Tag Archive - church

On Jesus’ Choosing Twelve Males

February 3, 2012 in Bible Thoughts with 20 Comments

I know that many of you wake up on Fridays eager for the weekly Karl Barth post. I hate to put you off another day, but today I have something a bit more pressing to take care of.

Yesterday, I posted the first of two responses I wanted to make to John Piper’s description of Christianity as a “masculine” religion. Rachel Held Evans has issued the summons for replies, and I think this is an important moment to inject a more biblically sound reading of gender issues in the church. Thanks, Rachel, for stirring us to positive response.

Today’s issue has to do with the significance of Jesus’ choosing of twelve men to be his disciples. This is one of several issues I take up in Jesus Have I Loved, but Paul?.

The story within which this selection of the twelve is embedded leads us to draw a very different point from Piper’s.

Jesus chooses twelve men. These twelve Jesus specially commissions. Jesus came preaching, casting out demons, and healing. The disciples are sent to preach and heal and cast out demons.

Jesus comes proclaiming and inaugurating the reign of God, and these men are sent out to participate in that coming. When Jesus feeds the 5,000, he hands the bread to them. They are the chosen. They are the insiders.

In contrast (let’s stick to Mark’s Gospel here), the women in the story are marginal. There are small handfuls of nameless women. They touch Jesus’ robe, they ask for healing for their daughters, they throw a few coins in a box in the temple, they anoint Jesus’ head with oil.

So while the women are coming in and going out, acting on faith and finding praise for their faith, it’s the boys who are getting it done!

Getting it done, that is, right up until the great, transitional moment in the story.

“Who do you say that I am?” “You are the Christ.” Ok, so far so good. Then, Jesus begins to tell them what this title entails: “The Messiah must be rejected, suffer, and die. Then he’ll be raised.”

Peter rebukes Jesus. Jesus rebukes him back: “Get behind me Satan.”

What happens then?

Move on to ch. 9, and the disciples who had been empowered to exorcise are unable to cast out a demon. The disciples who had been given the charge to proclaim cannot overcome the mute-making spirit.

Later that same chapter Jesus again predicts his death. The disciples’ reaction? They walk along debating with each other about who is going to be greatest in God’s coming kingdom.

We begin to see what they don’t get about Jesus’ ministry: the cross turns the economy of the world on its head. They have a standard of greatness that entails a certain kind of leadership and power, but Jesus wants to transform their ideas. He wants them to see greatness in the cross and the child.

As if Mark, or Jesus, thought we might miss the point, we get the whole thing a third time.

Jesus predicts his death, and this time the subsequent response of the disciples is James’ and John’s request to sit at Jesus’ right and left hand. Again, Jesus has to combat not merely the request, but the wrongheaded assumption about what greatness in the kingdom of God looks like:

Jesus called them over and said, “ You know that the ones who are considered the rulers by the Gentiles show off their authority over them and their high-ranking officials order them around. But that’s not the way it will be with you. Whoever wants to be great among you will be your servant. Whoever wants to be first among you will be the slave of all, for the Human One didn’t come to be served but rather to serve and to give his life to liberate many people.” (Mark 10:42-44, CEB)

In the story, the disciples do not understand what is entailed in leading the people of God. They think it is about greatness and power rather than service and death.

And so, we have the group represented by Peter. The rock. Is being “the rock” a good thing? In Mark, the rocky soil indicates plants that spring up well, but fall away when danger or persecution arise on account of the word. Mark repeats the language of “falling away” when the disciples scatter, leaving Jesus to die alone.

The Twelve were committed to Jesus, and happy with him–but only as one who came with power. They had no faith in their calling to participate in his way of death. They did not have eyes to see that the ministry of Jesus turned the economy of the world on its head.

Shall we return to the women now?

How are we to assess these women who, in the narrative world, are outsiders, on the margins?

Unlike the disciples who are rebuked for being of little faith, Jesus commends these women as having great faith: “Daughter, go in peace, your faith has made you well.”

Moreover, there is one episode where Jesus ties a human inseparably to the gospel story. It is the episode of the woman who pours out oil over Jesus’ head. This looks to be a royal anointing! But when Jesus defends her he says, “Leave her alone, she has prepared my body beforehand for burial.”

