Books &Seminars.

It is being a busy week.  Tony Cook has been teaching on the 5~fold ministry.  I'd never heard of the man.  My ignorance of the Charismatic movement is phenomenal but this is one teacher it has been an absolute joy to sit under!  His doctrine is as sound & wholesome as a good apple but he is the sweetest, gentlest man & I finally have an answer to a question that has been driving me nuts for the best part of 2 years. 

Today we sat under his ministry for a one day seminar ~ geared for pastors but applicable to any Christian who can handle strong meat. I was desperate for caffeine by the half way mark & having secured my Styrofoam cup found a convenient pillar to hold up & opened my book.  I'd reached the exciting bit where blood & mayhem were creating havoc & I zone out rather well.  It never once occurred to me that these dos are for networking [a term I associate with men in expensive suites & Old School Ties] & that's what everyone else was busily doing while I was in England solving bloody murder!  *sigh* School finds me a little odd.

I can't think what God was doing.  I seem to get all the bits actually relating to people wrong.  I like paper.  It has no opinions.  As the Dean said, doing a double take over the lurid cover, it was a very secular book! I have to keep  self editing!  I do like a good crime thriller but there's no escaping that in the name of gritty realism they are neither for the faint of heart or tender of conscience.  Unless you are made of pretty sturdy stuff this is one writer I'm not recommending though it has turned into a gripping read ~ & it was a gift,just in case you're wondering.

And I have no trouble changing gears to grapple with the pastoral epistles & the dilemma of Timothy, who I'm pretty sure would have loved to have brained Paul for haring of to Philippi & leaving him to deal with the irascible Ephesians & Paul's robust advice to buck up & get on with it. 

So having covered the Apostle, the prophet & the evangelist [losing the plot on this one now] we deal with teachers & preachers tomorrow, just in time to make me feel totally inadequate & inferior ~ & idiotic because inferiority is, apparently, a form of pride. *sigh*  And these people wonder why I hide my head in a book all the time!