Dinner and Pipes

Matt and I had one of our occasional dinners at Roti Chenai with Richard Flinn last night. Dave and Ange joined us a wee bit later and we went to the Good Luck Bar. It was really good. Lifted my spirits no end.

We talked about some cool things too:

- an amazing providential confluence that seemed like a 'grade b' miracle on Richard's recent hunting trip;

- the Queen's Birthday Camp and positive things in Wellington region/church (esp the Mentorship & Discipleship team)

- the differences and emerging clash between the Puritan and Continental streams of Reformed theology;

- 'evanagelism' as a social/relational practice, and our tendency to keep relationships with non-Christians to matters that don't directly implicate our faith;

- the scope of 'the gospel', and the origins of dualism in the modern Evangelical/Reformed Church in the state restriction of church power during the English reformation;

- 'first-principles' interpretation of scripture: getting its orginal meaning, then applying it to analogous contemporary situations, with Calvin's approval of the same approach and his consequent widespread relevance even today;

- environmentalism and the distinctives of a Christian approach;

- environmentalism & the meaning of the fall/the curse for 'nature';

- modern attitudes to children and the closing wombs of a godless culture;

- motherhood, its privileges, place and exercise in a culture of extended households (eg, with maids);

- the creation and inter-generational accumulation of capital as a means of extending both the capacities of the family and their 'reach' as centres of kingdom work (eg, employing underprivileged young women as maids);

- 'slavery/servanthood' and the godly practice (seen by Richard in the American South) of 'enveloping' the slave/servant and their dependents within the nurture and care of the extended family.