The South Island Pastors' Conference took place last week in Mosgiel, at the East Taieri Presbyterian Church. The main speaker was Steve Graham, the Dean of the Bible College in Christchurch.
I'll be mentioning other books and articles Steve spoke about, but let's start with one that's available on the Net. It's called Teaching a Calvinist to Dance. A couple of quotes:
It can be a little intimidating in a Reformed context to admit that one is Pentecostal. It's a bit like being at the ballet and letting it slip that you're partial to NASCAR and country music. Both claims tend to clear a room. And yet I happily define myself as a Reformed charismatic, a Pentecostal Calvinist.
I started a master's degree in philosophical theology at the Institute for Christian Studies, a graduate school in the Dutch Reformed tradition at the University of Toronto. So my week looked a bit odd: Monday to Friday I was immersed in the intellectual resources of the Reformed tradition, diving into the works of Calvin, Kuyper, and Dooyeweerd.
Steve talked about brokenness in leadership too, but perhaps more of his focus was on the need for Presbyterians to work more in the middle area of the supernatural-this-worldly, in other words, not being content to live just in the natural, with the supernatural as something for the future next world, but to live with a sense of the supernatural in our everyday lives. (This is sometimes called the Flaw of the Excluded Middle.)
We'll look at these other areas further in other posts.
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