LaRosa Johnson {dot} com

I’ve been spending the past few weeks putting together a curriculum for the Steps Discipleship Training Ministry division of Trailblazin Ministries and I must admit that it has been some experience. The process of gathering materials has been an experience, and it’s really gotten my juices flowing in how I want to continue to mold and shape Trailblazin Ministries into what the Lord desires for it to be. One of the things that has always been at the forefront of my mind has been the discipling of individuals so that they can be assured of their salvation and built up in the faith so that they can chew on spiritual meat instead of drinking milk. Steps DTM is going a long way in making that vision a reality because it is equipping the saints with the gift of teaching to best use their gift for the glory of the Lord. I don’t want it to just stop there though.

Now wanting to simply leave it at that has really gotten me thinking about doing much more. What am I thinking of? Very simply, I think it would be great to have a Steps DTM for the layman who is just interested in growing in their knowledge of the Scriptures, but has no desire to write for the website, nor do they need the in-depth teachings on exegesis or hermeneutics that are in the course of study right now. In many ways what I’m seeing is a course of study that is geared toward the new believer of the Christian who has not progressed in the faith since being born again. First and foremost, I would love for them to be able to rest assured in their salvation and then be able to properly articulate their testimony to others (how they were a sinner saved by grace, as opposed to being a person who just decided to "try Jesus"). From there, I envision showing them the basics of confession of sins to the Lord, staying in fellowship, and how to study the Bible. With that, I would also provide many different resources that can help them to establish the habit of studying the Bible and praying. Then it’ll move into showing them how to share their faith and do evangelism. That’s really what I see happening.

What’s more, I don’t see this being something like Steps DTM is right now where people have to register to get access (although there would be some kind of registration for contact purposes); instead, this is something that would be available to the public and freely accessible on the website so that anyone can come along and start growing in the faith. It really is my heart to see people grow in the Lord and I want to do whatever I can to make those kind of resources available so that they can make it happen, especially if they’re not in a church that offers something like this. I think I’m doing myself and the Body a disservice if I limit my "discipleship training" to only those who have a desire to write for the website; this is the kind of thing that should be made available to any and everyone that needs and wants it.

I think that with that in my sights, I want to do whatever I can to make it happen, even if it starts out as something small. So, please keep me in prayer as I start to formulate the ideas for this "open" discipleship training ministry and for the first class in the Steps Discipleship Training Ministry. Discipleship is important because it’s more than something we "do," but it’s a way of life. We must live as disciples and stay before the Master’s feet yearning to know more about Him, instead of looking at our walk as an obligation.

I think this is something the Body needs and I want to make it happen. Sure it’s been done, and I’m not reinventing the wheel, but I do want to reach my demographic. So, thank You, Lord, for provision and purpose. Amen.

Can I be honest and say that I get worried when I look at the current state of the church? I’m not worried in the sense that I think it’s going to crumble or anything like that, but some of the trends that I see really make me wonder how people can so easily fall for them. One of those things is the idea that "if I see it happening in multiple churches, then it must be okay." This could be rephrased as those things that have become accepted as the norm in Christian culture, even if they aren’t right.

One of those situations happens to be that of women preachers. I was visiting a message board and read a topic about a woman pastor who had just recently had a dedication service for her new church building. I decided to make a rather snippy comment to the effect that she needed to read her Bible more. Needless to say, I took a bit of heat for my comment and got called a hater (for what reason, I don’t know). Some of the comments that rolled in afterwards ended up saying things like "so women can’t be pastors?," "don’t you know about the culture at that time?," "women can be over a body of people," and "women can pastor! I see it all the time!" Those are pretty typical comments when the subject comes up, but all of them have their fallacies when brought to the light of Scripture. What are those fallacies? 1) They assume that just because it is commonplace in many churches that it is okay and biblical and 2) they interject the current culture into Scripture and disregard passages that they feel no longer agree with the current state of society.

Both of these arguments are basically the same if you really look at it; they are both saying that the commands of Scripture are dated and no longer valid in our current culture. The sad part is that their argument has no foundation in Scripture whatsoever, especially in terms of this argument in particular. Just because something is commonplace and seemingly accepted, that does not mean that it is biblical or right. And I really love when people try to bring culture into the picture when examining Scripture, definitely when they are arguing the New Testament. In so many cases they are simply using that argument to try and say that their culture was primitive and that we are so much more advanced as a society that the Bible no longer applies to us, which is totally ludicrous. For this discussion, let’s take a look at the passage in question.

1 Timothy 2:11-14 (NASB) – 11 A woman must quietly receive instruction with entire submissiveness. 12 But I do not allow a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man, but to remain quiet. 13 For it was Adam who was first created, and then Eve. 14 And it was not Adam who was deceived, but the woman being deceived, fell into transgression.

