Learning to Discern Podcasts

Podcasts of the Christian variety

There is little doubt that many believers listen to podcasts during the week - and there are many good Christian podcasts out there.

Discernment is essential however, especially since the listener does not know the podcasters personally. In the New Testament Christians were instructed by in-house teachers (with the exception of the Apostles, capital A, of which there are none today. And even the Apostles combined life and lip, "You, however, know all about my teaching, my way of life" 2 Timothy 3:10). 

The life of the church teacher was always open to inspection, and since life and lip go together, one could trust the teaching because one could observe the life of the teacher.

The only way to know if a teacher is reliable is to observe his life. The notion that pure orthodoxy or pats on the back by big shots or little shots around them are all we need to trust a teacher is error and disproved multiple times in recent years by one big-shot evangelical expose after another.

The main place to get our teaching is from local pastors whose lives are open to inspection, who invite people into their homes (hospitality), whose lives are open books.

(This of course, is yet one more argument for small churches, where the pastor loves and lives among the sheep, as opposed to big churches where the pastor is basically a high and mighty CEO who must, of necesity, delegate the real work of pastoring to minions beneath him.)

The Rest is History

But this blog is not about Christian podcasts its about non-Christian, secular podcasts, and one popular one "The Rest is History." This is an enormously enjoyable series of podcasts on all sorts of historical subjects, such as a few about the Titanic, which were interesting (and entertaining).

I decided to listen to the series on Martin Luther. It's enormously helpful to have sympathetic but non-evangelical podcasters talk about evangelical superstars like Luther. Many evangelical writers would gloss over the foibles and folly of Luther and so end up writing hagiography rather than biography.

But you need to be discerning, because just at the point where Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook are describing the central truth of the reformation, they get it completely wrong, here's the transcript:

 But, as I say, it also comes from reading Paul, and particularly one line. So there's a line in the letter that Paul writes to the Christians in the church, the letter to the Romans. The righteous shall live through faith. And Luther understands this to mean the faith specifically, that God loves you, and that it doesn't matter if you're lost to sin. Everyone is lost to sin. Humanity is so sinful that they can't, through their own agency, obtain the forgiveness of God. But it doesn't matter, because if God loves you, then you exist in a state of grace. And the state of grace is the feeling that you have that Christ is present in you in your secret most heart. And the certainty of that grace, in turn, gives you what Luther calls the peace of conscience, that all your anxiety about whether you're going to be redeemed or not is gone. And so you can have a kind of deep, profound spiritual joy and sense of certitude that essentially cuts the gordian knot of all the purgatory stuff, all the confession stuff, all the. Am I going to go to heaven or not? And it's an incredible.

"The just shall live by faith" does not mean "God loves you and that it doesn't matter if you are lost to sin." It means that God has provided a new way for us to be righteous in the eyes of God, a way that does not come about by human effort but by the righteousness he provides through his Son. 

Yes God loves you, but our sin does matter; so much that God sent his Son to atone for it.

Simple lesson, listen to Christian podcasts with discernment, listen to secular podcasts with even more discernment. 

The Bible is a Goldilocks Size

Just The Right Size

Listening to Classic FM the other day I asked "Alexa what's the name of this tune," to which "she" replied "Bluebird" by Alexis Ffrench. I had never heard of this contemporary musician, who has over 3 million monthly Spotify listeners and is one of the most streamed classical artists globally. 

But then again, with some 12 million artists stream on Spotify, Why should I have heard of Ffrench? If I was to listen to just one track of each artist for 8 hours a day, it would take me 50 years to hear them all. 

A number exercise like this gives us an insight into our terrible smallness and finitude when faced with the magnitude of All Knowledge. In one human lifetime you and I have very little time. 

People say that the Bible is a big book, but I want to argue that it's a Goldilocks Size for our short journey through this life.

The "infinity" of knowledge 

Let's consider the vast banks of knowledge that are available to any one of us today.

In the world of science, one estimate puts the total number of scientific papers ever published at 100 million. It would take 8000 lifetimes to read them all, making our way through one paper a day five days a week for fifty years.

The Common Crawl Dataset, an internet snapshot used by Large Language AI models contains about 600 billion words - that would take 600 lifetimes for an average person to read.

We could engage in this kind of numerical exercise not only with history and science but with art, literature and back to music. 

Each time we'd end up with information sizes vastly beyond the scope of any human being to read let alone comprehend.