The act of anointing prepares Jesus for burial: Messiahship and death are held together, and here is the only person in the whole story to get it. This is why “wherever the gospel is preached what she has done will also be told in memory of her.”

What does it mean to live at the margins, to be unnamed? How does this compare with being the twelve, the dudes, the insiders?

According to the economy of the world, with its measures of greatness, to be the twelve is to be exemplary, in the place to lead, to exclude others from leadership, to stand close to Jesus and guard the gates of who else can draw near.

And to the extent that we look to Jesus’ selection of them, and the apparent marginalization of the women, as paradigmatic for male leadership in the church, we show ourselves to be people whose minds have not yet been transformed by the very story to which we are appealing.

It is only by agreeing with the disciples’ way of assessing the world that we can see their “insider status” as a true insider status, to be replicated by other men in church history.

Jesus offers another way: You guys don’t get it! It’s the rulers of the Gentiles who lord authority over people. It shall not be so among you.

There is another way. It is the way of the cross.

There is another way. It is the way of the “marginalized” in the worlds eyes lying closest to Jesus in faith and understanding.

Are we really supposed to hold up as our model the “Satan” who denied the gospel of the crucified Christ, and claim that Peter is paradigmatic of the place of men as insiders and faithful leaders in the church?

Or should we not seek out the one who did the good deed for Jesus, holding together Messiah and death from her place at the margins? Should we not seek out the one who sought out Jesus merely to touch the fringe of his garment and learn from her what it means to walk in faith?

The irony of appealing to the boys as insiders is that in so doing we show ourselves to be adopting the boys’ understanding of power, privilege, and leadership in the kingdom.

And this view is roundly rebuked by Jesus in words of dissuasion and the work of the cross.

Imaging the Biblical God

February 2, 2012 in Bible Thoughts with 42 Comments

Rachel Held Evans has drawn attention to John Piper’s recent declarations that Christianity has a masculine feel, and that this is, of course, great news for everyone–even women, whose feminine feel isn’t, apparently, part of what God intended for Christianity.

Piper’s point is that God intentionally depicted Himself in masculine imagery, and that this sets the character for what Christianity is: God is Father and Son, God is King not queen.

In this post I want to outline some ways that scripture leads us to see that Piper’s view is selective to the point of being misleading. Tomorrow I want to tackle a much more serious issue: the way that Piper reads the Gospels as underpinning his theology demonstrates a fundamental failure to understand the stories themselves.

The very first indication we get in scripture of how the nature of God maps onto human gender is Genesis 1. When God creates humanity in God’s own image, we read, “Male and female he created them.”

This is significant for two reasons. First, in what is the clearest connection of God to human gender, perhaps the only clear and intentional such connection in all of scripture, it is both male and female, together, who mirror God to the world.

This means that a “masculine” church or a church with a “masculine feel” is inherently lacking in its ability to reflect the image of God to the world.

But Genesis 1 isn’t simply about “being like” God in some general way.

To bear the image of God is to be the person to whom God has entrusted the rule of the world on God’s behalf. The purpose of humanity, “Let them rule the world on our behalf,” is inseparable from the categorization of these creatures as those made “in the image of God.”

In other words: it is not merely as humans that we reflect God together as male and female, but as those who rule over the world as male and female we bear the image of God. The kind of rule God has in mind is not a “masculine” rule, but a masculine plus feminine, male plus female, rule. Only this kind of shared participation in representing God’s reign to the world is capable of doing justice to the God whose image we bear.

Another dynamic of God, as God is reflected in the story of ancient Israel, is worth considering. As a religion without official goddesses, it falls to the one God to do the typically “feminine” duty of ensuring fertility.

In the ancient world, where being a woman was specially tied to bearing, nurturing, and rearing children, feminine images of God (and, of course, goddesses) were often tied to either literal or figurative bearing and nurturing of a people and/or of children.

This may lend some credibility to the idea that when the OT speaks of God as El-Shaddai. Although this is sometimes translated “God almighty,” other options have been suggested, including “God of the mountain.” But it’s worth noting that El-Shaddai is a term that appears in tandem with the covenant blessing of seed, offspring.

In Gen 17:1, God self-identifies as El-Shaddai and then institutes the covenant of circumcision which is tied to the covenant promise of offspring. Why does Genesis 35:11 say, “I am El-Shaddai, be fruitful and multiply” (cf. Gen 28:3)? Why this title for the God of fruitfulness and multiplication?

