"The contemporary situation may offer a golden opportunity for believers concerned about history.  I do not myself know anyone from the community of faith who has seized fully that opportunity, but it seems to be there for the taking.  That opportunity is created both by modern intellectual confusion and by the specific forms of contemporary thought that, in striving against each other, create the confusion.  The opportunity is to practice a history that accepts with discrimination, but also eagerly, the historiographical wisdom of the world.  That opportunity is to show the beauty, power and coherence of the Christin faith make it possible to learn from the modern world without falling prey to intellectual confusion or anti-Christian conclusions.

"Who in the tribe of Christian historians is in the best position to work simultaneously with aspects of the premodern, the modern and the postmodern?  The answer must be missiologists...."

Mark A Noll, 'The Potential of Missiology for the Crises of History' in Ronald A Wells, ed.  History and the Christian Historian, Cambridge, Eerdmans, 1998, p 122

As the saying goes: discuss.

This is the time of year that the leaving students of Baptist, URC and Congregationalist persuasions enter the unsettling experience of 'the settlement process.'  This year my kid sister is doing it URC style. I pray regularly that she will see the light and move to the one true church, but as she does the same in reverse, God is caught in an unenviable theological bind.  Unity in diversity and a bit of sibling rivalry to boot - makes for good, practical ecumenism somewhere along the line.

I have huge respect for those who endeavour to match ministers to churches, and understand that this week around 30 Baptist leaving students enter the 'pot' and wait for the first list of names of churches.  I'm not sure how many URC's there are - probably around half a dozen by all accounts - and they will be waiting for similar information, albeit only one church at a time and with a slightly different process.  I have no idea about the Congs.  But there will be around 50 people waiting and wondering what their future holds, seeking God's will amidst the muddle of their own desires, dreams and fears.  It's a scary time, and we do well to hold in our thoughts and prayers those ministerial students known to us who are leaving college at the end of this academic year.  L at Bristol and F at Westminster (plus anyone at either of the Northerns), you are in my thoughts.