangers of using history and applying it to the present day.
Evangelicals and History Increasingly however, I see evangelicals who are (rightly in many ways) excited by church history at least possibly falling into the same trap.
For example, the state of the church is paralleled with the time before Whitefield and Wesley. There are some shocking statistics apparently about attendance at communion at St Paul’s on Ea…

My magazine article for July.

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He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death' or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away. (Rev 21:4 NIV)

The UK has had a hard month. Terrorist attacks with many killed and then an horrific fire destroying a tower block with many lost. One of the most natural and common responses has been to wonder how we can live in such a broken world, with such tragedy and terror in it. The singer Katy Perry captured this after the Manchester bombing when she wrote:

'Praying for everyone at @arianagrande's show... Broken hearted for the families tonight. Broken hearted for Ari. Broken hearted for the state of this world.'
We must pray for those who have lost loved ones, for the emergency and security services and for our leaders. We must pray for our broken world.

If we’re Christians, we’ve always known it’s broken, because that’s what sin did to the world. Our experience in the UK in the last …

In the final few blogs in this series, I want to address briefly some of the church and pastoral implications of God’s view of same-sex relationships. Books have been written on these subjects, so this will only be an overview, but I hope useful all the same.
So far we have seen that God reveals his will to us in his word the Bible. If we’re Christians we accept that God is always right and always in charge, so we submit to him, which means submitting to the teaching of the Bible (see Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4). We have then surveyed the teaching of the Old and New Testaments to see a consistent picture that God defines same-sex relationships as sinful and thus (like other sin) persisting in sin without repentance will lead to exclusion from the kingdom of God, i.e. someone who does not repent cannot claim to be a Christian or have the hope of eternal life (Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8).
In this blog, I want to address briefly how this view brings us into conflict with our soci…