“This is all about a simple value, building a society where we reward those who do the right thing. Last year we saw the Prime Minister betraying those who had done the right thing, when he boasted that “not one British saver has lost a single penny” in the banking crisis. He should try telling that to investors in the PMS who worked hard, saved hard – and then saw their money disappear. Are they not British, did they not lose money, why has he forgotten about them? So I give you this pledge. “If I am Prime Minister, a Conservative and Unionist Government will work with the Executive here to ensure a just and fair resolution of the PMS. It’s about saying we’re all in this together, you’ve done the right thing, and you deserve for that to be recognized and rewarded.”

When I met with the Secretary of State following the election, and just before the opening night of our General Assembly, Mr Paterson invited me to quote the Prime Minister’s commitment to the General Assembly and to assure the Presbyterian community that the new Government remained stedfast in its determination to deliver on this pledge.

This pledge not only sets out the goal - a just and fair settlement - but also the benchmark for measuring its achievement - that PMS savers, like other British savers, should not lose one penny.

I was impressed by the Secretary of State’s straightforward approach when I met him, and I fully expect the Government to deliver on its pledge. Any solution which would leave all savers without early access to 100% of their savings would fail the litmus test of justice. It would perpetuate the cruel anxiety and uncertainty with which savers, many of them elderly, have lived for the past 21 months.

The failure of the PMS was a local manifestation of a national and global phenomenon. It occurred during the awful autumn and winter of 2008-09 and it was, in part, caused by the actions the Government took to respond to other financial failures. PMS savers are not seeking exceptional treatment, but simply the removal of the discriminatory treatment which has rescued all other British savers but which has left them bereft of their savings.

Precisely how all savers will be given access to their savings is a matter for the Government. We wish the members of the Ministerial Working Group well as, over the rest of the summer, they and their officials address the various options available to them.

It seems that all the issues surrounding the PMS collapse have been exhaustively analysed. What is now needed is a solution. Mr Cameron’s pledge has cleared the way for that to happen at long last.

Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Owen Paterson today chaired a meeting with Peter Robinson, Martin McGuinness and Sammy Wilson to assess progress to date in seeking a resolution for the thousands of members of the Presbyterian Mutual Society who have been unable to access their investments since the Society entered administration in 2008.

Northern Ireland Minister Hugo Swire and Mark Hoban, the Financial Secretary to the Treasury, also attended this first meeting of the Ministerial Working Group on PMS which was reconvened at the request of the Prime Minister in an effort to find a fair and just resolution for PMS members.

Speaking after the meeting, Mr Paterson said: “Both before and since the General Election, the Prime Minister and I have been firm in our commitment to finding a fair and just resolution to this crisis.

“We are fully aware of the urgency of this matter.

“The meeting confirms the will which exists both in Government and in the Northern Ireland Executive to work together in seeking a solution.

“There is no easy answer, but I am keen to consider all available options to ensure PMS members are treated fairly.

“We have identified several courses of action which will be pursued with urgency over the summer, and we are all clear that it will be important for PMS members that we reach a conclusion as quickly as possible after that.

“We will meet again at the beginning of September”.

In a recently re-published book, The Erosion of Calvinist Orthodoxy, Ian Hamilton, minister of Cambridge Presbyterian Church, concludes with a very interesting chapter on why the church needs a confession of faith.

First, a confession is an appropriate way for identifying the church as such in the world. A confession is like a banner under which the church carries on its activities, telling the world what it is, and what it stands for. Abraham Kuyper said that a creed is not for the purpose of stating our own surmises or conjectures, but for professing that, of which on the basis of God’s revelation, we possess most certain knowledge.

Secondly, a confession also serves as an evangelical testimony to those outside the church’s fellowship. Mr Hamilton quotes my former professor at Westminster Seminary, Norman Shepherd, who speaks of the confession as having both apologetic (directed against error outside the church) and polemic (directed against deception within the professing church) functions. A confession makes known to the church as well as to the world “the faith once for all delivered to the saints”.