The problem that most people have is with verse 12, which very clearly prohibits women from assuming the pastorate role, and is then continued in the next chapter when Paul gives Timothy clear guidelines for appointing overseers and elders. The detractors like to say that Paul was against women and that the culture as a whole was oppressive towards women, and that is why Paul wrote what he did; but that no longer applies today because men & women are equal. Even if the culture was more male oriented, that has no bearing on this passage and position and it is because of the two verses that follow. If this were to only apply to the current culture, then why did Paul take it all the way back to the created order of Adam and Eve? By taking it all the way back to the beginning, Paul is establishing God’s created order for man and women, which directly translates itself to the church, as we see here. But let us not forget the latter chapters of 1 Corinthians where Paul permits women to prophesy (a no longer operational spiritual gift) in church services, as long as their heads were covered. If he was such a chauvinist, he would not have permitted women to speak at all in church or to be deaconesses.

What does it say to the argument of commonality? The answer is simply this: just because God permits it to happen, that does not mean that it is right. Just like God permits us to sin and go against His will, that does mean that it is right or the brightest thing to do. There are lots of things that God permits to happen but does not condone, women pastors included. A woman is not to have authority over a man, and the exposition of Scripture is an authoritative role that is not to be taken by women. The argument is then begged though, men aren’t stepping up, so women are forced to fill in for them. My response: says who? God will hold the men accountable for not taking up their priestly role, but that does not coincide with giving women permission to step into the pastorate and to start preaching. For women to do so puts them out of their God-given role and only creates disorder within the body of Christ.

As I start to wrap up, I will say this: women are given the spiritual gift of teaching, just not the gift of pastor-teacher. So, what does that look like? It looks like this: women teaching other women, and women teaching children. As soon as it becomes women teaching men, it is out of order; but, within those contexts, it is perfectly acceptable for a woman to exercise her spiritual gift of teaching.

The bottom line is this: the Bible is supremely authoritative and we must not allow our personal preferences or cultural norms to supercede the commands of Scripture. Yes, we must take the Word of God in its proper context, but we must not ignore those commands that transcend cultural barriers and deal with God’s original created order of doing things. And, on a more personal note, I’m all for women exercising their gifts in ministry; but I desire for them to be done in their proper order and in line with how God expects things to be done. The same goes for me too; I want everything I do to line up with the Word of God as best as I possibly can.

Admittedly, I’m a bit frustrated at the moment. I have an idea of what it is that’s frustrating me, but I can’t exactly put my finger on why it’s bugging me so. On the one hand there’s the issues I have with technology; and, on the other hand, I’m discontent with my spiritual walk. I’m trying to find a remedy to both, but I’m not sure how to go about doing it.

On the technology end of things, I guess you could say that I’m content, but not satisfied. Recently, I’ve been attempting to change my work flow and computer use because I continue to find myself wasting time online doing idle things. That’s not a very good thing for me because I have quite a bit on my plate and I’m not being such a good steward of my time. One program I’ve downloaded to possibly help in this arena is more of a toy than anything else, but I’m trying to use it to help my productivity. The application is RK Launcher, which mimics the OS X Launch bar. The reason this helps me is because I’ve always been one who likes a clean desktop & taskbar, therefore I never let my Quick Launch toolbar have more than 5 or 6 shortcuts at any given time (which mainly consisted of FireFox, Bible apps, and Zune player). RK Launcher lets me ditch the Quick Launch toolbar and have multiple icons floating @ the top of my desktop, and is a lot cleaner and more functional than simply having desktop shortcuts. Along with this, I have also downloaded the Prism plugin for FireFox so that I can run applications such as Gmail and my Trailblazin Ministries admin panel as standalone "programs," which helps to keep me from pushing Ctrl+T to open a new tab and start surfing other websites. Both of those have seemed to help somewhat.

At the other end of this spectrum though, I’m still at odds with how I want to go about writing my devotions and which application to use in doing so. I had been using Windows Live Writer of late to do my devotions and it worked great because I was able to do all of my formatting and have it carry over with no problems whatsoever. Plus, with that, I was able to work locally (i.e. offline, although I’m always connected) and not have to depend on it being stored on some server that I could not get to for whatever reason. Well, that all changed recently when I discovered the Bibleref Markup when doing some reading up on Logos’ Reftagger script. This seemed to be a great use of XHTML markup and something that would help take Trailblazin Ministries one step further in helping to push Bible standards on the web. Using this markup came with a catch though, because I could no longer use Windows Live Writer because it was just too cumbersome to have to manually enter the Bibleref tags. So, I decided to move back to using Movable Type via the browser to input my devotions, and I even found a nifty plugin that allowed me to put a button on the menu to do the Bibleref code. This wasn’t so bad, but it required manually coding some things and having to work strictly online. Of course, there were other options, such as writing in Windows Live Writer (or even WORDsearch and then merely cutting and pasting into the browser when I’m done, and manually marking up the tags. That too seemed cumbersome.

Update: while in the midst of writing this entry, I came across a plugin for Windows Live Writer that allows me to create my own sets of template code, which works perfectly for inserting Bibleref tags. The plus on this is that I can just highlight the text, have a couple mouse clicks, and have it prompt me to type the Bible reference. This, in all actuality, worked much better than the MT setup I had just created. So, I guess I just resolved that dilemma.

I was going to write about the spiritual side of things tonight, but I think I’ll leave that for a post tomorrow or the day after. I’m just glad I got Windows Live Writer back to a place where it’s workable with the new things I want to do, along with all of the other changes I’m making. I’m hoping it all works out for the best. Definitely keep your boy lifted in prayer! One!