We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded by your direct support for ReKnew and our vision. Please consider supporting this project.

Changing Your Mind

via mystockphotos.com
Mark Moore is a man who has changed his mind about a lot of things which is somewhat extraordinary these days. Change can be costly and painful and this was certainly true for Mark. He previously pastored Providence Community Church in Plano, TX, where he pastored for eleven years based upon a set of theological assumptions he no longer holds. This is so rare, to be open to a new way of thinking, especially when there’s so much at stake.
Mark wrote a two part blog for Missio Alliance on how he changed his mind about women in ministry, but it’s really about how he changed his way of interacting with and understanding the Bible. You can read Part 1 here and Part 2 here.
Here’s a snippet to get you started:
The result of reading the Bible as story, as opposed to systematic theology, was that the background of the story—people, places, circumstances, etc.—became absolutely essential to understanding what was actually taking place in the text. One day I realized that I had very little understanding of the world of the 1st century; instead I had a whole lot of understanding of the world of the 16th century. I began studying 1st century Judaism and the Roman Empire and when I did the New Testament began to come alive. It sounds cliché, but it was literally like going from black and white to color television, which makes you want to go back and re-watch your favorite shows in order to see what color their clothes actually were—I was re-reading the Bible and picking up on colors I’d never seen before.
Category: General
Tags: Bible, Change, Mark Moore, Missio Alliance, Providence, Systematic Theology, Theology, Women In Ministry
Related Reading

Getting Behind the “Letter” of Violent Portraits of God
“I will do to you what I have never done before… in your midst parents will eat their children, and children will eat their parents…” Ezek. 5:9-10 In my previous post I offered a brief review of Matthew Bates’ fascinating work, The Hermeneutics of the Apostolic Proclamation by Matthew Bates (Baylor University Press, 2012). Among other…

History and Bible: Do They Align?
To begin, it is significant that when Jesus and the authors of the NT referred to their sacred writings as “God-breathed,” they were referring to the writings that had been handed down to them. So too, the text that the Church has always confessed to be “God-breathed” has been the canon she received. Never has…

Sermon: The Twist
In this sermon clip, Greg Boyd discusses how when you read a book with a twist ending, the ending reframes the entire story. The Bible is no different. In this sermon, Greg shows how Jesus’ message reframes how we are to understand the Bible, and he shows us why the Anabaptists shared this belief. You…

The Point of the Book of Job
The point of the book of Job is to teach us that the mystery of evil is a mystery of a war-torn and unfathomably complex creation, not the mystery of God’s all-controlling will. Given how Christians are yet inclined to look for a divine reason behind catastrophes and personal tragedies, I think it’s a point…

What is the right way to interpret Revelation?
Few biblical topics have captured the imagination of contemporary evangelicals like the book of Revelation. The recent unprecedented success of the Left Behind series is evidence of this popular fascination. Many evangelicals don’t realize that the futuristic interpretation of Revelation advocated in this popular series is only one of several interpretations evangelicals espouse. Here’s the…

Lighten Up: You Gotta Believe In Something, Man!
Two things here: 1) How does this philosopher not see that “not believing in believing” is itself a belief? 2) Is that a turtleneck or is that philosopher just really hairy?