Thirdly, a confession of faith serves the ecumenical unity of the church. Far from being engines of division, creeds and confessions promote true ecumenism by honestly stating what different denominations understand by “the faith once delivered to the saints”. Unity that is not built upon, and is reflective of God’s truth, is not Christian unity.

Fourthly, a confession of faith serves to maintain harmony within the church. Without a confession, anarchy, not harmony, would prevail. Mr Hamilton says that this fact necessitates the inclusion in any meaningful confessional statement of a number of doctrines which in themselves do not belong to the substance of the faith, for example, infant baptism and Presbyterian polity. In order to live in harmony and administrative unity, churches need this kind of commitment. To have one church in a denomination practise paedo-baptism, while another rejects the practice, would be a recipe for theological, pastoral and administrative anarchy, he says.

Fifthly, confessions assist the church in maintaining internal discipline, especially among those who hold office in the church.

Sixthly, a confession of faith has the capacity to register the theological attainments of the church. Modern evangelicals have largely cut themselves off from the church of all ages. The learning, wisdom and attainments of the church over the past two millenia are reflected in a confession of faith. It helps to acknowledge those hard-won attainments and to recognise that the church did not begin with us and our generation.

Of course, there are major objections to this line of thinking.

Firstly, some say that confessions of faith detract from the sufficiency and perfection of the Bible as the church’s supreme rule of faith. “No creed but Christ, no book but the Bible”, they say. This argument completely misses the point, says Hamilton. Confessions are “subordinate” standards (Westminster Confession of Faith, I,X) and are binding only in so far as they are biblical, and are therefore open to revision, modification and rejection in the light of God’s Word.

Secondly, it is objected that confessions of faith limit and hinder the liberty of God’s people. But it is obvious that confessions do not seek to impose any burden on church members that the Bible does not already impose. Hamilton says they no more restrict an individual’s liberty than the rails of a railway track restrict a train.

Thirdly, some say that confessions limit the progress and development of theology. That might be true if confessions were considered to be the last word in biblical interpretation. They are not “sacred cows” which must never be altered nor discussed. Hamilton quotes James Bannerman:

Let any part of them (confessions) be proved from Scripture to be false, and we give it up; for we hold them only because, and insofar as, they are true. We invite every man to go beyond them if he can. We encourage and call upon every student of God’s Holy Word to press forward to fresh discoveries of truth, and to open up new views of the meaning of Scripture….Those who have studied their Bibles longest and most prayerfully are most convinced of that.

The honoured status or past usefulness of a confession of faith does not exempt it from its provisional place in the life of the church.

Fourthly, creeds and confessions, and subscription to them, do not guard the church against heresies, help it to propagate the truth, or maintain peace in the church. When it comes to elders and ministers subscribing to a confession of faith, subscription by itself does not guarantee orthodoxy. But Hamilton argues that, while not perfect,  the existence of a confession of faith provides the church with a biblically tested basis out of which it may conduct  a careful examination of those who are candidates for the ministry or the eldership.

Hamilton acknowledges that we cannot escape the fact that confessionalism is considered by many to be a relic of a by-gone era. In practice, the commitment that is required from many ministers and elders today is not a commitment to the church’s confession of faith, but a commitment to the church’s canon law. The issue that matters most is not “What do you believe?” but “What will you practice?”

Hamilton concludes:

Such documents are an embarrassment to the Church today, and increasingly relegated to the sidelines of history; documents of historical interest, landmarks in the evolution of the church, relevant to their own day, but out of touch with the realities of today. This kind of thinking may appeal to inclusivist thinking that pervades much of the Church and society, but it is light years removed from the New Testament with its categorical affirmations of truth, and its equally categorical denial of error. Until the Church wakens up to its follies, and is returned to a new confidence in Scripture, it seems likely that meaningful Confessionalism will be the preserve of so-called “fundamentalist” remnants.

In the Ulster Cycle of early Irish mythological tales, Emain was portrayed as the headquarters and sacred place of a military dynasty, the Red Branch Knights, ruled by Conchobar mac Nessa who was advised by the druid Cathbad and championed by CuChulainn, the Hound of Ulster.

