by garytburke | Jun 22, 2022 | Blog
It’s Not What You’ve Always Thought: Reconsidering I Cor. 14:34 This article appeared originally in Wineskins, February 26, 2022. It is widely believed that Paul’s words in I Cor. 14:34 prohibiting women from speaking in church call for absolute silence and are meant...
by garytburke | Apr 11, 2022 | Blog
In the beginning: God’s original plan for marriage This article appeared originally in Wineskins, February 25, 2022. When Jesus sparred with the Pharisees in Matthew 19 over their question about divorce, he indicated that the answer lay “in the beginning” (19:8). From...
by garytburke | Mar 2, 2022 | Blog
Jesus Loves the Little Children In the third episode of the first season of “The Chosen” (“Jesus Loves the Little Children”), early in his ministry Jesus develops a relationship with a few small children. The star of this episode is a little girl named Abigail, who...
by garytburke | Jan 6, 2022 | Blog
The Church And Culture Many Christians who question the need to reconsider the restrictions widely put on women’s participation in the assembly and the work of the church are understandably concerned about the danger of giving in to our culture. Scripture, not the way...
by garytburke | Aug 6, 2021 | Blog
I Cor. 14:34-35 and I Tim. 2:9-15: The Norm or Special Circumstances? Jesus was born into a world in which there were well-defined and widely understood rules for everyone—children and adults, slaves and masters, rulers and the ruled, countrymen and foreigners (us and...
by garytburke | Dec 23, 2020 | Blog
Two Books, One Topic In June last year my first book on women in the church, God’s Woman Revisited: Women and the Church, was published by Luminare Press and made available on Amazon. The book seeks to engage serious Bible students in the study of the major biblical...
by garytburke | Dec 15, 2020 | Blog
The Story of Ruth–Part Two Earlier I wrote about an elderly woman in our congregation named Ruth. That was not the end of her story. Because of declining health and the need for help managing her 24/7 oxygen requirements, Ruth spent her last few years in a...
by garytburke | Sep 18, 2019 | Blog
Soft Is Hard Through many years of helping organizations implement major changes, I had to remind myself constantly of the maxim that “hard is easy; soft is hard.” We could produce a detailed implementation timeline, plan for all the contingencies, and line up all the...
by garytburke | Aug 29, 2019 | Blog
Book, Chapter, and Verse Often when seeking justification for a particular Christian belief or practice a person will ask for “Book, Chapter, and Verse.” This rightly flows from our belief that the Bible is the ultimate source for everything about our Christian lives....
by garytburke | Jun 7, 2019 | Blog
The Story of Ruth Sadly, many sincere Christians seem to believe that the simple act of a woman reading a passage of Scripture in the Sunday assembly would be an act of “exercising authority” (I Tim. 2:12) over the men present. I guess their experience of the way men...