CrossPoint Community News 09/13/2024

Brothers and Sisters in Christ, 

     Greetings from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary! This week, I am at my penultimate (second to last) cohort of the Ockenga Fellows Program. This program is for mid-career pastors to learn and discuss issues that affect our congregations and how we can handle these topics pastorally.
     In the first round, we covered topics like Art, Technology, Medicine, etc. I am presently in the second year of the second round. We have covered Christianity in a Post-Christian culture, Race Relations, Environmental Justice, and this week we are talking about Human Sexuality. Yesterday morning, we talked with one of my former professors, Dr. Timothy Tennent about a book he wrote called “For the Body.” He wrote a theology of the body because he saw that many different issues were connected to our being enfleshed (in the body). He talked about how the fact that we were created by God puts a high value on our bodies. Our bodies are not inherently bad; they are a gift from God, though they have been marred by sin. Our bodies are also relational – we come into the world through the body of our mothers and we grow up in family systems. Marriage and Celibacy are both relational categories – one pointing to the creation order, the other pointing to the eschatological realities (we won’t be married or given in marriage in heaven – Matt. 22:30). Our bodies are also sacramental – we bring the presence of God with us into the world. We get to be his hands and his feet, even in our mundane, ordinary tasks of life – like washing dishes or cleaning a room or taking out the trash. We can do these things in order to benefit others around us.
     We are also talking about a faithful Christian response to homosexuality and pornography and sex trafficking. We also read a book about how we got to a point, as a culture, where transgenderism is even possible (since it would’ve been handled very differently 50 years ago).
     My hope is that you can thank God for your body and that you are living a self-controlled, upright, and godly life in the present age (Titus 2:12). If you want to talk about these topics, I’d love to talk with you more about them!

Please continue to pray for the nations of Israel and Ukraine and South Sudan. Pray that the wars would end. Here is a suggested list of prayers if you are at a loss for words in how to pray: https://send.org/story/hh_pray_for_ukraine. And https://worldrelief.org/blog-prayer-for-israel-and-gaza/ Thank you for kneeling on behalf of the people of Ukraine and Russia, Israel and Gaza, Sudan and South Sudan, and taking a stand (or a knee in prayer) against the forces of darkness in this present age.