st thomas' weekly bulletin letters
This is an archive of the St Thomas' "Weekly Bulletin" letters, written by Simon Manchester and other St Thomas' ministers.
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Dear Friends, If you had the time and inclination to listen to 1,000 sermons that are being preached today in various parts of the world you would find St Thomas’ sermons very different in content from most of the others. Even in many churches that are ‘using the Bible’ they would take our passages from today — Exodus, 2 Kings and Hebrews — and stress very different priorities. Most pulpits around the world could not preach on Exodus 5–7 without addressing ‘social issues’, 2 Kings 2 without an appeal for ‘good leadership’ or Hebrews 4 without announcing that God’s help is there to get us ‘out of our troubles’. So what makes us right — and are we just the arrogant smarty-pants? Let me try to answer that using the Exodus 5–7 passage — where God’s people are in slavery and where God will deliver them from Egypt. You can almost feel your pulse quicken when I tell you that there are an estimated 27 million people today in various forms of slavery. You can almost sense the relevance when I tell you that we should immediately take action for the: homeless, defenceless, unborn, asylum seekers (and of course there may well be action we should take). Many preachers today would jump from Exodus 5–7 straight to the enslaved in our world but they would be jumping away from the text. For God tells us exactly why He rescues His people in 2:24 and 3:16 and 6:4 and 6:7 (again and again and again) — it’s because they are His covenant people. Mike Raiter (‘Exploring Exodus’) warns the church of leaving God’s priority for His people (by which He will impact the nations) saying “the priority of the Scriptures is the poor of the covenant people of God. It is surprising then that most Christian social justice agencies take pride in the fact that they are completely impartial in their distribution of aid when in fact the Bible explicitly directs us to be partial.” Again he warns that “(even) the history of evangelicalism since the 1960’s … has been a movement away from a traditional prioritising of evangelism … to a commitment to holistic mission [meeting all the needs] … now … entrenched … as the new evangelical paradigm.” The “holistic mission advocates” look on traditional evangelicals as “armchair theologians” who ignore the whole person. In fact the traditional evangelicals have always cared for the whole person and been courageous to tell the gospel — which the new holistic advocates often hide away in their desire to be (falsely) kind. We desperately need a new generation of Christians who believe that the chains of sin are much more serious than even the claims of poverty and physical need — just as we need a new generation of Christians who are bigger in the Word than they are in the world and don’t read out of their Bibles what the world is telling them to. Yours in fellowship, Simon Manchester
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