I was raised in the Church of England & trained at a C of E seminary. This vote breaks my heart. It rejects the authority of scripture & far from blessing people who (like me) experience same-sex attraction it points them toward unrepentant sin that bars people from God's kingdom

https://twitter.com/EvangelicalsNow/status/1724828484474712407

It's not an agree-to-disagree issue or something on which scripture is unclear. I'm writing a book examining 10 arguments for same-sex marriage & none of them hold water. Read the Greek & Hebrew. Look at cultural context. Chart the scriptural trajectory. The Bible is still clear.

Once upon a time, a there was a girl who went to Yale as an atheist in love with her high school girlfriend. But then she stole a copy of Mere Christianity, read it in the Yale library & put her trust in Jesus.

https://twitter.com/RachelGilson/status/1624751247902363664

She knew from the first that the Bible was against same-sex sexual relationships, & that following Jesus meant she could never marry another woman. But Jesus was more precious to her than following her heart romantically. She fell in love with the Bible & read it voraciously.

In 2019, I had the privilege of speaking with @timkellernyc at an equipping event for Christians in NYC. He'd introduced himself the year before at a TGC event & said kind words about my first book, & we talked once on the phone in preparation for our joint event. 1/4 What struck me in each of our conversations was his genuine humility. He clearly cared first & foremost about people knowing Jesus, not about his own achievements. He also communicated the kind of respect for me as a woman that comes from years of actually respecting women. 2/4

Some years ago, something my friend @RachelGilson said in a Q&A was taken out of context & used to wildly misrepresent her views on same-sex marriage for Christians. Apparently, this misrepresentation is still circulating, hence this statement👇

https://twitter.com/RachelGilson/status/1659227706754564096

I nearly said "hence this clarifying statement." But the reality is that Rachel has been clear all along. So, really, it's just a short statement for the benefit of anyone who hasn't taken time to read anything she's written on the subject, or listen to any talk she's given.

I'm thankful for this apology from @TGC president Julius Kim, re the extract from @butlerjosh forthcoming book. Before I knew of other people's public reactions, I & multiple other Keller Center fellows had expressed serious concern about the article 1/5
thegospelcoalition.org/article/sex-wo… both in terms of its theology & in terms of how it seems to locate a woman's "very self" in her reproductive organs. As I read more of Beautiful Union in the last week, I found other areas of significant disagreement & I don't think the book achieves what Josh was aiming for. 2/5

Last night, I watched Adele being interviewed by Oprah & saying she'd divorced her husband not because she didn't love him anymore, but because she wasn't "in love" with him anymore. Oprah said what a great message it was to women out there who also aren't 100% happily married. There is so much evidence to show that this is in fact a terrible message. Marriage is not about locking into a state of being perpetually "in love" with one's spouse. Marriage is about locking into a commitment to love someone precisely when you're not feeling all the feels.

5 years ago today, I had my first proper conversation with @RachelGilson. She'd been at my church for a year, but we didn't really talk until a mutual friend told us we should. Rachel shared how she had become a Christian. I was stunned. Her story was an answer to my prayers. Atheist girl at Yale breaks up with girlfriend & becomes evangelical Christian is the opposite of the popular narrative. After some gentle persuasion, Rachel wrote it up for @CTmagazine & it became one of the most read pieces of the year. christianitytoday.com/ct/2017/octobe…

Last night, my 11yo finished The Secular Creed. She started it on Monday & read it in two sittings. I didn't write it for 11yos. She had to ask me what "misogynistic expletives" meant. But it spoke to many things she hears about in middle school. Don't wait to disciple your kids! They need to know what the Bible says. They also need to know about the history of Christian sin. & they need to be able to distinguish what the Bible says from the history of Christian sin in order to navigate our cultural moment faithfully. It's real work.

My daughter's found another Christian friend at middle school. She's super excited. The other Christians in her grade are both Black girls & all the others we've found in the school are Black or Asian-American. We're working on starting an "affinity group" for them all to connect Many people see Christianity as the enemy of diversity, & God knows they have reasons for this. But the problem with the, e.g., the white 60s segregationists was not that they believed the Bible too much, but that they believed it far too little.

I'm distressed & disturbed by the murder of 8 precious human beings yesterday, including 6 women of Asian descent. Murder is always appalling. But we can't ignore the racial element here, nor can we trust the perpetrator to tell us if his crimes were racially motivated. The fact that there was clearly also a major gender violence element to the murders doesn't diminish the racial element. If anything, it compounds it. The sexual fetishizing of women of Asian descent is a terrible problem in itself.