It has been argued that El-Shaddai is less a reference to God as all-powerful and more a reference to God as the one who grants fertility.

Genesis 49:25 reads:

by God, your father, who supports you,
by the Almighty (shaddai) who blesses you
with blessings from the skies above
and blessings
from the deep sea below,
blessings from breasts (shadayim) and womb.

It has been argued that Shaddai is related to the Hebrew word for breasts. Although alternative translation of “shaddai” has been “God of the mountains”–as someone who lives in a city with “twin peaks,” it seems to me that the options of “God of the mountains” and “God of the breasts” are not mutually exclusive.

In Gen 49:25 we may very well have an intentional juxtaposition of God as Father and God as nursing mother. The God of Israel is the God of womb and breast as much as this is the God of war and rain.

El Shaddai is the God who makes God’s people fruitful and multiples them. This is the God of fertility.

Good on the bra, but more "mountains" needed...

And so, when we see the Son appear in all His glory in Revelation, we are, perhaps, not entirely surprised to find this:

“His breasts are girt up with a golden girdle” (Revelation 1:13)

Ok, we are surprised to find it. So surprised, in fact, that the translations won’t have it! But mastoi are breasts. (Thanks are due to Jesse Rainbow for his article on the Son of Man’s breasts in JSNT 30 [2007] 249-53.) The great warrior king of Revelation? It’s the Son of Man, prepared to be nursing mother.

So when Paul says that he and his fellow apostles were present among the Thessalonians like a nurse or mother, perhaps we should understand that there is something distinctly “feminine” about leading the church of God. And, that this femininity is part of what it means to bear the image of God and manifest the presence of Christ.

Who is the Father of our Bible? Who is the Son? It is not only the king and conqueror, but the nurturer and nourisher, the one who cares for and holds close. Not only (I should say, stereotypically) “masculine” but also the (stereotypically) feminine.

It is the God who is only rightly and fully imaged as male and female. Together.

Christmas Contagion

December 30, 2011 in Bible Thoughts, Culture with 9 Comments

Jesus came with more than his fair share of surprises. Among these was his power to reverse contagion.

“Contagion” is a fancy way of talking about something being contagious. In particular, we talk about contagion as how things become “unclean.”

If an unclean object comes into contact with a clean object, the clean becomes unclean. Uncleanness is more powerful than the cleanness an object might carry around.

Priests are holy and eminently clean. But they can’t go into the same room with a dead person: the unclean dead defiles the living clean.

Jesus messed all this up.

Jesus came and touched the unclean, declaring to them, “You are cleansed.”

The unclean leprosy did not defile Jesus. The purifying touch of Jesus cleansed the leper.

How relevant is any of this to us? After all, we don’t live in a world whose boundaries are marked by laws of purity and impurity. We don’t come to a temple for cleansing.

But, in general, Christians still struggle with the fear that we will be defiled by the unclean.

A few years ago I was gently ribbing a friend on Facebook who was describing their “quiet evening at home,” on October 31. They had gotten some candy, bobbed for apples, sipped some hot cider, made a bonfire.

Two things were equally clear: (1) they were celebrating Halloween. (2) They weren’t calling it Halloween because it’s a pagan holiday.

See also: every church that allegedly has a “Harvest Festival” even though nobody in our post-industrial age even knows what difference an ingathering of food would make compared to any other day of the year.

Christmas presents similar problems for us. We get all bent about Christmas celebrations that are less than what we would idealize as “Christian.” Many of us get worked about taking Christ out of Christmas and the like.

And so we’ve resorted to believing that the power of the world’s contagion, the power of the world’s uncleanness, is an overwhelming power to be feared, rather than being willing to embrace, participate with, and (either literally or figuratively) rubbing shoulders with the non-believing world around us.

Jesus is more powerful than the forces of the world that would defile us.

There is no power in non-Christian music or movies or celebrations that the cleansing power of the resurrected Christ (who is Lord over all) cannot overcome and purify.

So lighten up. Proclaim Christ. Worship Jesus in that old tavern or Masonic lodge or Druid temple if you’re fortunate enough to get the space.

He whose purifying power we bear is greater.

Christianity as Community

December 23, 2011 in Bible Thoughts, Jesus Have I Loved with 1 Comment

Is Christianity just about my personal relationship with God? Is that what Paul thought?