Emain is one of a small number of sites identified as a prehistoric provincial capital in early sources. The others include Tara, Co Meath (Meath, the ‘middle’ province), Knockaulin, Co Kildare (Leinster) and Cruachan, Co Roscommon (Connacht). While some of the lore associated with these places may be medieval literary invention, archaeological excavations have revealed ceremonial structures of Iron Age date in these monuments which are very similar to each other.

Justin learns how to defend himself from an Irish warrior with a spear. Maybe PSNI will take the course before next Twelfth at Ardoyne?

The visitors’ centre at Navan Fort included a multi-media exhibition that we found very complex and which was not at all child-friendly. The explanation was given at a level most suitable for someone pursuing post-graduate research into Irish mythology.

A more engaging explanation was made by some actors who depicted life in the Iron Age, including a demonstration of their fighting strategy as well as their cooking skills. They claimed that all visitors were welcome, but were particularly suspicious of anyone from Connacht. Justin is from Philadelphia (they had never heard of it) and another family were from Minnesota (also unheard of), although a woman who came from Newry was recognisable as coming from the Gap of the North.

Clearly Navan Fort is an important archaeological site, reminding us of our pagan past, and how that  for many centuries we were a community of warring tribes with a well-developed religious and spiritual life. The deliberate burning of the pagan sanctuary at Navan still remains something of a mystery. I came away thinking that in one sense not much has changed in Ulster in two centuries, and wishing that the Gospel brought by St Patrick had resulted in a deeper and more profound transformation of this island.

Theresa Denton, moderator of the PCUSA’s Church Orders and Ministry Committee, is quoted as saying that she does not view the proposed amendment to the ordination standards as lower standards but rather as higher ones.

“The standards that the governing bodies will be held to is to evaluate the totality of a candidate’s life, to interview them and see what their gifts are, what their talents are, what their whole life is about rather than one aspect of their life and … all of this to be done under the Lordship of Jesus Christ,” she contended. “I think that is an incredibly high standard.”

What exactly did the Assembly do? And what has changed?

The 219th General Assembly (2010) proposed a change to the PC(USA) Constitution regarding ordination standards by a vote of 373‐323‐4. This action does not change the Constitution. It is a first step in the process. A majority of the 173 presbyteries would have to vote in the affirmative to approve the replacement by July 10, 2011.

The amendment approved by the Assembly is a provision in the PC(USA) Book of Order (Constitution) that sets the following standards for persons ordained as church leaders (deacon, elder or minister). The current version reads:

“Those who are called to office in the church are to lead a life in obedience to Scripture and in conformity to the historic confessional standards of the church. Among these standards is the requirement to live either in fidelity within the covenant of marriage between a man and a woman, or chastity in singleness. Persons refusing to repent of any self‐acknowledged practice which the confessions call sin shall not be ordained and/or installed as deacons, elders, or ministers of the Word and Sacrament.”

The 219th General Assembly (2010) recommends deleting the above provision and replacing it with the following language:

“Standards for ordained service reflect the church’s desire to submit joyfully to the Lordship of Jesus Christ in all aspects of life. The governing body responsible for ordination and/or installation shall examine each candidate’s calling, gifts, preparation, and suitability for the responsibilities of office. The examination shall include, but not be limited to, a determination of the candidate’s ability and commitment to fulfill all requirements as expressed in the constitutional questions for ordination and installation. Governing bodies shall be guided by Scripture and the confessions in applying standards to individual candidates.”

By removing the requirement that ordination candidates live in fidelity within the covenant of marriage or chastity in singleness, the General Assembly has in effect lifted the ban on practising homosexuals being ordained, and now awaits the endorsement of the presbyteries. Many will view this move as a serious departure from what the Bible teaches about marriage and sexuality, and certainly not a higher standard.

Since the PC(USA) is a sister denomination of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, and since another sister denomination, the Church of Scotland, is due to receive a report on the same issue at its General Assembly in 2011, Irish Presbyterians will be watching closely how their fellow Presbyterians handle this issue, especially since there is a mutually recognised ministry among these denominations.

