Leadership in Biblical Perspective

Just read a paper in one of my classes at Liberty University that absolutely nailed it! She wrote a paper on Paul as Paradigm for Biblical Leadership. Unlike most of the drivel out there I read on leadership in the church, she did not fall prey to the temptation to smuggle in the notion that leadership in the Kingdom of God is exactly the same as leadership in the world. Rather, she set leadership in the church in biblical perspective and came away with the stunning, but (if you actually read the Bible!) obvious conclusion that leadership in the church is purely about calling, not the possession of certain “leadership skills” etc.

Baptist to the Bone

The James Ossuary*

A reliquary (stone box containing sacred relics) was discovered back in 2010 on the Black Sea island of Sveti Ivan (which means "St. John") off the coast of Bulgaria. Inside were eight pieces of bone, including pieces of a skull, face, and a tooth. Because there is a monastery on the island which claims John the Baptist as its patron saint, the excavation leader, Kazimir Popkonstantinov, suggests that the bones might belong to the Baptist. The possibility is strengthened, he suggests, by the fact that found alongside the reliquary was a small sandstone box with a Greek inscription that said, “God, save your servant Thomas. To St. John. June 24.” June 24 is the date celebrated by Christians as the birthday of John the Baptist, and the inscription suggests that a pilgrim had come to the monastery to seek the Baptist’s blessing in the place where, he believed, John’s bones resided. Alternatively, Thomas may have been the patron who built the monastery and, as an act of sanctification, donated the bones of John the Baptist to the monastery as a sacral gift.

The Dumbing of the Church

I wrote a blog recently in which one reader excoriated me for using words like “excoriate.” Noting that my blog is about things theological, he suggested that theology was really quite simple and, therefore, simple words would do just fine when talking about God. He suggested that I lose the polysyllabic morphemes (sorry, I just couldn’t help myself) and replace them with single syllable words on a 5^th grade reading level. Of course, some of us read Shakespeare in the 5^th grade, so that’s no help.

I’ve been hearing this more and more lately, both from laity and clergy. It seems that even when dealing with a subject as complex as the Divine, the motto is KISS – “keep it simple, stupid.” It is symptomatic, I think, of a more serious contemporary ecclesiastical (there I go again!) trend; namely, the “dumbing of the church.”

A Palm Sunday Misconception

This Sunday is Palm Sunday for most Christian churches. Palm Sunday commemorates Jesus’ triumphal approach to Jerusalem (sometimes mistakenly called his “triumphal entry,” but as the Gospel of Mark makes clear, Jesus only approached the city on Palm Sunday, delaying his actual “entry” into the city and the temple until the next day - see Mark 11:11ff.). This is the time of the year when pastors and preachers trot out their “fickle crowd sermons” in which they fulminate about the fickle and feckless crowds who gathered on Palm Sunday to hail Jesus as their king only to turn on him a week later and, complicit in his betrayal and execution, shouted “Crucify him! Crucify him!”

Problem is, while that might make for some passionate homiletical indignation in which the preacher berates the crowd for being feckless and mercurial, that’s not what the text of the Gospel of Mark says happened at all.

The Crux of the Matter

I’m teaching an intensive graduate seminar on the Gospel of Mark this summer at Liberty University. Hadn’t taught Mark for a while, so I welcome the opportunity. Wrote my PhD dissertation on Mark back in the late 70’s. Since then, I’ve gravitated more to other NT documents. But Mark has always haunted me. The power of the story comes through in Mark in a way that it doesn’t in the other canonical Gospels, so much so that the British actor, Alec McCowen, once held audiences spellbound simply by reading the Gospel of Mark on stage in a one-man performance. No commentary was necessary. The story itself carried the freight.