The Bible is Small

By comparison, the Bible is small, containing about 800,000 words. A little larger than War and Peace (580,000 words) and The Lord of the Rings trilogy (455,000) but smaller than The Works of William Shakespeare which runs at 880,000 words. 

The Bible can be read in a mere 80 hours, by contrast to hundreds or thousands of years. 

It's small enough to be grasped by a human being in a lifetime. The Bible can be read in a year by spending just 15 -20 minutes a day. 

Our smallness explains in part - surely - why God works out his purposes through just one nation, so that the largest part of the Bible (the Old Testament) contains the story of just that one nation (Israel). 

We could not handle a "history of the world." This divine filtering allows transient tiny creatures like you and I to grasp something of God's great plans, which in the end are for the whole world. 

The Bible is Big 

And yet, one should quickly add, the Bible is a big book, spanning poetry to Gospel to apocalyptic to prophecy to letter, and from one nation to the whole wide world.

Sufficiently small to be manageable, but big enough to be both interesting all the days of our lives and comprehensive enough to cover all the most important things we need to know. 

Truth be told, the Bible is big enough to make it's contents inexhaustible over a single human life time. My father read the Bible through every year of his adult life. Many other believers make it their habit to read it often as they can. I remember my father telling me what every reader will acknowledge - that the Bible never grew old or dim.

The Bible is Divine

The Bible's purpose is to show us how to get right with the Creator God who we all know exists. The Bible makes us wise unto salvation. Its words bring light to the unbeliever and provide spiritual food for the souls of those who believe. 

The reason the Bible speaks today, the reason it is alive and active is that it was inspired by God. The authors were in some amazing way - in a way that did not overrule their personalities or their location in history - moved along by the Spirit of God, so that while they wrote - indeed what they decided to write - turned out to be, nevertheless, the very words God wanted them to write.

In the Bible we have in our hands the very words of God to mankind. 

Read it!

Some people who say "the Bible is too big" or "boring" have never read it. If you have never read the Bible before, I suggest you start with a good modern translation like the NIV (New International Version) or the ESV (English Standard Version). 

If you are not yet a believer start with one of the Gospels (stories of the life of Jesus, named Matthew, Mark, Luke or John). Mark, the shortest, is a good place to start. Read one small section a day, asking God beforehand to help you understand it. 

If you want to read the whole in one year try one of these reading plans:

Read the Bible in One Year

Bible Reading Plan

If you are a believer who has never read the whole Bible, or if you are a backslidden believer who has drifted away from God, again, these reading plans are a good resource.

"The entrance of your Word bring light"

(Psalm 119:130)

"Your Word is a lamp for my feet and a light for my path"

(Psalm 119:105)  

Christmas in Four Words

God

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”

The meaning of Christmas starts with the God who made this wonderful universe, from the smallest atom to the largest galaxy with its billions of stars.

God Almighty created the cosmos to reveal how powerful, wise and good he is, and he made this planet to be the beautiful home of mankind.

God created us too.

The English physicist Steven Hawking wrote:

“the human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate sized planet, orbiting round a very average star in the outer suburbs of one among a billion galaxies.”

You and I are not “chemical scum”, we were made in the image of the God who created us and we are all very precious to him. We were made to know him, love him, obey him and find our significance and meaning and highest joy in Him.

Sin

“All have sinned and come short of the glory of God”

Although you and I were made to know and love and obey God, all of us have walked out on Him. 

Me, you, everyone. 

Sin is not acknowledging God's existence, not thanking him for the many good gifts that crown each day, sin is living as we please rather than seeking how to please him, sin is disobeying the voice of conscience God has placed in every human heart.

We have all sinned, and our sin, the Bible says, separates us from the God who made us and loves us. Sin breaks our relationship with him, and since God is the Just Judge of the Universe, he must punish all wrongdoing. 

This is the most serious consequence of sin - the righteous Judge of the Universe must punish it.

 Jesus

“...give him the name Jesus for he will save is people from their sins.”

An angelic being said to Joseph that the baby born to Mary would be called Jesus, “because he will save his people from their sins.” The name “Jesus” means "Saviour," someone who would save us from our sins.

How did Jesus “save us from our sins”? He took upon himself the punishment for all our wrongdoing that should have come to us, so that we could be completely forgiven and reconciled with God!

And how did he pay for all our wrongdoing? The Bible says that Jesus paid for our sin when he suffered on the cross.  “Christ died for our sins." Jesus “bore our sins in his body on the tree.” 