Given that we’ve had a woman Prime Minister, a woman as Head of M15 and we send women to war it’s surely a little anachronistic that an institution like the Church of England should prevent women from having the top jobs. Of course, whether they’re the top jobs is a discussion for another time. ….But people increasingly find the ineligibility of women for the Episcopacy as an act of outrageous and ‘criminal’ discrimination. It may well be that Government Legislation will one day make it a criminal offence to ‘victimize’ women in this way.

To deny positions of authority and leadership to women in the church is not meant to cause offence. But because of where our culture is, it does. But just because the culture is saying something doesn’t necessarily require us to change our position, but it ought to send us back to the Bible to make sure we’ve got it right.

Christ Church, Balham is part of a group of churches in the west end of London known as Co-Mission churches. These churches are vibrant, growing congregations, and are popular among a younger generation of committed Christians. Their position on the issue of women bishops does not seem to detract from their ability to attract and use the gifts of able, talented young men and women.

I had a conversation recently with a senior Anglican cleric, and he was pointing out that, in some English dioceses, if a candidate for the ministry expressed reservations about the ordination of women he would almost certainly be rejected, but another candidate could express concerns about basic Christian doctrines like the resurrection and no eyebrows would be raised. If true, that seems to send out a crazy message: we know exactly what the Bible teaches about the ordination of women, but we aren’t sure what it says about the resurrection.

The ordination of women as ministers or their appointment as bishops is not a gospel issue, but it is one which requires careful biblical reflection. I am sure God does not want us to be confused on such a practical issue.

Christians in the Republic of Ireland will be interested to know that Senator Mullen plans to table some freedom of conscience amendments to the Civil Partnership Bill which is now being debated by the Seanad.

This Bill would penalise, and in some cases criminalise, photographers,
printers, managers of parish halls or registrars who might, on conscience
grounds, not wish to facilitate civil partnership events. This attacks the
freedom of conscience of those who believe in traditional morality and in
marriage between a man and a woman as the bedrock of society.

My amendments would protect freedom of conscience while avoiding unintended consequences, including any obstruction of the State’s implementation of civil partnership legislation.

In a pluralist society there will be different viewpoints on many ethical issues including the morality of homosexual relationships and the extent to which the State should protect the institution of marriage. It is one thing for citizens to disagree on these matters. It is another thing to use the overwhelming force of the law to punish certain citizens because their beliefs differ from the new State-sponsored outlook.

The Minister for Justice has tried to claim that freedom of conscience
exceptions could lead to undesirable consequences. It was both needlessly
offensive and inaccurate to invoke the ‘fundamentalist Christian garda’ who
might refuse to arrest a person breaching a safety order because he
believed that a husband was entitled to beat his wife. Such weak arguments
hide the fact that our existing equality legislation contains many
sensible, carefully-crafted, exceptions which are not abused.

Senator Mullen argued that, without freedom of conscience amendments, the Civil Partnership Bill may be unconstitutional, given Bunreacht na hÉireann’s strong protection for the practice of religion and the rights of religious institutions.

Article 44.2 of the Constitution guarantees freedom of conscience and Article 44.5 provides that every religious denomination shall have the right to manage its own affairs. It is interesting to note that in 1997, the Supreme Court regarded Section 37 of the Employment Equality Bill, which allows religious employers to take action which is reasonably necessary to prevent the undermining of their religious ethos, as necessary to the Bill’s constitutionality. A similar exemption is needed now.

Senator Mullen will also table amendments to tackle a new form of discrimination introduced by the Civil Partnership Bill.

The Bill as it stands discriminates against mutually dependent adults in
non-sexual relationships, such as carers and siblings, by not providing
them with any of the rights and entitlements of would-be civil partners or
cohabitees. There is no objective justification for this. My amendments
will seek to equalise the rights of all mutually-dependent couples while
ensuring the special status of marriage remains intact.

Christians throughout the Republic of Ireland will follow this debate with much interest.

