Virtually Paul

MarkSpace: Attention Bible Nerds

January 15, 2007 on 2:33 pm | In Church, Friends, Links, Theology |

Hopefully the title of this post captures the attention of the relevant audience sufficiently.

I’d like to take a moment to introduce a friend of mine, or, more accurately, his blog.

Mark-MarkSpace

By way of introduction, Mark was the interim youth pastor at my church for a while, which gave me the chance to get to know him pretty well. Mark is now the full-time pastor at another baptist church and the blog, for the moment, seems to be an online rendition of his Sunday sermon text. I recommend that you RSS it for now. I’ll try to get him to let me fix up the tech side of it (including the URL).
By way of a real introduction, Mark could quite easily get himself a reputation for being a bit of a liberal theologian if he put his mind to it. He was the interim youth pastor who got into trouble for wearing a soccer jumper with a Heineken logo on the stage at church. We were thinking about burning him at the stake for it but no one could find a copy of the church constitution to work out how many votes we’d need to do it. Personally I find Mark far too interesting to box him like that. He has a unique way of drawing connections between scriptural concepts and suggesting some application to our present context. (As opposed to wrapping the bible around our present day presuppositions, which he regularly does a good job of avoiding.)
I’m not afraid to say that in the past, the exegetical amateur in me occasionally wants to red flag some of his ponderings when they appear to draw a bit of a long bow. In practice though, when I’ve thought about it, the long bow usually just means he’s tried to skip over an otherwise overcomplicated tangent, or that he’s made a conceptual jump that I wasn’t ready for just yet. Mark is also smarter than me and has spent a lot more time with his head in books, so I generally don’t mess with him on theological grounds and stick to criticising his poor attempts at web publishing to make myself feel better.
If you’re a 20-something single theological student who goes to a church where most of the preaching is focused on newbies or married people, then Mark’s blog is certainly for you.