love to paint

Yesterday, a friend of mine asked me a question at church.  She had been given a pamphlet published by the Cumberland Presbyterian Church in America denomination.  She asked me if I knew anything about the church. She and I both had assumed it was just one church.  It's actually not, it's a denomination.  A century ago it was larger than the PC(USA) denomination actually.  So, I started to try and figure out what they believed. It might seem strange that I would do this, but I've discovered over the past few years that it matters who publishes a book--especially it is the publisher from a denomination.  What the denomination believes shapes what they will publish.  Many denominations take a very liberal view of scripture and that's going to be reflected in how the authors they publish interpret scripture--whether they take the whole Word to be the inerrant Word of God, whether they believe that the Truth can be found solely in God's Word or also in ...

Growing up in a Quaker church was very interesting.   I learned far more about Quaker history than I did about Jesus.   I learned a lot about God, but not as much about Jesus.   In our church, we had a male head pastor and a female assistant pastor.   The Quaker way is that all people in the church are considered ministers.   It's very easy to see that I grew up with a very egalitarian view of women and men.   I mentioned in my last blog entry that I had only heard the word "submission" once before I married.  I had no understanding of what it meant.  But, shortly after I got married, God put me on a journey to help me understand His desires for me in my marriage.  Along that journey, I began to consider what submission meant for women in regard to church leadership.  There are two scriptures that specifically state that elders in the church are to be men and that women are not to teach or exercise authority over men.  These scrip...

Over the course of my marriage, which is now almost 10 years, I have been challenged by the Lord from the beginning about submission.   When I married my husband, I might have been called an Evangelical feminist.   I was raised in a Quaker Church and had only heard the word "submission" once when I was a senior in high school at a Baptist church.   The gal who spoke of it was someone that I did not look up to, but rather always felt judged by.   After that first time, I didn't hear the word again until I got married nine years later.   My husband and I met and married in six months, so you can imagine how much we had to work out and navigate in that first year.   It was a rough year.   A few months into our marriage, I came upon a book titled Feminism: Mystique or Mistake by Diane Passno.   Ms. Passno talked straight and didn't dance around the issues.   Her book opened my eyes about the lies I'd been fed by feminism over the years. ...