Eight years ago, our family moved into the heart of Toronto. One of the surprises that came with this move was being freed from my car; something I was completely dependent on while pastoring in suburbia. Now I was taking public transit every day as I travelled into Wycliffe College. I knew my trip would entail a short walk on both ends of a subway ride. What I didn’t know was that during the subway ride God would teach me how to pray for strangers.
“What is God’s call for my life?” That is a question most Christians think about at one time or another and it is certainly one of the questions we have in the back of our minds when we come to a college or seminary like Wycliffe—regardless of whether we are looking towards possible ordination/paid ministry or envisioning some type of volunteer ministry or service.
How can studying the past help us in our Christian formation?
It can help us in several ways: it can confront us with the mysteries of God's providence, globalize our understanding of Christian life and faith, explain why our churches do things the way they do, justify the norms that the Church ought to honour, and challenge false or biased constructions of the past that distort our sense of the Gospel, church, and world.
Here I'm going to talk about the last way.
I remember seminary students who were hoping to be ordained warning one another of the kind of questions they were likely to be asked in the selection process. “It used to be,” they said, “that you had to say something about the importance of the sacraments. But now,” they explained, “you’d better say something about the importance of mission, or you don’t have a chance.”
People think about theological colleges in different ways. To most, perhaps, they are simply schools, maybe professional schools, like the faculties of medicine or law or music. Wycliffe College’s incorporating documents identify us as a “divinity school,” indicating that the education we offer, while practical in its intention, has something to do with God. This is a place where one learns the tools of the pastoral or academic trades.
Senior Research Professor and Old Testament scholar Christopher Seitz recently contracted Covid-19 after having been vaccinated. His symptoms—while relatively mild—have nonetheless been disruptive. In the midst of his recuperation, he wrote this sermon using Mark 7: 24–37 (the story of Jesus’ encounter with the Canaanite woman) as his text, and granted permission for it to be shared here.
Names are important in the Bible. From the time Adam named the animals in the creation story, to the revelation of God’s name in the Sinai desert, to the angelic naming of the holy child who is our Saviour. Names identify. Names personify. Names are intimate. Names awaken memory. We are given names in our baptism, and we are told that the Good Shepherd “calls his own sheep by name” (John 10:3).
Israel is where I have family. It is the country many of my friends, and coworkers (Jews and Arabs both) call home. My heart is weighed down at the recent manifestation of violence and hatred that we have seen erupt there.
How is a Christian to make sense of it all?
I assert that God’s deepest desire, as made known in Jesus Christ, is “to seek and to save that which was lost” (Luke 19:10). And I believe this is an opportune moment for the church to boldly proclaim that the only hope for peace was born in the Middle East.
Albert Mohler is blowing up the Internet.
Today marks the centenary of the birth of John R.W. Stott (1921-2011). Identified by Time magazine in 2005 as one of the world’s “100 Most Influential People,” John R.W. Stott was a legendary figure in the modern global evangelical movement. Evangelicals of various stripes claimed him as their own. To Billy Graham, he was a fellow evangelist. To decades of students in the Inter-Varsity movement, he was an apologist and mentor. To missiologists and church leaders in the Majority World, he was a statesman, diplomat, and the framer of the 1974 Lausanne Covenant.