After three days, Jesus rose triumphantly from the dead to demonstrate that the punishment for our sin had been paid in full.

So Christmas and Easter go together: at Christmas we remember the Saviour coming into the world, at Easter we remember him taking away all our sins so that we can be reconciled to God and be friends once more.

Heaven

 “Then I saw a  new heaven and a new earth,

 for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away”

Recently Susan Everard gave testimony to a national inquiry about the loss of her daughter Sarah, murdered by a policeman. She said things like:

Grief is unpredictable – it sits there quietly only to rear up suddenly and pierce our hearts.

Sarah will always be missing and I will always long for her.

After four years, the shock of Sarah's death has diminished but we are left with an overwhelming sense of loss and of what might have been.

Perhaps the saddest sentence Susan wrote was this:

We find we still appreciate the lovely things of life, but, without Sarah, there is no unbridled joy.

This life is short and along with the happy times we will all experience sadness, sorrow and grief. Jesus came into the world to give us the hope of a brand new world filled with unbridled joy in the world to come.

Just as Jesus rose from the dead, never to die again, and just as he ascended to heaven where he now lives, so all who believe in Him will one day rise from the dead and live for all eternity in a new heaven and a new earth where there is no death, mourning, crying or pain.

This is the true and good news of Christmas in four words.

Who is the greatest in the Church of England?

 

A historic (or ahistoric) Milestone?

There are a number of reasons why the recent appointment of Sarah Mullally as the archbishop of the Church of England poses a real problem for anyone who takes the Bible seriously.

On the one hand you could say her appointment (or the appointment of anyone to that post) is an irrelevancy since there are no archbishops (or bishops for that matter) mentioned in the Bible. It's a man-made office with no authority whatsoever in the Church of Jesus Christ.

Bible believing Christians simply do not recognise any archbishop or bishop - whoever they may be.

But on the other hand the secular press was filled with praise for the first ever appointment of a female archbishop, hailing it as a joyous and historic milestone for women's rights.

A Deep - but Elementary Misunderstanding

If it was merely the press who were thus applauding, we'd understand: the world is in darkness. But sections of the "church" were saying exactly the same thing. At last a woman had reached the "top."

Hidden in plain sight, this view exposes a deep but elementary misunderstanding of greatness that has always been the gold-standard across the world, and evidently now the standard in the eyes of many so-called Christians.

Namely, that greatness is about power, authority, fame & position.

This is how the world goes round.

And it is exactly upside down.

Hear the words of Jesus in Matthew 20:

"whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be your slave — just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

In the Kingdom of God you descend into greatness, not ascend. You become great by becoming the servant of all, not the ruler of all.

And says Jesus, that is how the Son of Man would become great. He came into this world not to rule over people but to serve them, even to the point of giving up his life. 

In the place of pallium (I had to look it up too), the garb of a servant

Instead of a bishop's palace, a manger bare

Instead of a Canterbury Crypt, a borrowed grave

Who is the Greatest?

The greatest saint in the Church of England today is some unknown man or woman living in some nameless parish, serving her brothers and sisters faithfully, quietly, unassumingly with the gifts God has given.

We can be sure, without and beyond the shadow of any doubt, that no archbishop is the greatest in the Church of England denomination. 

The idea that Susan Mullally's appointment signifies women - or anyone else - reaching "the top" is a tragic misunderstanding of everything the Bible teaches about greatness and sign of a much wider ignorance of the Bible. 

AI IMAGE: A drawing of the new archbishop of the church of England Sarah Mullaly

Men, Women & The Trinity

This post attempts to answer a question perplexing some parts of the evangelical world, namely - should women lead mixed worship services?

A forgotten truth

Tucked away in the eleventh chapter of first Corinthians is a verse of profound, but neglected, significance for understanding the roles of men and women in the church:

"Now I want you to realise that the head of every man is Christ and the head of every woman is man and the head of Christ is God." (1 Corinthians 11:3)

Paul is drawing a deliberate parallel between the relationship that exists between men and women, and the relationship that exists between God the Son and God the Father. 

Order not hierarchy

An order exists between the Three Persons of the Godhead, not a hierarchy. God the Father is the "first" Person, God the Son is the "second" Person and God the Holy Spirit is the "third" Person. 

The Father sends the Son, but the Son never sends the Father. The Son does what the Father tells him, but the Father does not do what the Son tells him. 

Order.

And then both the Father and the Son send the Spirit. 

Order.

