Author Archives: Peter Kirk

Cathedral promotes nudism, newspaper claims

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I’m not sure I believe a word that I read in The Mail on Sunday. There is perhaps a little more truth in what they write than there was in the recently defunct, but little lamented, Sunday Sport. At least their rival The News of the World made some attempts to uncover the truth, although by illegal means that they have been forced to apologise for.

So it is with a pinch of salt that I take the following story. The Church Mouse alerted me to this on his twitter stream, but perhaps wisely tweeted

Good grief. Not sure I can be bothered to take this apart.

But I am trying to follow David Ker’s advice, at least the part about blogging controversy, so I will jump straight in.

What then is the story? The headline in The Mail on Sunday is

It’s wholesome and liberating … how cathedral landed in row over nudism

The cathedral in question is Manchester Cathedral, in the Church of England. This cathedral seems to hit the news quite regularly, most recently over its planned Spirit of Life Festival, which allegedly included tarot card readings. The newspaper reports the following as having been on the Spirit of Life website:

naturism is a liberating lifestyle and belief which encourages self-respect, respect for others and for the environment, and embodies freedom and a unique sense of communion with nature.

Christian naturists see this as God’s design for living. It is purposefully non-erotic and non-sexual and engenders a wholesome appreciation of self and others.

The article also mentions the Christian Naturist Fellowship, an apparently genuine organisation which promotes a similar positive view of naturism.

The story is not really news because

The item was posted by Manchester Cathedral several weeks ago

but has apparently only just come to the attention of the press. However, as the newspaper reports,

all references to nudity suddenly disappeared from the site last week,

so I can’t give any links or even confirm that there ever were any. How convenient for a newspaper that the only evidence for its report disappeared before publication! There is however some kind of confirmation in an earlier article by Charles Raven in the Church of England Newspaper – but this could simply be based on a previous report in the Mail.

If God wanted us to be naked ... we'd be born that wayIs this really so shocking? I wouldn’t think so. Here in the generally cool and wet north west of England I doubt if nudism, or naturism, will ever become popular. But it does have its attractions on a warm weekend like this one. And, as a page at the Christian Naturist Fellowship site shows, there is no good biblical reason for insisting that Christians wear clothes, as long as they don’t cause offence by their nakedness. As the Fellowship’s tagline reads,

If God wanted us to be naked … we’d be born that way

Is God our Systems Architect?

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Archdruid Eileen of the Beaker Folk proclaims today Dodgy Analogies Sunday. In her celebratory message she discusses how our life is like a computer program (that’s the correct spelling even in the UK, Eileen) with God as our Systems Architect. In the way she presents it, the analogy is indeed dodgy, and very funny.

Is this analogy in fact necessarily dodgy? I think I could redeem it into something really useful. But I won’t ruin today’s celebrations by trying to do so here.

Husborne CrawleyMeanwhile a message to any cyclists who might take advantage of this glorious weather and venture on the road anywhere near Husborne Crawley (yes, it’s a real place, a village near Milton Keynes): watch out for a homicidal lycra-hating Archdruid! I have already warned long-distance cyclist blogger Dave Warnock, whose route home from London might well take him nearby.

The Marriage of the Millennium: not William and Kate

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It is good to see ElShaddai Edwards blogging again, at He is Sufficient. And he has written an excellent post on the marriage of the millennium.

Prince William and Kate MiddletonNow the marriage of the month is, I suppose, going to be the royal wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton, on 29th April. Here in the UK we are having a public holiday to celebrate – but I will be working, because it is a good day for my current temporary work. I can imagine that some would want to bill this royal event as the marriage of the millennium so far, although I would put forward a different suggestion.

But the wedding ElShaddai is writing about is not that of William and Kate, and it will have no rival in the next thousand years, or indeed forever. It has its similarities: a royal prince marrying a commoner. It is the marriage of Jesus Christ with his church, as described mainly in the Book of Revelation.

ElShaddai links the wedding of the Lamb with teaching on the millennium. For him, the millennium is the time between the announcement of the wedding and the actual ceremony, when the guests are invited and the bride is made ready. For the details read his post.

ElShaddai avoids tying this in with events in the real world. But I suppose this is most easily interpreted with the millennium as the church age, the current age, at the end of which Jesus will return to be with his bride. This would then be a kind of postmillennialism, but without the triumphalism sometimes associated with this teaching.

There is certainly a lot to think about here – but we shouldn’t allow it to distract us too much from our primary task of proclaiming the kingdom of God and inviting people to take their part in the marriage of the millennium.

Ian Paul's Summary: the Bible on women and authority

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Revd Dr Ian PaulIan Paul has summed up his series on what the Bible teaches on women and authority. This material is due to be published as a Grove Booklet. In a previous post I referred to what Ian had written on 1 Timothy 2. The summary in Ian’s new post is presumably intended to sum up the series, and the booklet. Here is my summary of the summary, quoting Ian’s words:

  1. The creation accounts offer no evidence of hierarchy in male-female relationships as part of the original created order. …
  2. The gospel accounts appear to show no embarrassment about the commissioning of women to roles that would normally be restricted to men …
  3. The evidence from Acts and Paul goes further. …
  4. The critical texts in 1 Corinthians, Ephesians and 1 Timothy are best understood as offering a corrective in particular contexts in the light of the outpouring of the Spirit …
  5. There is no textual evidence that the New Testament envisages any permanent prohibition on women exercising authority or a teaching role on the grounds of their gender. …
  6. The nature of the texts on women’s roles sets this issue at some distance from current debates on same-sex relations. …

In other words, there is no biblical leg to stand on for the complementarian position that women must not exercise any kind of authority in the church.

