Jonathan D. Sheddan

Thinking of Rome? Please pray for evangelical Christians here to be bold, strategic, and wise. Pray also for the millions of lost here who need to hear a faithful witness to God’s glory and grace. May the name of Christ Jesus be magnified here in spirit and in truth!

@Wade_Burleson @pastordmack Not true: “would make official the SBC barring any woman from serving in any local church leadership capacity.” You define “leadership capacity” narrower than Scripture, the SBC, or this amendment ever intended. I have my own issues with the amendment, but not this.

@ALesserPaul @Pastor_Gabe Ok, but the passage doesn’t fully spell out the mechanics of removal/authority that enforces it (What happens upon rebuke and fear?). Having committees that have collective authority, not in general but to execute such rebuke if there are 2-3 witnesses, applies the passage.

@shedd98 @Pastor_Gabe 1 Timothy 5:17-22 spells it out, specifically about Elders. They can be removed and expelled for unrepentant sin

In a church with a congregational polity, if women serve on committees that hold authority over men, especially if pastors and teachers have to submit to the will of those committees, is that church not functionally egalitarian?

@Pastor_Gabe @ALesserPaul And how, biblically, are elders held to account? Plurality is helpful, but not foolproof. Or power-hungry proof, or . . .

@ALesserPaul As Scripture says elders are overseers (1 Tim. 3:1, Titus 1:4) and the church is to be subject to the elders (1 Peter 5:5), and there is not a similar verse saying elders must be subject to the democratic will of the congregation, I believe that to be an unbiblical polity, yes.

@Pastor_Gabe @GodCenteredUS I suppose the implied question is whether we should visit the “by democratic processes” language in the BFM 2000.

@GodCenteredUS I would argue that congregational rule is not the biblical model for church polity. But of course a congregational church is going to argue that there is biblical support.

@BruceHunterJr @ihtesham2005 Ok, but did you read the rest of the post that showed better scores/results (in two different countries) if those who processed via typing vs those who processed via writing?

This is assuming that the brain lighting up has a benefit. Maybe it's lighting up simply because of the extra actions are needed while typing is an optimized input for the brain. Example. Very much like how DeepSeek was able to optimize the network layer code order to gain. Reference: youtu.be/aAfanTeRn84?si… I've been typing on a keyboard all my life and I don't think I am worse off at all. In fact it's probably the opposite.

A Norwegian neuroscientist spent 20 years proving that the act of writing by hand changes the human brain in ways typing physically cannot, and almost nobody outside her field has read the paper. Her name is Audrey van der Meer. She runs a brain research lab in Trondheim, and the paper that closed the argument was published in 2024 in a journal called Frontiers in Psychology. The finding is brutal enough that it should have changed every classroom on Earth. The experiment was simple. She recruited 36 university students and put each one in a cap with 256 sensors pressed against their scalp to record brain activity. Words flashed on a screen one at a time. Sometimes the students wrote the word by hand on a touchscreen using a digital pen, and sometimes they typed the same word on a keyboard. Every neural response was recorded for the full five seconds the word stayed on screen. Then her team looked at the part of the data most researchers had ignored for years, which is how different parts of the brain were communicating with each other during the task. When the students wrote by hand, the brain lit up everywhere at once. The regions responsible for memory, sensory integration, and the encoding of new information were all firing together in a coordinated pattern that spread across the entire cortex. The whole network was awake and connected. When the same students typed the same word, that pattern collapsed almost completely. Most of the brain went quiet, and the connections between regions that had been alive seconds earlier were nowhere to be found on the EEG. Same word, same brain, same person, and two completely different neurological events. The reason turned out to be something nobody had really paid attention to before her work. Writing by hand is not one motion but a sequence of thousands of tiny micro-movements coordinated with your eyes in real time, where each letter is a different shape that requires the brain to solve a slightly different spatial problem. Your fingers, wrist, vision, and the parts of your brain that track position in space are all working together to produce one letter, then the next, then the next. Typing throws all of that away. Every key on a keyboard requires the exact same finger motion regardless of which letter you are pressing, which means the brain has almost nothing to integrate and almost no problem to solve. Van der Meer said it plainly in her interviews. Pressing the same key with the same finger over and over does not stimulate the brain in any meaningful way, and she pointed out something that should scare every parent who handed their kid an iPad. Children who learn to read and write on tablets often cannot tell letters like b and d apart, because they have never physically felt with their bodies what it takes to actually produce those letters on a page. A decade before her, two researchers at Princeton ran the same fight using a completely different method and ended up at the same answer. Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer tested 327 students across three experiments, where half took notes on laptops with the internet disabled and half took notes by hand, before testing everyone on what they actually understood from the lectures they had watched. The handwriting group won by a wide margin on every question that required real understanding rather than surface recall. The reason was hiding in the transcripts of what the two groups had actually written down. The laptop students typed almost word for word, capturing more total content but processing almost none of it as they went, while the handwriting students physically could not write fast enough to transcribe a lecture in real time, which forced them to listen carefully, decide what actually mattered, and put it in their own words on the page. That single act of choosing what to keep was the learning itself, and the keyboard had quietly skipped the choosing and skipped the learning along with it. Two studies. Two countries. Same answer. Handwriting makes the brain work. Typing lets it coast. Every note you have ever typed instead of written went into your brain through a thinner pipe. Every meeting, every book highlight, every idea you captured on your phone instead of on paper was processed at half depth. You did not forget those things because your memory is bad. You forgot them because typing never woke the part of the brain that would have made them stick. The fix is the thing your grandmother already knew. Pick up a pen. Write the thing down. The slower road is the faster one.

