How do I make sense of all this?

Most opinions on issues of the day are separated into two camps – and the two camps will be extreme opposites. Women preaching, divorce and re-marriage, same-sex attraction, singleness, politics and “the Christian vote”, masculinity, feminism – all of these can have extreme opposing views.

In one sense, rightly so. We should always examine and debate and be sure why we know what we know. It stops us becoming Christian-bots. It forces us to look and look again at the Bible, to be sure of our theology.

The trouble is, that a lot of the time these issues are not so much debated as screamed from opposing corners. This is a function of our time and how we disseminate and receive our information. Nearly three-quarters of us get at least some of our news from social media platforms. If you want to reach people, you have to reach them via social media. In our world of 7-odd billion people, 2.5 billion people use social media.

A function of this is that information has to be bite-sized which means it cuts out all the nuance from any opinion. Everyone is competing for the biggest audience so nuanced opinion doesn’t really get a look-in against more shocking click bait. Reasoned, loving debate gets drowned out by who can shout the loudest – and if you want to join the debate (even in a loving way), you find you have to shout louder than the other guys just to get heard.

This is a problem for us. Because normal messy Christians like me don’t know how to make sense of it. We sort of know what we think, but the arguments become dizzying, everyone is shouting, everyone is quoting Bible verses and the positions are becoming more and more entrenched. This erodes our confidence in what we think, in what we believe.

There are very good reasons for many opposing views on all these subjects. But most of us are just sitting in the middle trying to do life. For clarity, I spared no expense on creating the info-graphic below:

One of the things I want to use this blog for is to speak into this space – the space in the middle. We need good theology. We need our ministers and churches and our wise Christian friends. We also need nuance, compassion and humanity. In short, we need grace.

So, if there is something you want to talk about – lets talk about it. If there is something hurting you, confusing you or even exciting you – lets talk about it. Email, comment or message me and lets start talking about things that really matter to women. And lets talk with love and reason and respect.

Lets meet each other where we are.