I sort of met my husband on St Patrick's Day. We knew each other vaguely from church. I knew him as the loud American (we both lived in Cambridge UK at the time). He knew me as the girl who always wore knee high boots & could improvise answers in group Bible study. I went with 2 friends to an exchange dinner at his college & when we walked in I said, "I know that guy from church, we can sit with him." He asked how he could get tickets to the May Ball at my college. I asked if he could dance. He said yes. I said, "Then you can come with me."

Reading Exodus slowly with my kids has massively helped me to understand it myself.

While God is giving Moses all those careful descriptions of the tabernacle & of Aaron's role as priest, Aaron's down below making a golden calf. The sheer pathos of it. But rather than scrapping Aaron & picking another priest, God nonetheless ordains him. It reminds me of Peter denying Christ 3 times & *still* being a rock on which Christ would build his church.

God uses miserable failures like us.

BREAKING NEWS! Tonight at 8.30pm ET on IG, I'll be interviewing Australian historian Dr Sarah Irving Stonebraker, whose surprising story I told in Confronting Christianity.

We met when we were both PhD students at Cambridge, when she was still an atheist.
veritas.org/oxford-atheism… We'll be talking about the Christian foundations of human rights & our lack of moral foundation if we remove God from the equation. This was the driving force for Sarah's conversion & overlaps with her academic research.

Follow me on IG at @rebecc_mclaugh to listen in!

TODAY at 1pm ET, I'll be interviewing @esaumccaulley about his important & timely book, #readingwhileblack

You can join us on Instagram Live by following either me (@rebecc_mclaugh) or him (@esaumccaulley) on IG.

I'll also post a link to the video here after. I highly recommend you buy the book as well. Mine is desecrated with much underlining & I know I'll be coming back to it in future years. You may also want to buy one for a friend.
amazon.com/Reading-While-…

.@RachelGilson would like you all to know that I was today years old when I realized that the moon could be visible at any time of the day (or night). I'd always thought it was mostly a night thing, with occasional forays into the late afternoon. To any other sightings I have said, "How weird to see the moon! She must not have got the memo that it's not nighttime yet." Which goes to show that you can live a decently long & happy life while being blisteringly ignorant.

A little Labor Day story about my pastor, @curtisdcook

6 years ago, Bryan & I were renovating a house, with two small kids, & two new jobs & it was AWFUL.

One Sunday, I wrote on the prayer cards at church that everything was awful (see above). The next day, Bryan got a text from Curtis saying he had no particular expertise but would be glad to help with the renovation work any way he could.

On Wednesday night, he was at our house from 7pm to past 10pm helping Bryan set a bath.

You know that thing when one of the books you are reading quotes from the other?

I'm currently devouring @esaumccaulley's "Reading While Black" in the midst of rereading Richard Bauckham's "Jesus & the Eyewitnesses." If you're not familiar with Bauckham's book, he advances a brilliant argument that the Gospels are based on eyewitness testimony from named individuals. (In the case of John, he concludes, "very unfashionably, that an eyewitness wrote it." Gotta love that line.)

This is one of my favourite points in #ReadingWhileBlack so far. In 1 Timothy 2:1-2, Paul urges prayer for kings & those in authority. This is often quoted to silence criticism of leaders today. But as @esaumccaulley notes, in the immediate context, Paul critiques Roman practices Indeed, the idea that praying for someone entails never critiquing their actions makes no sense in any other context. For example, a pastor should absolutely pray for those under his care. But this doesn't mean he should never challenge them on their sin. Quite the reverse.

I'm working on a book about Christmas, so I'm spending some time in the beginnings of the Gospels & here's the thing:

You can't walk through the front door of *any* of the Gospels without getting hit over the head with Jesus's divinity. The "Jesus-was-a-good`teacher-but-never-claimed-to-be-God" hypothesis is dead on arrival in Matthew, Luke & John. So, what about Mark? Does it stand any chance in the Gospel that was written first?

Nope.

I find this extraordinary. There is zero question in my mind: having an affair should absolutely disqualify a pastor (or any Christian leader for that matter) from public ministry.

That's not because there isn't grace & forgiveness for repentant sinners. There absolutely is.

https://twitter.com/ChristianPost/status/1293599377777459202

But being forgiven does not mean you should be given spiritual authority over others again.

I'm not saying this to be judgmental. Any Christian leader who doesn't think they're vulnerable to catastrophic sin of this sort is a fool. But the qualifications for elders are clear.

Tonight, I stumbled upon my husband cuddled up with our almost 2yo son before bed & I had that jolt of joy I get when I see members of my family loving each other & I suddenly realized that must be how God feels when he sees believers loving each other. Pure, unadulterated joy. I've been thinking a lot recently about the glimpses of God's love we get in the relationships he's plumbed into human existence: parent/child, husband/wife, friend/friend. The scriptures tell us all of these are metaphors for how God loves his people.