Read more about Christianity as Community in this free sample chapter.

The full book, of course, is for the having at Amazon, et al.

Rachel Held Evans: Prophesying Daughters

December 13, 2011 in Bible Thoughts, blogging with 0 Comments

If you have not yet read Rachel Held Evans’s post, “Your Daughters will Prophesy,” now is the time. Off you go.

Are You Willing?

November 18, 2011 in Bible Thoughts, Church with 3 Comments

If you want change, you have to be willing to give up everything.

Yesterday we had some great conversation at the Newbigin House of Studies’ “Leadership for the Church in Mission” conference. N. T. Wright gave a couple of talks that engaged biblical theology with an eye toward the place of the church in our current culture.

Image: Danilo Rizzuti / FreeDigitalPhotos.net


During the panel of which I was a part, George Hunsberger made the point that the missional church conversation calls us to be willing to put everything on the table, to be willing to reassess all of our structures, all that we do.

Later in the conversation, Pamela Wilhelms reflected on why it is so difficult for us to speak truth to power: power pays our salaries. The church that is separate from the state is funded by the people who give their money, who are in leadership in the major corporations–the major corporations who account for 1/2 of the world’s top 100 economies.

Are we willing to go about the dangerous business of calling everything to account?

The conversation we had gave me pause.

We were a bunch of church- or seminary-funded religious professionals. We were talking as though the purpose of theological education is to serve the church.

Is that it? Or is the purpose of theological education to serve the world in which the church finds itself? Have we gotten it out of our heads, yet, that the missional calling of the church tells us that our identity is to be sent out into the world even as the son was sent into the world?

Are we willing to allow our rethought theology to call our own power and institutions into question?

Or when we talk about movements such as “Fresh Expressions” in the U.K., are we going to see the fact that they come up with a somewhat standard form of worship as an indication that we’ve been in the right all along and therefore don’t need to rethink anything for a new generation? Or will we be willing to let go of the power and control that comes from being those established in power, perhaps even admitting that we cannot do what we’ve always done and see the church or kingdom thrive in a new generation?

There are lots of great conversations going on, there is lots of good theology being kicked around, and the practitioners are doing good, faithful work.

But are we willing to change everything for the Kingdom, even if it means a loss of power or place or income?

These are the challenges that rumble about in my mind as I reflect on a day of missional conversation.

Does Deborah Help?

September 26, 2011 in Bible Thoughts with 13 Comments

I am 100% supportive of women’s full participation in the ministry of the church. If your church ordains, it should be ordaining women. If your church has teachers, women should teach. If your church has elders, your women should so participate in the church’s “rule.”

But there’s one argument in favor of women’s full participation in the leadership of the people of God that I don’t find compelling. It’s the example of Deborah in the book of Judges.

Judges is a book replete with irony. The book as a whole (OT scholar types, please shelve your composition history theories for a few minutes, thanks) works by showing (a) how faithless Israel was; and (b) what losers the judges are, whom (c) God nevertheless uses to save Israel.

To take but one example: you know that great and awesome mighty warrior Gideon? He’s hailed as mighty warrior when he’s hiding in a wine vat. Hiding. And when he pulls down an altar he does it at night–when no one will see him. And that great golden fleece of his–that’s awesome! Until he takes the gold the people give him and make a golden fleece to worship. And then there’s his tremendous humility in not accepting the people’s acclamations of him as king–right… and then he names his kid Abimelech: “my father is king.”

There are no heroes in the book of judges. The judges are not examples to be followed, but pointers toward the necessity of a different kind of rule for the people of Israel.

So when Deborah comes along and serves as judge, we should be cautious about seeing this as normative.

The fight into which she ends up leading the people is a fight that should have been waged by Barak. When he is too afraid to go out and fight, she says she will go with him. But in consequence of, literally, hiding behind the skirts of Deborah, Barak will not gain honor from his victory: “for YHWH will hand Sisera over to a woman” (Judges 4:9).

The prominent place of women in the story is part of how the narrator is communicating how far Israel has fallen. When the men have not the faith to lead like they should, then God can even hand over Israel’s enemies by the hand of a woman. The prominence of women is a source of shame to the man who should be the prominent victor in the story.