But all Three Persons are equal in divinity and glory. There is no hierarchy between the Three blessed Persons. The Father is not "above" the Son, Father and Son are not "above" the Spirit. The Spirit is not in the least "below" the Father. 

Order, but zero hierarchy.

This of course is a high mystery, but is not beyond our grasp: we can all comprehend the distinction between order and hierarchy, even if we cannot fully understand it. 

And this is an "insider truth," known and acceptable only to believers. The moment the world hears that one person - whether human or Divine - has sent another, or that one person obeys another, they immediately see hierarchy - and object.

Order between men and women

According to the Apostle Paul, the same kind of order exists between men and women. In 1 Corinthians 11, quoted above, Paul is not referring to marriage, where a different kind of order exists. 

In Christian marriage Paul draws a parallel between Christ's headship over the Church and a husband's headship over his wife. That isn't the order Paul has in mind in 1 Corinthians 11. 

There's a much more general order between men and women Paul has in mind here, parallel to the order between God the Father and God the Son and revealed in the way God created Adam and Eve.

Paul explains the way this intrinsic order was revealed in the creation of Adam and Eve, Genesis 1-2:

"For man did not come from woman, but woman from man, neither was man created for woman, but woman for man." (verse 8)

Man is not in the least superior to the woman for both were made in the image of God, but there is an order between them.

Lest a misogynist confuse order for superior independency, Paul goes on to say:

"In the Lord, however, woman is not independent of man, nor is man independent of woman. For as woman came from man, so also man is born of woman. But everything comes from God." (11-12)

This order was also revealed in the way Adam was made first and Eve was made second:

"For Adam was formed first, then Eve." (1 Timothy 2:13)

In summary, there are two kinds of order between men and women. One particular order between a husband and wife (modelled on the relationship between Christ and the Church) and another general one between men and women in the church, modelled on relationships within the Trinity.

Order not eradicated by the Fall or Salvation

The married order between husband and wife was twisted by the fall, but it was not eradicated:

"Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you." (3:16)

And the general order between men and women is not obliterated either by the fall or the Gospel. The full light of Gospel Day frees men and women to serve, but it does not erase or play down the divine order anywhere in the New Testament. 

That order would have been assumed by all the Jewish believers who possessed the Old Testament and it was left to Paul to explain to the Gentiles converted under his ministry, and to the rest of the Gentile world. 

Both kinds of order - the specific order between a husband and wife and the more general order between men and women are to be maintained by believers,  in Christian marriage and the church.

Both "order" problems at Corinth

At Corinth there were problems with both kinds of order. In chapter 14 there was husband-wife disorder. The details are obscure, the fundamental problem is not. In some way wives were speaking in the church in a way that upturned the order between them and their husbands. While women could pray and prophecy in the church, their contributions - perhaps over the heads of their husbands sitting there? - were now threatening the order of the gathering. 

In chapter 11, it is not the husband-wife order problem Paul has in mind, but the more general order between men and women.

Again the details are obscure to us, but the problem is as clear as day. Something about the way the sisters were dressing - or not dressing (hat/top bun/?) - was obscuring the differences between men and women - and here is the point! - therefore obscuring the divine order between men and women. The women were doing something / wearing / not wearing something which made them look like men. And in that way the divine order between men and women was being obscured. 

The angels are watching our worship gatherings says the Apostle Paul.

Application to Today

We live in an age of vast gender confusion. It's part of a wholesale attack on biblical anthropology, on God's created order. What is mankind? What is male and what is female? And how are they to relate to each other?

Tragically many parts of the protestant churches have followed the world as meekly as Mary's lamb.  

Equally alarming, in many parts of so-called evangelicalism this error is entering the church - indeed has already entered the church.

Women now lead church services in so-called complementarian churches, who say, at least at the moment, that they would not countenance a woman elder or a woman teacher. Women are leading at some conferences, too.

The moment a woman leads a gathering of believers, the divine order between men and women is turned upside down. Every impression is given that this church is led by women, that women are the head. We cannot ignore that impression. 

God's order is turned on its head, the angels are grieved and collateral damage is done to every other form of divine order.

Why this drift?

Why is the so-called evangelical church drifting in this way?

It may be weak men in leadership.

Could be the desire to be avant-garde, hip, cool, a pioneer. 

It may be ignorance of the whole-Scripture teaching of divine order between the sexes.

It may be strong women in the church who are influencing their husbands and Eve-like are leading them astray.

