Recent content by hedrick

The claim was the people wanted to remove the creeds. From what do you believe they want to remove them? Using them in a service has always been optional, since there aren't mandated orders of service. When I was in a Merthodist church the 1960s they weren't normally said. The article by Jeremy...

remove the creeds from what? Wesley already removed them from the Articles of Religion. If you compare the Anglican and Methodist versions, you'll see that the second "Of the Creeds" is not present in the Methodist version.

It doesn't appear that all Africans disagree with the new direction. With votes of 75% or 80%, there were clearly African delegations voting for the changes. There's a split among Africans. Some will leave. Some are OK with the new direction. This surprised me. I expected the votes to be close...

I’m not going to say much here, because CF rules don’t permit discussion of most of it, but please don’t confuse objections to penal satisfaction with rejection of the atonement.

You can start by not lumping those together.

Modern Christians have forgotten the context of the NT. For Jesus, Paul, and the authors of the NT books, the world reflects supernatural forces. You can make a good case that Jesus' main focus was on the battle between good and evil forces. His coming was the first shot in the final battle...

There's a basic disconnect about the nature of the End. Most of the talk about judgements comes from a Christianity that is about individual salvation. But in both Jesus' and Paul's rare descriptions of the End, it's the final defeat of God's enemies and establishment of Christ's rule. (Like...

Unlike other US Protestant churches, the UMC is in principle a single international denomination. Under the new system, there will be a central organization with some central policies, but each region will be at least partly autonomous. Hence countries will be able to have qualification for...

The context was the Canaanite woman, who Jesus originally turned down. A number of interpreters say that her faith caused Jesus to reject the traditional Jewish objection to Canaanites. Hence she doesn't say Jesus was a bigot, but that Jesus gave up bigotry.

That's interesting timing, since the UMC just overturned the bans against gay clergy and marriage today. Central conferences (i.e. areas outside the US) can override the change, and presumably will.

I’ve seen those stats, too. Two things. First, for places like Pew, mainline means anyone who doesn’t self identify as Evangelical. Second, it’s personal identification, not church membership or attendance there’s no sign that mainline attendance is recovering, as far as I know. Not only have...

The weird thing is that this wasn’t actually any judgement on Biden's memory, just how a jury would likely see him. No ststement like, he didn’t remember as much as we would expect.

What do you mean by politically active? I’ve never heard discussion of political candidates or politics of any kind from the pulpit. We have groups doing various service projects. Our choir does concerts and visits other churches for worship. I’m not quite sure how politics would fit in. There...

Among other things, I wonder whether our tradition of not being political in sermons is hurting us. We don’t need to endorse candidates from the pulpit, but there are things where the Christian faith really does have implications I will say that our church, although smaller than it used to be...

The usual concern about this is how Christ is then the savior. Furthermore, it can’t be discussed here.