Note: The Civil Partnership Bill has been amended in the Dáil and is now
known as the Civil Partnership and Certain Rights and Obligations of
Cohabitants Bill, 2009.

In his beautifully crafted speech, Seamus recalled how that words used to describe libraries, like “holdings” and “stacks”, were reminiscent of his rural Ulster upbringing, where one would gather an armful from the stack for fodder or bedding. In the same way, standing among these stacks, there was much to feed the mind and comfort the soul.

Language, literature, learning, the lure and indeed the lair of the library  -in the course of my undergraduate years here, those were things that changed me for life, and they remain to this day essential to the pursuit of a liberal education. However much the technology may have changed in the meantime, however fast and flooded the information stream has become, however many electronic devices the undergraduate and the research student come provided with and  attached to, the library remains at the intellectual and creative centre of any university. Many of the words associated with it have rich and primal associations. Just to speak of ‘holdings’ or ’stacks’ is to be reminded how indispensable a library is to the garnering and guarding what is most treasured in the culture and most necessary in the pursuit of knowledge. How it remains, in the words of Louis MacNeice’s poem “The British Museum Reading Room’, a ‘hive-like dome’ where the scholars are like busy bees ‘tap[ping] the cells of knowledge -/Honey and wax, the accumulation of years.’ And the fact that the tapping is now done on the keyboard of a pc or by the insertion of a memory stick does not change the nature of the operation.

The first time I entered a library stack was at the beginning of my second year at Queen’s, when I became an honours student in the English Department and was entitled to that privilege. The dim outback of shelves and catwalks that I entered then was very different from the stacks I had grown up among, haystacks and cornstacks higher than the house, harvest holdings, you might say, garnerings of straw and grain. But the stacks in the library still performed a similar function to those in the haggard, for just as the farmer could withdraw hay or straw by the armful and carry it off for fodder or bedding, so the student could emerge with his or her armful of books, fill up the slips at the desk and keep them for a fortnight to extract whatever nurture that was stored In them for mind or imagination.

Patricia and I were able to attend the event because the current moderator, Dr Hamilton, and his wife, were away, and we were first reserves. Patricia was particularly pleased to be there because she first met Seamus when she was at school in Cambridge House, Ballymena, and the great man came to a small Irish Literature Society to talk about his work. The teacher who looked after this group hailed from Derrygarve, and Seamus was recalling to us in conversation afterwards how that when he went home from meeting the girls and their teacher in Cambridge House, he put pen to paper: “I met a girl from Derrygarve” in a poem entitled “A New Song” that talks about Upperlands and Castledawson.

The Vice-Chancellor, Professor Peter Gregson, presented Seamus with a medal to recognise the fact that it was precisely 50 years ago since Seamus had first graduated from Queen’s. I wonder if any of this year’s graduates from Queen’s will go on to make as significant a contribution as Seamus the Great.

In a fast-paced culture, it is so easy to lose one’s bearings and to get lost. Dave reminds us, very eloquently, of a basic commitment which reformed people have to the authority of Scripture which has direct implications for how we think about church and worship, as well as the spiritual realities which underpin our faith.

They thought they were going to die.  Already begrudging the outdated notion of wilderness camp hundreds of miles from home, the vanload of teenagers was jolted by the ground rules at their non-virtual form of distance education. Posted at the wilderness camp’s entrance gate was the media bouncer barking authoritatively, “No MP3 players. No I-Pods.  No DVD players. No cell phones. No laptops.  No kidding.”   The prehistoric demands aroused sleepy youth from their digital slumbers.  Disappointment heated into outrage; outrage ignited panic, and I-Pod toting teens banded into a digitally mastered surround-sound symphony: “How can we possibly survive for 10 days without our music?!”

Does this camping scenario manifest a harmless reality of twenty-first century adolescents?  Is it merely laughable that these Generation Next-ers see no possibility of survival apart from their electronic gadgetry?  Is it a negligible trend that the digital world has created virtual friends with virtually no social skills, that texting and sexting are now components of daily life, and that I-Phone apps, Facebook, and On-Demand video are no longer conveniences but expectations?

