All Articles For McGeown, Martyn

Emily Letts’ “Positive Abortion Story” Emily Letts is an abortion counsellor at Cherry Hill Women’s Center in New Jersey, USA. Having given advice to many women faced with “crisis pregnancies,” she found herself pregnant: “I knew immediately I was going to have an abortion. I knew I wasn’t ready to take care of a child. The guy wasn’t involved in my decision.” Troubled by the fact that many women feel guilty about abortion, Letts made a short video of her abortion to promote the idea that one can have a “positive abortion experience:” I searched the Internet, and I couldn’t...

Annise Parker is the first openly lesbian mayor of Houston, Texas. In June 2014, the city of Houston passed a bill called the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance (HERO) which, among other things, allows persons of “confused gender identity” to use public restrooms of their choice. In other words, men may use women’s bathrooms, and women may use men’s bathrooms. The controversial law immediately drew attempts to have it repealed. Many worked to gather signatures to force the city authorities to place the bill on the ballot to allow voters, rather than politicians, to decide its fate. A broadly interdenominational coalition...

From the beginning of his Christian pilgrimage, when, as a young man, he heard the call, Tolle lege, tolle lege (“Take up and read”), and his eyes lighted on Romans 13:12-14, until the end of his life, when, on his deathbed, he asked that the penitential psalms be written out for him, so that he might read and mediate on them, Augustine loved the Scriptures. As bishop of Hippo, Augustine aimed to preach biblical sermons, and as a writer, Augustine saturated his treatises and letters with quotations from the Bible. Augustine was also a churchman—one who loved the church, one...

Broken Minds: Hope for Healing When You Feel Like You’re Losing It, Steve and Robyn Bloem. Kregel Publications: Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2005. Paperback, pp. 301. [Reviewed by Rev. Martyn McGeown.] How do people—especially church people—react to depression? The Bloems, both of whom have suffered from clinical depression, argue that the church has failed to minister properly to the mentally ill. One of the main reasons for this is the church’s refusal to view depression and other mental illnesses as anything other than a disease of the soul, a spiritual disorder, which modern medicine cannot help. Thus a stigma has developed...

Most of us are familiar with the charge of homophobia, that we Christians, allegedly, have an irrational fear of, hatred for, and intolerance toward homosexuals. We are labelled thus because we have the audacity to teach that homosexuality is sin. Much has been seen in recent years—bakers sued because they would not make cakes for “gay marriages”; florists and photographers sued because they refused to participate in such ceremonies; and Christian street preachers arrested for calling homosexuality a sin. A new phobia controversy erupted in Belfast, Northern Ireland some months ago—Islamophobia. Pastor James McConnell is the septuagenarian preacher of Ulster’s...

Charismaticism seems a world away from Reformed— especially Protestant Reformed—Christianity, yet there are an estimated 500 million Charismatics or Pentecostals in the world today. The Charismatic or Pentecostal movement (although we can distinguish between Charismaticism and Pentecostalism, I use the words interchangeably) is the fastest growing movement among Christians, especially in the Third World. I can guarantee that there is a Charismatic church near you, and our missionaries in the Philippines have undoubtedly encountered Charismaticism. Philip Jenkins writes, “almost one Christian in five worldwide is neither Protestant, nor Catholic, nor Anglican, nor Orthodox,” but Charismatic.1 Moreover, the so-called “Young, Restless,...

Psalm-singing is a uniquely Reformed tradition. Whether in Europe, America, Africa, Australasia, or Asia, wherever the Reformed have established churches, they have brought with them the singing of the psalms. In fact, it can be argued that the farther a church departs from Reformed and biblical orthodoxy, the farther it drifts from psalm-singing. Go to an evangelical—Arminian, Pentecostal, Baptist, or Dispensationalist—church, and the psalms will be, and historically have been, conspicuous by their absence. Indeed, apart from a few of the old favorites—Psalm 23 or Psalm 42—the psalms are almost unheard-of in such circles. Modern worship has pushed out the...

Remember the persecuted! Perhaps we think of the early Christian martyrs thrown to the lions. Perhaps we remember Stephen and others who were stoned to death by angry Jewish mobs. Perhaps we recall the heroic suf­ferings of the Reformation saints in the Netherlands. Martyrdom makes us think of the stake, the scaffold, and the dungeon. Open Doors International, a Christian group support­ing persecuted Christians, reports that Christian martyr­dom doubled in 2013. The persecution of the church is a very serious reality for many of the saints today. They do not read about it in history books—they live it. 2,123 believers...

When the devil is unable to intimidate the church into accepting homosexuality, lesbianism, bisexuality, and transgenderism (LGBT), he uses deception. In this deception we hear the ancient hiss of the serpent, “Yea, hath God said?” (Gen. 3:1). “Yea, hath God said?” has been Satan’s tactic from the beginning. “Hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?” “Hath God said that He is the Creator of all things?” “Hath God said that there was a worldwide flood?” “Hath God said that women shall not be office­bearers in the church?” “Hath God said that marriage is between...

My first impression on arriving at the confer­ence in Hudsonville PRC was that the park­ing lot was almost full. That augured well for good attendance at the three sessions on Thursday-Saturday (October 17-19, 2013). I was glad to see such a lively interest in a conference for which the seminary and the Evangelism Committee of Hudsonville PRC had made such diligent preparation. Entering the building itself, I was immediately drawn to the book tables. The seminary had set up one book table, ably manned by the seminarians themselves. It included a display of rare books from the library, with the...