JustThinking | possibility of holiness

I‘ve been reading a few classics on holiness. Samuel Logan Brengle’s When the Holy Ghost is Come and Hannah Whitall Smith’s The Christian’s Secret Of A Happy Life, to be specific.

Now, holiness is a difficult topic to approach without creating heat - and unfortunately it’s not the Holy Spirit kind. I understand why. I suffer from the same fate as many, I’m afraid. I fear many things, among them typical stuff like spiders and sharks… but when it comes to spiritual truth, I’m scared of bigger things.

Talk of holiness scares the hell out of me. I’m afraid that I’ll claim something impossible. I’m afraid that I’ll relinquish my will to some sort of holy cloning that will render me uninteresting and bland. I’m afraid that God’s will for my life might be, well, less then what I’d hoped. I’m afraid of my own sinful nature and the power it seems to have over me.

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JustThinking | prostitution 3

Gunilla rocks | Danielle Strickland

Gunilla Ekberg the Swedish social reformer who introduced brand new legislation into the country that has upheld the rights of women and virtually eliminated the need for prostitution suggests that two things are necessary to change nations.  Nation changers pay attention:

1. Imagine a better world. You can’t do what you can’t imagine. Every good athlete knows this. Apparently every good social reformer does as well. Mohammad Yunis, founder of Grameen Bank and 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner echoes the sentiment in his acceptance speech.

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JustThinking | prostitution 2

Banishing wickedness | Danielle Strickland

William Booth said ‘salvationism is simply this: the banishment of wickedness from the earth.’ Wow. Storm the forts of darkness - let’s bring them down.

We’ve come a long way baby. Now, most Salvationists have joined the rest of the evangelical church in a holy huddle, hidden in fancy buildings trying to protect themselves from Dr. Evil until Super Jesus comes back to save the day. I’m not sure when that rapture stuff started to invade the church but boy was that a cunning ploy of the enemy. Let’s just get the Christians on the defense - strike fear in their hearts and watch them hide. It’s pathetic. Try this experiment - find the darkest place you can think of in your area… then go and stand there. If you stand there and listen you will hear the darkness tremble… the darkness doesn’t tremble at you - it trembles at the kingdom you carry. That’s right… the Kingdom of God is within you - you may recognize Jesus but the enemy knows Him by name.

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JustThinking | the ghetto rant

The Married Women’s Ghetto
by Captain Danielle Strickland

So here’s the rub. There were many married women officers at the most recent High Council, and not one of them was nominated to be General. Do we think that out of all the women officers represented at the High Council, only single women have the gift of leadership? Are married women less capable, less inspiring, less able? Most would insist, with some trepidation, that no married women possess the experience necessary for the office of General. The rough part is this: they would be right. This problem is the result of what might be called “the women’s ghetto of The Salvation Army”.

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JustThinking | prostitution

Victims or whores | Danielle Strickland

I‘ve been immersed recently in prostitution legislation. A year and a half ago I was neck high in a raging debate around the legalising of prostitution in Canada. Some very vocal proponents were upholding the ‘rights of women’ to prostitute themselves. After all - it is their body. This neo-liberal feminism (far from the classic feminism that spear-headed abolition, women voting and the rights of children around the world) suggests that prostitution isn’t oppression but a profession and should be dignified with proper acceptance, education and wages - with protection of workers rights. There is a classic case of a ‘co-operative brothel’ operating right now (albeit illegally) in Victoria, BC on the west coast of Canada.

The problem is that the rhetoric around legalising prostitution sounds pretty good (in promised form anyway): a society that no longer judges women or uses morality as a grid to punish those who don’t adopt a pure lifestyle, billed as a liberation and a right. It makes opposing it sound like a puritanical rant against the freedom of women. You’d think the only people left opposing legalizing prostitution were a bunch of old- fashioned, purist holy rollers trying to save poor lasses from the den of iniquity and the fires of hell.

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JustThinking | sinner friend

Who do you spend your time with?

Evangelism is hard. I’m not sure the exact science of why it’s hard but I have some ideas.  I think it’s because we feel like car salesmen or vacuum cleaner folks – who force our way into people’s homes and try to pitch a deal and get them to sign up before the hour is over.

I remember my friend telling me of her revelation of God as a ‘friend of sinners’.  She asked God for sinners and he said he didn’t trust her with his friends. Interesting. Think about the salesmen who asked you for a list of your friends… I bet you made up the names and numbers?!

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JustThinking | living sacrifices

… or lukewarm dead beats? asks Danielle Strickland

I heard some teaching recently about Romans 12… the chapter on faith beginning and lived out - I mean, it is a full chapter.

Kierkegaard said that the ‘living sacrifice’ thing could be considered insanity. Faith, he suggested, made absolutely no sense… he referred to the story of Abraham and Isaac when God asked Ab to sacrifice the most important thing in his life (the promised child, his future, his life, his blood… the ultimate sacrifice). Soren (Kierkegaard) suggested this is absolutely insane. Bonhoeffer on the other hand said, “when Jesus bids a man, he bids him ‘come and die’.”

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JustThinking | liberate your latte

Fairtrade rant by Danielle Strickland

I can’t really get over the fact that fairtrade is such a hard sell to western Christians. It’s actually quite irritating. I mean – it’s about developing world labourers receiving a fair price for their product… it’s about a hand up instead of hand out… it’s about equality and re-distribution and about modeling a different way to do business. How could your average Christian not support it?  It’s basically the Kingdom lived out… yet, here is a sample of responses I get as I promote fairtrade as one way (albeit a small one) of acting justly:

• It doesn’t taste good. This is rubbish (this is Australian for silly, dumb-witted, nonsensical and idiotic). There are many different brands of fairtrade… now, if the one you’ve tasted was from about 20- years ago or so when fairtrade was blatantly a martyr type action, then I would relent but now, there is such a variety of fairtrade blends that you’d have to be willfully ignorant to miss them.

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