In all, the book of Judges shows Israel what its life should be like by depicting things as bad as they could be. The era of judges is the time when there was no king in Israel and everyone did what was right in their own eyes. Israel needs a king.

The indications of gender equality are few and far between in scripture, and the New Testament itself sets us on a trajectory toward embracing one another as equals before God without ever fully attaining to a vision of such equality itself. There are some really good ways to get to gender equality in scripture, but I’m not sure that Deborah, falling as she does in the book of Judges, is much help.

You?

Authority, Scripture, Creed

September 16, 2011 in Barth Dogmatics Reading with 4 Comments

Blogsphere confessional: I realize that I am often not at my best when I am trying to work out the relationships among bible, theology, and church authority. I do too much “not this but that” rather than “this and also that.” The whole project of reading through the Church Dogmatics was meant, in part, to keep me wrestling with and appreciating good theology.

In §20, Barth is wrestling with the very issues that have been driving me insane for the past decade or so: where does church authority come from? What does it mean and look like to have scripture as ultimate authority? What does this mean for our confessions about the canon as it stands? And what does it mean for the creeds that speak to us of what the church has said defines it and its beliefs?

This section is beautiful, because Barth the dogmatician (i.e., the one who seeks to say within the church what the church is truly saying about God) demands that we not surrender for one minute the Reformation principle that the Bible as the word of God is the church’s authority. This means that the authority will not be shared or usurped by church or creed.

And, it is only within the church that we meet this Bible as a Bible, as holy scripture; and before we could even say anything good or ill about a creed it must come to us as the church’s proclamation that this is what it believes.

Barth manages to advocate a hermeneutical spiral that deals with the reality of the church as the primary locus of God’s speech and as the primary mediators of the word, that deals with the reality of the Bible as something that is only the book it is because of the church, while demanding that we never lose our evangelical and Protestant moorings by allowing the church to have either a final word over the scriptures, or even a co-equal word alongside it.

Let me try that again: the canon (!), church, and creeds are important, but are always subject to correction and stand under the authority of scripture as the word of God.

But this authority of scripture is a derivative authority. It is only because Jesus is Lord that the Christian Bible has authority (§20.1). For there even to be a church is not to have a bunch of people sitting around reading the Bible. The Society of Biblical Literature is not the church. Where the church really is the church it is a people living in obedient relationship to Jesus Christ.

One reason I trust Barth is that he keeps demanding that people be actively responding to the story of Jesus if they are going to claim for themselves the prerogative of bearing the name of the church. Where the more recent conservative move has been to say that we have the word in the Bible itself, and therefore as the possessors and readers and expositors of the word we are the emissaries of God, Barth suggests the reverse.

To be the people of God is not to posses and master the Word, but to be possessed and mastered by it.

To be in the presence of scripture is not to have laid hold of what is pristine and to derive one’s validity from that possession. It is to be in the presence of something human in every sense that the word “human” conveys in a fallen world: limited, fragile, sinful. And yet, it is also be in the presence of something that, though very human, is the instrument that God in God’s grace chooses in order to speak and draw and otherwise mediate the authority of the resurrected Lord Jesus.

Christ sits enthroned above all, and God speaks this Word through the word that is scripture. The word has authority because of this dynamic use to which God puts it, to which we believe he puts it, as God calls us to obey. And the church’s own authority rests under both of these: the written word which mediates and the God who speaks through it.

More needs to be said about how this relates to church authority and creeds in particular. But the focus on word, and obeying the word, rather than believing a creed or submitting to a church, enables Barth to cultivate a vision for what the church is, what Christianity is, that has an inherent ethic.

This has the power to overcome the failure that has beset the church in general and Protestantism in particular for most of its history.

“The existence of the church of Jesus Christ stands or falls with the fact that it obeys as the apostles and prophets obeyed their Lord. It stands or falls with the known and actual antithesis of man and revelation, which cannot be reversed, in which man receives, learns, submits, and is controlled, in which he has a Lord and belongs to Him wholly and utterly.”

Yes. That.

Now, how do we define Church and Christian such that this kind of obedience lies at the core of its identity?

Psalms in the Story

August 13, 2011 in Bible Thoughts, Church with 1 Comment

The community we have been worshiping with on Sunday nights, Eucharist, is about to launch a series on the psalms. Here are some slightly modified reflections I put together for the weekly newsletter on reading the psalms as part of the larger story of scripture:

“Let my whole being bless the Lord! Let everything inside me bless his holy name!” (Psalm 103:1, CEB).