Child and adolescent psychologists, sociologists, and cultural analysts are now speaking openly of quantifiable effects of the Digital Age.  Their concerns are largely clinical, as they present trends, expectations, and the measurable effects of media upon the minds of the post-Millennials.  Others perceive the longings of the I-generations as watershed cultural shifts that beg for creative solutions educationally, socially, economically, and technologically.  But what of the Church, what of Scripture, what of the hearts and souls of those in the pews whose eyes, ears, and hearts thump with digital expectations?  Electronic media trends raise serious questions for the life of the Church, and the lack of deep, thorough, critical and immediate analysis may tangle us in a worldwide web of irrelevance.

Let’s remove our earphones for a moment and reflect quietly. Is it merely a dismissible fact that many flourishing churches flourish because they keep up with technological longings of their congregations, which expect, no demand, multi-media impulses to keep their attention? Should the demands of our congregations and culture shape twenty-first century ministry?

Can such shaping be done without weakening the authority of Christ and his Word?  Knowing that the youth in our congregations now average 7 hours and 38 minutes per day (53 hours per week!) of entertainment media, is it any surprise that their expectations of church worship center on their own desires?

I don’t mean to sound overdramatic, but we simply cannot bury our heads in our X-Boxes. As numerous studies attest, the relentless acquisition of cutting edge digital technology now lords over the Western cultural heart, extending across ethnic, gender, economic, and social boundaries. We must pause between texts, emails, and Seinfeld episodes to face the fact that technological lordship vies for the worship of God’s people in our churches.  For too many, the knee is already bowed.

Neil Postman warned us in 1985.  Bravely extending Huxley’s prophetic analysis of a new world shaped by technological, social and moral change, Postman delivered his own package of warning, alerting us that we were well on the way to Amusing Ourselves to Death. But blind to his foresight and deaf to his alarm bell, our eyes and ears greedily sought more media.  We got what we wanted.  And now the media playground is anything but frivolous, as instant, downloadable, and streamlined access to media has crept (in same cases, leapt) from servant to lord.  Our new god is killing us.  Oh, our souls may not yet have died, but the morgue musicians are warming up… or is it cooling down?  Whatever the case, they are tuning their instruments, because barring repentance from our multimedia idolatry, we may soon die, drowning in our pool of instantaneous media pleasure.

Like a ping-pong ball in a raffle machine, we bounce from CSI-Miami to a rerun of Hogan’s Heroes, from Madonna to Mozart, and from Amazon to Facebook. We pay the electric company with e-pay, donate ten bucks to Haiti, download Star Wars from Netflix, stream Kenny Chesney on Pandora, and choose the news anchor we want to expose the sex and lies, and videotape of our choice… all with the effortless flick of a single finger.  Yes, we choose the news, the noise, and the narcissism.  This buffet of choices confirms the cultural conviction clutched deeply within our collective souls: “I am that I am. I am Lord.  I am the god of my instantly-gratifying world.”  The enticing image of the media goddess has also captivated the Western church with a sweetly persuasive vengeance: her voluptuous digital body overpowering, her kisses sweet, and her embrace irresistible. We got what we wanted, but so did she.  She now owns us.  Our seductive embrace of the media goddess has cast us into her suffocating vice-grip.

At the Reformation, Protestants enthusiastically esteemed the Word of God as the Word of God.  From architectural changes which centered the preached Word in the life of the Church to Bible translation, which delivered the Scriptures to peoples’ heart languages, at the core of Protestantism is its love, respect, and elevation of the Scriptures. In the sixteenth century, the fresh recognition of Scripture as truly God’s Word, as the veryrevelation of the Triune God of heaven, promoted a countercultural movement that dismantled the idolatrous religious establishment of its day.  As the Reformers grappled with the claims of the Bible about itself, they recognized that the Church sat under the Scripture’s authority rather than as its final judge and interpreter.  The Reformation mantra sola Scriptura turned its culture upside down, and shaped the ministry of the Church in many ways against the culture, even the religious one.

