We never got the talk on 'rightly handling the word of truth' as the speaker felt led to concentrate on other aspects of what he had prepared.  This is a shame, because I'd like to have known how he understood this term given some of what he said.  It all started so well, affirming the need for ongoing study and reflection on the part of preachers - but only so long as they read the right stuff, it seems.  After denouncing liberalism and feminism as 'dangerous' he pronounced vegetarianism as demonic based on his reading of 1 Timothy 4:1 - 3.  You need a KJV to be able to reach this conclusion - although I reckon you could argue that it is actually unmarried vegetarians who would demon-inspired.

What utter twaddle!  The Greek word means (in contemporary parlance) 'foodstuffs' - which the KJV translates as 'meat' because 'meat' meant food in those days.  What saddens me almost as much as this dangerous mishandling of scripture is that the same speaker was happy to throw in Greek words willy nilly when they suited his purposes.  Given that elsewhere in the Bible, we are called to respect other people's views on what they can and cannot eat (e.g. Paul on food offered to idols) and that many have argued that the pre-fall people were vegetarian, taking one English translation of one verse as a basis for denouncing a whole group of people seems contrary to his (correct) statement that we need to see the bigger picture of scripture.

It is really easy to criticise someone else, and I know I have been as guilty as any of dodgey exegesis and partial (in every sense) preaching.  I just hope I have the commonsense not to make pronouncements that are so easily knocked down.

The speaker obviously had a deep love of the letters to Timothy - something I share (perhaps surprisingly as a female of the species!); I just wish some of the encouragements that Paul gives to young preachers/ministers/evangelists could have been drawn out to balance the warnings.