Shall we Sing a Song for you?

Saturday 24th September saw the second Stranraer GO Team take place. We gave out about 1700/1800 of the 2000 leaflets they had printed, mostly knocking on the doors and handing them to people. Pray that God will save people as they read the gospel presented on the leaflets, and that people would come out to church. Here’s some snaps:

Heather, Rachel Bond and Lorna getting ready to give out some leaflets

Rachel and Claire

Again

It’s a hard life!

Outside the church building, with Gerald Milligan at the far left

Their church building is wile big

This always fascinates me – the safe where they used to keep the Bible

The deadline for adding prayer requests for October is tomorrow, so if your CY hasn’t done so, please get it sorted! If you miss the deadline, you can email them to me up until the 30th. Well done to Airdrie and James Bun for adding requests so far. I see Airdrie are switching to the ESV.

Thanks to the kind folks at the Londonderry Sentinel:

Well, the poll was pretty comprehensive, with over 50% of people telling me not to get a red-letter edition Bible and only 2 people telling me I could justify getting one. Although a quarter of those who voted asked what would be wrong with getting a red-letter edition. Mark Loughridge has written about the issue on his blog, expanding on his comment that red-letter Bibles ‘are an insult to the Holy Spirit, harder to read, and probably wrong for Christians to use’.

The reason I created the poll was that I really wanted a small English Standard Version – but there is only about one type of small ESV out that doesn’t have the ‘words of Christ’ (ie the words He actually vocally spoke…in the New Testament) in red. Have a look at this page of ESV editions – there’s a shocking amount of them that are ‘red-letter only’. And I thought the boys who were translating the ESV were all strongly evangelical if not reformed. Although maybe it’s a publisher thing – but still they’re trying to market it to Evangelicals. It would be good to hear some thoughts from the ESV blog.

The reasons why I don’t like red-letter Bibles is, as Mark says, it implies that the words Jesus’ actually spoke are more inspired than the rest of the Bible. And what about the words of Jesus Christ in the Old Testament? In the psalms? What about passages like Joshua 5:13-6:7? – where Jesus Himself appeared and spoke to Joshua. Also, Peter told me that the reason they started putting the words of Christ in red was to do with His blood or something – weird…

We did give Titus some abuse over the summer for his Bible – telling him only to read the ‘more inspired’ stuff and all, but there I was, thinking that if he could get one I maybe could. Well I’ve been told otherwise!

Update: Here’s the story of how the red-letter editions came about. (Thanks Pete!)

Vote!

Callum will be among the speakers at 4 meetings held by the Christian Institute in two week’s time on the subject “Secularising Northern Ireland: How to defend Biblical values in our society”. The meetings all last from 8-9:45pm at:

Stranmillis Evangelical Presbyterian, Belfast – Mon 26th September
Portstewart Baptist – Tues 27th
Enniskillen Independent Methodist – Wed 28th
High Street Methodist, Lurgan – Thursday 29th