In the twentieth century, liberal Protestants put the Bible on trial and found it guilty of error, abandoned their dependence upon God’s Word, and replaced it with the lifeless lyrics of their own wisdom.  What social Gospel theorist Walter Rauschenbusch preached, Charles Sheldon popularized; “What did Jesus do?” became “What would Jesus do?”  Morality and social justice supplanted redemption, and the living Christ died again, this time buried beneath unbelieving, yet captivating rhetoric. He was not to rise again in the liberal Protestant Church.

The dangerous irony of the twenty-first century Church is that while most Reformed and evangelical leaders contend vigorously for the concept of Scriptural authority, the sights and sounds of the Digital Age have lured many unsuspectingly from implementing the message and the methods of the Gospel for this generation.  While our hindsight on twentieth century liberalism is 20/20, our current blindness to thespiritual and idolatrous power of the Digital Age is pressing our ministries into a media-shaped, culturally determined mold.  We need a fresh Reformation, in which we take seriously the authority of the Gospel as God’s revealed Word to our culture. We need a fresh Reformation, in which we take seriously the implications of the authority of the Gospel as God’s revealed Word in our ministries.  We need a fresh Reformation, in which we take conscious reassessment of the lordship of the resurrected Christ, pondering repentantly how His authority bears upon our work of ministry in the face of the media temptress.

To that end, let me pose some non-virtual questions.

To start, let’s be pragmatic.  Can we really keep up?  Can our churches and our budgets stay on course with Google search, Avatar graphics, Super Bowl commercial humor, and 3-D flat screen entertainment? As many churches are discovering, digital technology moves at warp speed.  By the time we emptied our banks to purchase cutting edge technology for our churches, better technology has dulled our edge to oh, so last year.  Most have neither the financial resources nor the collective cultural savvy to keep up with the digital Joneses.

But let’s move closer toward the mirror. To what degree has the authoritative voice of the culture – “Entertain me or lose me!” - drowned out the authoritative voice of Scripture? In what ways are we basing the what and how of our ministry on the media-intoxicated culture in which we live? Are not digitally captivated hearts the contemporary version of Paul’s itching ears syndrome (2 Tim 4:4)?  If so, only a sober-minded response will do. Running the technology race may simply cascade us into the arms of the digital deity, which most in our congregations blindly assume exists for their full and safe consumption.  Does our ministry in its content and method affirm their hearts’ idolatrous affections or draw them to the idol-crushing, freedom-bearing, divinely authoritative Gospel of Jesus Christ?

What about the Wii-wielding, Internet-savvy youngsters of our congregations? Do these children believe that Bible “stories” are any different than Harry Potter, Sponge Bob, and Alvin and the Chipmunks? Do not surf quickly over this question. Publications of Noah and the Ark, David and Goliath, Moses and the Ten Commandments, and Jesus and His disciples, employ cartoon characters and riveting animation, complete with catchy tunes and for-purchase figurines. Vacation Bible School curricula explore biblical stories from outer space, jungles, and wilderness adventures.  At what point does the imaginative medium eclipse the transcendent truth?  Does our simplifying and dramatizing of Bible accounts into modern themes reinforce the Scripture’s authority in the minds of our children or undermine it?  Do moralistic cartoons, including the animation of vegetables singing silly songs, reinforce the uniqueness of Scripture or lower children’s view of the Bible to something indistinguishable from Aesop’s fables?

What about preaching?  How has the self-consuming, self-centering instant gratification of the entertainment media shaped preaching, the preacher, and our congregations?  Of course, certain American churches have essentially, if not entirely, replaced preaching with drama and video.  These mega-hip mega-church ‘worship services’ frequently prize performance over worship; the attendee is spectator, not participant.  Entertainment is why he comes, and entertainment he gets.  In this theater, the larger-than-life actors on stage carry out their frenzy-inducing feel-good magic, giving the digital junkies their religious fix.

