William Bradford

“It isn’t merely a justice issue, it’s a mission issue—and the mission will continue to be held back without women.”
― Tara Beth Leach, Emboldened: A Vision for Empowering Women in Ministry

“What do you think success is?" asked the boy.
"To love," said the mole.”
― Charlie Mackesy, The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse

“History was, if anything, at even more of a discount in the United States, where a strident Fundamentalism displaying overt hostility towards the academy had made a far greater impact on the Evangelical world. Although by the 1940s a number of ‘neo-Evangelicals’ were inching their way back towards greater engagement with scholarship, progress was especially slow in the discipline of history. As late as 1982 Mark Noll, a leading American Evangelical historian, was deploring ‘the generally weak sense of history among most evangelical groups’.8 Even the past of the Evangelical movement itself was alien territory.”
― Mark A. Noll, Evangelicals: Who They Have Been, Are Now, and Could Be

“Understand that these early Christians did not meet in churches and sit apart from one another in pews, and then when the music ended get in their chariots and go home. No, their churches were small, and they met in homes or house churches. A recent study by a British scholar has concluded that if the apostle Paul’s house churches were composed of about thirty people, this would have been their approximate make-up:1
• a craftworker in whose home they meet, along with his wife, children, a couple of male slaves, a female domestic slave, and a dependent relative • some tenants, with families and slaves and dependents, also living in the same home in rented rooms • some family members of a householder who himself does not participate in the house church • a couple of slaves whose owners do not attend • some freed slaves who do not participate in the church • a couple homeless people • a few migrant workers renting small rooms in the home
Add to this mix some Jewish folks and a perhaps an enslaved prostitute and we see how many “different tastes” were in a typical house church in Rome: men and women, citizens and freed slaves and slaves (who had no legal rights), Jews and Gentiles, people from all moral walks of life, and perhaps, most notably, people from elite classes all the way down the social scale to homeless people.”
― Scot McKnight, A Fellowship of Differents: Showing the World God's Design for Life Together