It may be simply a form of worldliness.

The effect?

The effect of women leading church services, I believe, could turn out to be a milestone on the road to other compromises.

For one thing women leading feminizes the church. Men, already on the backfoot in western culture, feel that the church is yet another space for women, not men.

What we need in our age is not weathervane leadership that cowardly follows the contours of every worldly twist in turn, but courageous leadership prepared to stand against the tide of a culture ever-more pagan in belief and in practice.

The Universe God made is Binary

We live in a Binary World

The first two chapters of the Bible reveal a God who creates binary pairs. He makes light and dark, water below (sea) and water above (clouds), he separates dry ground and sea, and he creates male and female.

Genesis chapters 1 and 2 are saying, among many other things, that there is something intrinsically binary about the created order.

(Interestingly in the subatomic world, we find more created binaries. Electrons, for example, can have up spin (+1/2) or down spin (-1/2 spin). And they have a fixed negative charge of a value equal but opposite of their antiparticle counterpart, the positron.)

The Gospel follows exactly the same binary pattern. There is light and there is darkness, spiritual sight and spiritual blindness, the wide road that leads to destruction the narrow that leads to life; there is sowing to please the sinful nature or sowing to please the Spirit, a heaven to gain or a hell to avoid. 

One or the other.

Scriptural truth, you could say, as well as the created order, is binary by divine design.

Perhaps one reason for this is so that we can understand things: after all we are weak and finite little human beings.

Transgender Ideology

Underpinning transgender ideology is a radical rejection of binary categories, especially when it comes to gender; there is no binary male and female, but a spectrum of genders.

The fall of mankind has for sure messed us all up - body and understanding - and so we should have great compassion on all who struggle. 

Unlike previous societal shifts (e.g. same-sex marriage), transgender ideology has little explicit answer in Scripture, simply because there is not one example of someone claiming to be transgender in the Bible. Homosexual practice is mentioned and condemned multiple times in Scripture but no mention of transgender. 

This explicit absence of Scriptural references does not in any way limit the ability of Scripture, which was written for all time and all peoples, to speak plainly to this issue. 

One of the most remarkable indications that the Bible is of divine origin is the fact that tucked away all over are truths that answer any confusing lie Satan may spread in a culture at any moment of history.

"God hath more light to shed from his Word."

Passages that may be passed over unnoticed by one generation suddenly come alive and relevant to another - designedly so.

An example from 1 Corinthians chapter 7: when discussing marriage, Paul says things like this "each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband" (7:2). If those instructions were not inspired by God, if only the product of one man temporarily located in one moment of time, he might have written, "each person should be married," which would have left the door open later in time to someone saying "look Paul just says get married, he doesn't say who to."

But the Holy Spirit closed the same-sex marriage door firmly with the addition of the words man, wife, woman and husband.

In like manner, for thousands of years believers may have overlooked the binary nature of God's creation, but today it is one of the many Scriptural truths that reveal the lie of transgender ideology. 

The world God made is binary. 

Image: AI draw "binary"

Why we (must) have no Popes

 

 The Kingdom of Christ is different

In this blog I want to explore and explain why in the Scriptures there is only one Head of the Church and why we must reject the idea of "single human leadership," such as popes, archbishops or bishops - or any other ecclesiastical equivalent.

One of the triumphs of the 1500s reformation was supposed to be the exposure and eradication of unscriptural man-made offices such as the pope. And yet the shallowist dip into even that era of church history provides us with examples of power-corruption in those very church leaders. 

In "The Reformers and their Stepchildren" Leonard Verduin describes the persecution of the godly Anabaptist Christians by the powerful Luthers, Calvins and Zwinglis. Although these Reformers stood against the doctrine of the pope, they were unable to shake off the spirit of popery. Lesson: even the very best of Christian men fall prey to the corruption of power and fame. 

No-one is immune to power-trip temptation. 

But let's start here: craving for human rule seems to be built into human nature; expressed either in the desire to rule or the desire to follow - to have a visible king, "like all the other nations." 

And there is something good about wanting to follow, providing it is a godly someone we know well, and good about wanting to lead, provided it is for the benefit of those being led.

But central to the Christian Gospel are truths which undermine any kind of single or overarching human rule among God's people. 

Bishop rule. Archbishop rule. Popish rule. 

First of all, the kingdom we serve is the Kingdom of God, which has become the kingdom of Christ. We acknowledge only one Man as our King.