@bartbarber @JaredCBurt What about the adjective “pastoral”?

@JaredCBurt What is the meaning of the verb "to pastor"? I think this very question is the rub. I would say it means "to serve as a pastor/elder/overseer of a congregation."

There’s a church somewhere almost exactly like yours. The only difference is they have a “Children’s Pastor” because she pastors children. This church wants to partner with you in giving financial support to missionaries to reach people for Christ. Do you partner w/ them?

@megbasham Perhaps this is from Hadith, rather than the Quran itself? Can anyone tell me where in the Quran it says this?

This is a good instinct, the problem is, the Quran teaches that Muslims are allowed to lie in their efforts to conquer nations for Islam.

Thinking of Rome? Please pray for evangelical Christians here to be bold, strategic, and wise. Pray also for the millions of lost here who need to hear a faithful witness to God’s glory and grace. May the name of Christ Jesus be magnified here in spirit and in truth!

@thesouthrhead0n @tennalum Texas is generally closer to 3 or 4, perhaps even more “burnt” than either.

@tennalum Its 3 but why are people saying 2? We're not Texas people.

Vol pop quiz: which orange is 𝒕𝒉𝒆 orange?

@TuckerHarlin I get the difference between a 1st-yr coach and ‘05 when TN was still a top-10 team (for this game). I also get that the memory is unpopular for some fans because of emotions w/ the Clausen family. But the 2005 LSU game was crazy. Rick’s off the bench play? Nuts.

I think the average Tennessee fan’s answer is one of these two games. They had zero business winning either with first year head coaches.

@JoshuaBarzon There is only one answer to this question. Income Tax.

You can get rid of one of the following: 1. Income Tax 2. Sales Tax 3. Property Tax Which one do you choose to eliminate?

@JoshuaBarzon It definitely depends on the situation and the design, but I personally feel roundabouts are greatly underrated and under-appreciated.

Are roundabouts or intersections better?

@BethanyMcGrew @Colson_Potter @farmingandJesus I get that that in itself doesn’t prove anything or even offer evidence toward my position. I will say that while I hold to PSA, I don’t think Jesus’s question/Psalms 22 reference on the cross implies what many PSA proponents seem to think or teach that it does.

@BethanyMcGrew @Colson_Potter @farmingandJesus Fair enough. Perhaps this is why I feel [some of] the different aspects of atonement are not necessarily contradictory but are together bigger than we sometimes allow or include in our descriptions.

Penal substitutionary atonement? Yes or no and why? Scripture encouraged. 👇🏻 Actually, scripture required.

@BethanyMcGrew @pastorchar1015 @farmingandJesus Continuing to study Scripture and being teachable are important.

@shedd98 @pastorchar1015 @farmingandJesus I understand that perspective. It would really be something you'd have to spend some time researching. I took nearly a year on it. I don't want to say I have anything all figured out now though. I always want to be teachable and learn.

@BethanyMcGrew @Colson_Potter @farmingandJesus I think there was more going on than you are acknowledging. God pretty clearly shows both ceremonial requirements and moral requirements in the law. There’s also the substitutionary picture shown in Genesis 22 when God provides the ram to be sacrificed instead of Isaac.

That’s not what was going on in animal sacrifices in the Old Testatment. The blood, which represented as the life, was offered to God in order to cleanse sacred space and sinful consciences so we could share a meal with God. So the animals life was offered, not its death. And animals lives were required even for ritual impurities like after natural bodily emission and even childbirth. Those aren’t sins deserving of wrath being poured on a person to then need an animal as a substitute. The whole system was about cleansing the sanctuary and people of “the forces of death” which includes sin but also things pertaining to our mortality - like bodily emissions & childbirth.

@BethanyMcGrew @pastorchar1015 @farmingandJesus I appreciate the resource. I’m not sure these ideas are mutually exclusive.

@shedd98 @pastorchar1015 @farmingandJesus Have you looked into other theories of atonement? This video does a good job going over them: youtu.be/xoJa7AiQdgM?si…

@BethanyMcGrew @ajfworship @farmingandJesus So God’s wrath does need to be satisfied? If it does, how is that done?

@shedd98 @ajfworship @farmingandJesus Christus Victor & Ransom were what the early church wrote about and expressed belief in. PSA didn’t come on the scene until way later.

@BethanyMcGrew @pastorchar1015 @farmingandJesus I think the question is that if not psa, what is the nature of atonement Christ provides? How does he accomplish this? How does such bring justification to the believer? Hebrews says Christ was not only the priest, but the sacrifice himself.

@pastorchar1015 @farmingandJesus Propitiation refers to the Mercy Seat, not wrath satisfaction. Check out the usage of the Greek word in the Septuagint.

@BethanyMcGrew @Colson_Potter @farmingandJesus The priests did not have God’s wrath poured on them, but the sacrifice itself pictured wrath poured out on a (albeit, temporary) substitute. Jesus became this (absolutely permanent) substitute. If God’s wrath was not poured out on him, how are we not still in our sins?

I’ve attached this Scripture in the Septuagint - the Bible Jesus & the Disciples and Paul used. The priests bore the sins of the people in the Old Covenant according to Numbers 18:1. That doesn’t mean they had God’s wrath poured on them. It means the were the ones responsible with offering sacrifices and removing sin from the camp. Sin offerings were about cleanse the sacred space and people’s consciences. But they weren’t able to fully do so, that’s why they had a Day of Atonement every year. Jesus is now our once and for all sacrifice and His blood has fully cleansed our sinful consciences so that we may live confidently in service to Him. (Hebrews 9-10)