Categories: uncategorized
Date: 21 June 2007 07:02:37
I am a good 21st century (very broadly) evangelical, therefore I know 4 gospels and a few of Pauls letters very well. I know very little about the rest of the bible, apart from odd texts which I may wish to disagree with (or get depressed by as the mood takes me) and the popular bible stories which are taught along side the fairy tales when you're young. I have explored the odd book within housegroups and listening to the occassional sermon which has not concentrated on the new testament, but as I say my knowledge of the bible as a whole is actually crap.
So at the moment I am finding it an enlightening and disturbing experience searching through the bible to find the stories of lone parents that lie within it's pages. I have to say that anybody who thinks our society is f***ed up and depraved has obviously never read the old testament. I'm finding it particuarly disturbing finding out quite how abusive and awful many of those "biblical figures" who we are taught to look up to are, women aswell as men and quite how misunderstood a number of other biblical figures may have been. (I think reading this so soon after reading Elizabeth Wurtzel's take on Judges may be influencing me as well).
The other thing I'm actually finding really exciting is getting a proper handle on the biblical idea of households. I had for ages thought family services should be called household services, (apart from that gives the idea of bringing your bottle of Fairy Liquid to be blessed), but I hadn't ever clicked on to what the significance of households as opposed to families really was as a way to view church more generally. I think what I'm finding is that good practice in relation to anybody who is sometimes referred to as "the other", particularly lone parents, occurs when we effectively treat church as household (old skool definition of family which goes beyond blood and marriage) rather than as family (19th century idea of family, which includes nuclear and extended but is based upon blood and marriage).
Oh and incase I'm missing anybody in my scanning through if you can think of examples of lone parenthood in the bible (or know of any theology books which talk about these) please could you visit the comments section before you leave.
Finally happy solstice.