Second, our glorious divine King is in heaven, presently invisible to us, but dwelling among his people by his Spirit and ruling through his Spirit and Word applied by godly local leaders.

In the third place, the prescribed leadership pattern in the New Testament Church is local elders in local churches. The Apostles, capital "A," were a unique and passing band of men who possessed an overarching measure of authority across more than one local church. But that variety of authority, vital for the foundational stage of the church, has disappeared now that we have the full Scriptures. 

Except for that Apostolic band, we find, in the New Testament, no hierarchal inter-church para-church organisations or structures with single leaders "at the top." Churches were bound together by intangible voluntary bonds of truth and love, not by ecclesiological structures with their human intermediaries. 

No human hierarchies in the Church, not one. 

Individual churches (always small in the New Testament) have their own leaders. No bishops presiding over a dozen churches, or up some mythical ecclesiastical pyramid, archbishops, or top of the pile Popes.

All human ranks or structures, except for local elders, are wholly unknown to the Scriptures. 

The Corruption of All human Authority

There is good divine reason why the church is ruled from heaven and it is this sober truth: all human authority is inherently corrupt - no matter how many "safeguards" we might try to put in place. 

Let's explore this together.

Corruption - or at least distortion - of power comes in a myriad of guises. Some intentional, some unintentional, some perhaps even unknown to us. 

Obviously: corruption can come about by human ambition. The world is filled with examples - and tragically so is the church. Men wanting more influence and greater power.

Obviously: corruption can occur by the mother of ambition which is pride. No human being is capable of humbly handling a position of authority beyond the small. 

Corruption can be disguised by class. It is impossible for any human being to be as-broad-as-the-true-church in our associations, affections or appointments. Birds of a feather naturally hang out together; middle-class leaders beget middle-class institutions with middle-class priorities. And before long you may have a religious organisation in the image of its leader(s). (And hence potentially incomprehensible to true believers of any other social class.)

Corruption can occur by personality type. Issues and styles that have nothing to do with truth and everything to do with human personality can become so confused, resulting in the inclusion of some (often of the same personality) and the exclusion of others (of a different personality type).

Corruption can occur by perspective.  We don't need to be postmoderns to know that all of us are perspectival by virtue of the fact of human finitude. The issues we think are important may actually not be all that important. In which case any movement we lead will intrinsically be imbalanced. 

Corruption happens by tribal instinct & bias. Out in the world this may be called the "old boy network." In recent days we've seen "famous" Reformed pastors maligning charismatic pastors (perhaps visa versa?). One tribe maligning another. (What, I wonder, does the Father of all his tribes think of this intra-family squabbling? He weeps?)

Corruption also - indeed always - occurs given enough time. If per chance the first leader of some new Christian movement was godly and relatively balanced, within time, less and less godly men will be appointed, until lines are crossed and apostasy sets in. We have seen this with Christian book publishers and a multitude of denominations. It can happen in decades; for sure it will happen over generations. 

John Wesley and Charles Spurgeon must be turning in their graves. One day, we have to be frank about these things, those who start evangelical Gospel Partnerships or Coalitions will also turn in their graves. 

Every human institution with no exceptions, goes down hill given enough time. It must do so because it is human. 

The Glory of Divine Leadership & the Wisdom of local leadership

For all these reasons and no doubt more, leadership in the Church of Jesus Christ is always by local elders in the local area who know those particular sheep. 

What divine wisdom! 

Those leaders, in turn, must seek to be accountable to their only invisible and glorious Head by applying His Word to their local church. 

And how wonderful to know that in heaven, at the Father's right hand, sits the One and Only Chief, Good, Great Shepherd of the Sheep. He knows each one of his sheep and calls them by name. His global love for them all knows no distortions of class, education, personality, culture or perspective. 

Only Jesus loves all his sheep.

Only Jesus is totally just.

Only Jesus is class-less.

Only Jesus is without any prejudice towards his true flock.

All the rest of us - no matter what checks and balances we may try to put into place - are profoundly parochial, one-sided, biased and therefore unjust.

And so in an age of celebrity Christianity (= the exaltation of individuals) we ought to do everything in our power to stand against that tide, and personally divest ourselves of power and influence, because none of us are immune to its inherent corruptions. 

What can we do, in practical terms, we should ask, to reduce our fame or power?

Local churches must seek to associate with other local true churches, and strive to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. 

But they must - at all costs - avoid the tyranny of singular human leadership, wherever it rears its ugly head.

No popes, please.