But what of the more conservative or traditional models of worship, where the regulative principle prevails and preachers actually seek to preach the Bible? Recently in a worship service I attended at a Reformed church, which staunchly defends the inerrancy and sufficiency of Scripture, the preacher apologized two times for reading the Bible to the congregation.  He was serious. The very Word he heralded as both authoritative and relevant required pardon from the congregation for its reading!  Why?  Perhaps because he knows his Blackberry and YouTube crowd might get bored listening to biblical texts.  Or perhaps because he subconsciously doubts the power of the Word of God to do what God claims – to accomplish its purpose even in the heart of one in the embrace of the digital goddess.  Whatever the case, in one tragic moment, he affirmed what many media-drunk churchgoers have come to believe: that public reading of Scripture, which the Apostle Paul alerts Timothy not to neglect (1 Tim 4:13), is a necessary boredom to endure; that preaching Scripture is an irrelevant part of our church experience.

Do we really believe in the power of God’s Word read and preached? Or do we believe Paul was simply clueless to twenty-first century culture when he exhorted Timothy to preach the word in season and out (2 Tim 4:2)?  Was his notion of Scripture read publicly and preached persistently a mere contextualized protocol for the first century?  Does the media-saturated church really need something else?

We must tolerate neither laziness nor neglect to self-critical questions, because without conscious and deliberate address, media idolatry will shape our ministry at 3-G speed.  If Scripture itself really is divinely authoritative, then decisions about how we worship and minister need scrupulous biblical reflection for twenty-first century ministry.  Make no mistake.  The tools of technology are extremely valuable to the kingdom of Christ and its mission; computer and Internet technology enable us to deliver the Gospel and ministry resources literally all over the world!  However, the engagement of technology must occur with rigorous, conscious, and humble consideration: the benefits, the pitfalls, the consequences (immediate and long-term), and the heart-level costs.

We must reopen the package Postman delivered: medium and message are simply not disconnected.  The how and what of ministry are joined at the hip.  Paul’s recurring expression of Gospel ministry was by the Word preached, not by the Word dramatized, the Word PowerPointed, the Word YouTubed.  We have no right to minimize, marginalize, or moderate the biblical method of delivery.  Preaching Christ crucified may be passé for an entertainment culture, but its foolishness remains God’s primary tool for glorious change.

The job of the church then is not to conform its ministry to the digital whims of its virtual congregants, but to proclaim and live boldly God’s redemptive work in Christ.  We need authentic Reformation, fresh inspection about how Scriptural authority must shape our ministries in this digital world.  God’s Word is the only authority that will confront and dismantle the idolatry – virtual and actual – of our culture, break the vice-grip of the digital temptress, and elevate the life-changing message of the Gospel: Christ died, was buried, and rose from the dead.  He is Lord and no digital dynasty will stand against His kingdom.

This Sunday I’m back in my own pulpit after being away for 14 months. I am looking forward to being with my own congregation and to the task of ministering to them, in the pulpit and out of the pulpit. I am back to the discipline of preparing at least two sermons a week, and thankfully there are lots of resources to help preachers to preach good sermons. But there is virtually nothing in the last 200 years on helping people in the pews to listen to sermons. That’s why this wee book (available in our favourite local Faith Mission Bookshop in Portadown) is so helpful.

So here are Ash’s seven ingredients for healthy sermon listening:

1. Expect God to speak

2. Admit God knows better than you

3. Check the preacher says what the passage says

4. Hear the sermon in church

5. Be there week by week

6. Do what the Bible says

7. Do what the Bible says today - and rejoice!

He also has an interesting chapter on how to listen to bad sermons. How do you listen to a dull sermon? How do you listen to a biblically inadequate sermon? How do you listen to a heretical sermon? (The short answer to the last question is: Don’t!) How can we get better sermons? All great questions, with good answers provided.

I like this short book because it describes the relationship between the preacher and his congregation and encourages a relationship of “active listening” and feedback. That is essential if a pastor and his people are going to grow spiritually together. I need to improve as a preacher and as a person, and I know that will only happen as my congregation talks to me and responds to what I say in the pulpit. The days of being in the pulpit “six feet above contradiction” are long gone.

So I’m getting ready to preach on Sunday. I hope my people are ready to listen. And I hope I will have ears to hear what they are saying to me.