Mary Magdalene is one of my favourite people in the Bible. She is named more times than almost any other woman in the New Testament. Mary Magdalene was the apostle to the apostles, a survivor of trauma, and is a patron for all women in ministry. She is also one of the most consistently misrepresented…
Yes, but only if it makes it happen. It will not happen naturally. If The Salvation Army is going to have gender equality it will need to choose to change things. The Salvation Army has a responsibility to do better with gender equality. Particularly for women in ministry. This is a theological imperative. The Army…
I believe that the attractive power of the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders can best be understood through the lens of the cult of the Virgin Mary. When understood as a form of modern sacred virgin-mothers, the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders (DCC) reveal the continuing power of the courtly ideal of love to unite lust with the sacred….
The Salvation Army is known for its position on women’s equality in ministry. The Early Salvation Army’s Understanding of Masculinity was even more radical in its day. Equality? From the very beginning, women were given positions of authority and were appointed to be church leaders. They preached, taught, and evangelised just as any man, and…
The staggering expansion of the early Salvation Army from the United Kingdom to the rest of the world was driven to a great degree by individual initiative rather than formal planning. The story of the Army in Jamaica is an example of that kind of faithful initiative and personal commitment to evangelism which shaped the…
This is the fourth and final part of a series on the inclusion debate. You could read this as a standalone, but it will make more sense if you read the other three first. I start this article by suggesting how the early Church approached their scripture reading and what that can mean for us…
Content Warning – Contains Descriptions of Sexual Acts and of Castration We take for granted that the church is a community whose membership is constituted by faith alone. We are used to it. But when the church first burst into the world, it introduced something that no one had ever seen before. It created a…