This verse captures one of the most crucial dynamics of the psalms. We enter into the presence of God, and with all that we are we join in praise to the God who is worthy of glory and honor.

But if you delve deeper into the psalms, you discover that this is only one section of a much larger canvass.

The psalms are not only about me, they are about us. We come together to sing praises to God as a people with whom God has made covenant. The plurality of our voices is one dynamic that makes our praise acceptable before God. God sees and hears us as a people whose voices come together as one in order to express the oneness that we have as God’s people in Christ.

But even putting our individual praise within the chorus of God’s people does not take in enough of the picture. Because God is the God of all creation. Our songs are embedded in a cosmic drama that includes the harmony of nature and the praise of angelic host as well.

Perhaps the most surprising part of this cosmic song is that, often, we are given the lead. In our songs we not only praise God, but call one another to sing; we call the other people of the earth to sing with us; and we even call the heavenly host to join in our praise.

We, human beings, are given the role of calling the angelic host to praise the God in whose presence they stand day and night.

Read through the psalms and you’ll see a lot of this cosmic picture. So what happens to this great, majestic chorus when we recognize that all is not right with the world?

In songs of lament, we not only remind the earthly and heavenly creatures to render to God what God is due, but we actually remind God to faithfully care for the world that God has created and to look after the people who bear God’s image.

In the psalms, all the world, in all its facets, is lifted up in song before the face of God. And this includes not only its wonders, but even its brokenness.

Church and Seminary

August 4, 2011 in Academia, Church with 17 Comments

Over at the Call and Response Blog, Carol Howard Merritt has a post reflecting on seminary-church relations. Specifically, what does someone in the church see form outside, looking into seminary-land, that gives pause when it comes to donating money?

She raises three points:

  1. Seminary organizational structures appear bloated to church professionals who often make due with very little in the way of staffing resources.
  2. Pastors are concerned with seminary student loan debt–are seminaries?
  3. Seminary profs should be encouraged to publish more for broad audiences

What do you think of these assessments of the seminary from “outside”?

Here are my thoughts:

(1) The first one is tricky. Quite often, schools that act like small schools that cannot afford top-notch staffing end up acting like second-rate schools as part of their culture. They end up not being able to recruit top-tier faculty or students. And, due to their inability to offer the same services (directly tied to administrative overhead) or caliber of scholarship (indirectly tied through a culture of being second rate), they can neither recruit students well nor convince people to give them the money that might enable them to act like a top-tier school.

Putting it somewhat differently, sometimes the very things that make an institution look like it’s too bloated for a donator on a tight budget are the very things that make an institution attractive to folks with large budgets and large organizations.

(2) Absolutely. I think that the reality of student loan debt is one that we as seminary faculty and administrators have to start taking much more seriously. There is, perhaps, a catch-22 here as well. A couple of the things that need to happen in order for cost burden to go down have to do with what’s worth giving money to. It seems it’s easier to raise money for buildings than student scholarships. And it seems that people are often drawn to schools with greater facilities that create significant infrastructure costs.

But I agree, and think that in raising money there should be a couple of focuses that might translate into gradual, long-term tuition reductions. First, commit to reducing overhead through faculty endowment. Endow a chair to pay for the faculty who is already present. (Is that possible? Do people give money if it doesn’t come with the promise of recruiting some new hot-shot?) Second, commit to reducing student burden through scholarship endowment.

Of course, this ties the costs of education more directly into the markets. And, as many schools can tell you in the wake of 2008, this is no sure way to alleviate student debt load. However, judging by the difference in what (for example) Princeton Seminary students were bearing in debt load and what my fellow classmates were bearing when I graduated from Westminster (Machen, couldn’t you have brought a few million over with you when you left, for crying out loud?!), this is an important facet of reducing debt that people will not earn enough to pay off in the fields for which we are preparing them.

(3) For some reason it does feel like we have to figure out what one audience we are going to write for. It’s tough to move back and forth between technical scholarly articles and broadly accessible books. I think CHM is right that we need to create seminary cultures in which producing for both worlds is the norm rather than the exception.

I see all three as great challenges for the seminary to do some serious soul-searching in terms of our calling to work for the church.

What do you think of her questions?

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