For the full summary read Ian’s post.

Vote Yes!, then let the politicians do the real work

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YES to Fairer VotesClayboy, otherwise known as Doug Chaplin, is a priest in the Church of England. So I was interested to see that he had put together a list of five reasons to say No! in the forthcoming Alternative Vote referendum.

I’m glad to see for once someone trying to find substantive arguments on the No! side. I hoped that in Doug’s list I might find some real Christian arguments on this issue, perhaps in response to my post Towards a Christian view on the Alternative Vote, or to what Ekklesia and some bishops have had to say on this subject.

So I was a little disappointed that the Clayboy arguments are mostly not about the ethical issues involved, but instead are speculation about the consequences of a Yes! vote. But, following his five reasons, he does write the following:

the most moral system of voting in a democracy is the one most understandable to and accessible by the most people.

Well, he may be right here. But is he really suggesting that listing candidates in order of preference is not understandable or not accessible by people? If there is an issue here, then it needs to be addressed by proper voter education. If he wants to rule this out on principle, then of course the best understood system will be the current one. That makes his argument into one for maintaining the status quo however bad that might be – and I cannot accept that that is a good moral argument.

Now I’m sure Clayboy is correct that adoption of AV will not on its own be “all that is needed” “to reconnect people and politicians”. But surely it is a step, if only a small one, in that direction. Let’s indeed make the politicians “do some real work to connect to the electorate”. But first let’s show that we care about this work by voting Yes!

Move over, Jim West, here comes Gentle Wisdom!

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Zwinglius RedivivusI don’t know if Jim West meant to do this, but in his post yesterday Ok Houston (WordPress), We Might Have a Problem… (I had the same problem) he revealed his daily WordPress visit statistics for the last month. I can compare them directly with the statistics for this blog. It looks as if Jim has been averaging around 1000 visits per day through March, rather more in the last few days.

Gentle Wisdom cannot yet match Jim on a daily basis. But its daily average number of visits, which was 82 in February, leapt up to 493 in March. Since 17th March, when I published David Wilkerson prophecy: earthquakes in Japan and USA, Gentle Wisdom has had more than 500 visits every day, with a peak of 1356 on 21st March. On 19th, when it had 1181 visits, Jim West clearly had well under 1000, so I edged ahead of him at least briefly.

In September 2009 Gentle Wisdom joined the select (maybe) band of official bibliobloggers. Thirteen months ago it actually made it into the infamous Top 50. But it didn’t hold its position because I wasn’t blogging regularly last year.

Meanwhile Jim West, also known as Zwingli come back to life, has held the #1 spot in the list of biblibloggers for most of its life, except for a short break when his blog was deleted and before he started a new one. He is still there in the latest list published yesterday – its title Oh My Goodness!!! Jim West Lost is an April Fool. Over the years the Alexa rank required to qualify for the Top 50 has inflated (because a lower number indicates a higher position): biblioblog #50 had a rank of 1,397,865 in August 2009 but 863,218 in the latest figures.

As I was blogging very little for nearly a year, it is not surprising that Gentle Wisdom slipped well down the Alexa rankings, to below 7,000,000 on the one month figures from a month ago, just before I started to relaunch this blog. But its one month rank has already risen nearly six million to 1,333,112, and will doubtless continue to rise quickly if my daily number of visits remains above 500. So watch out for Gentle Wisdom in next month’s Top 50.

I can’t help wondering if Gentle Wisdom should really be listed as a biblioblog. After all, most of the posts are not about biblical studies. But then the same is true of Jim West’s writing. Also Jim often posts 20 times a day, mostly very short posts. This suggests that on average only about 50 people read each post. By contrast I had over 15,000 visits in March and 35 new posts in the month, which corresponds to nearly 500 readers per post.

It looks to me as if Jim West is maintaining his #1 position only by blogging large numbers of short posts. If he keeps this up he may maintain his position, just ahead of Joel Watts who has a similar posting pattern. But if Gentle Wisdom only needs to double its number of visits this month, to follow up its sixfold increase last month, then that #1 biblioblogger spot is by no means secure. Watch out, Jim West, here comes Gentle Wisdom!

Memories of Mary Gardner

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I met John and Ruth Hamilton at a campsite in the south of France in 1987. I also met, among others, a quiet Scottish woman called Mary Gardner. At the time we were all considering joining Wycliffe Bible Translators. Mary, John and Ruth, and I became members within the next few years, and we all spent several years overseas involved with Bible translation work. We would meet one another every now and then as our paths crossed at the UK Wycliffe Centre. I left Wycliffe in 2002. but continued to work on Bible translation until 2008. John and Ruth are still members, now based in Northern Ireland. And Mary Gardner went to be with the Lord just over a week ago, the sole victim of a bomb blast in Jerusalem.

STEP meal time - Mary Gardner on the left with the long red hairJohn Hamilton has now posted his memories of Mary, including some pictures from that camp in the south of France. As he also names me, that has prompted me to recognise publicly that I knew Mary. In John’s photo which I have reproduced here, I think the top of my head is visible at the back right. And there, on the left with long red hair, is Mary as I first knew her.

I don’t have anything else to add to what John, Eddie Arthur and several others have written about Mary. I just want to honour the memory of this dedicated woman who tragically lost her life while serving the Lord, but is now in a better place.