I think both Terry and Moe make excellent points.  One of the problems with the church today is that we pay someone else to do everything for us. We pay the elders to do the teaching and we pay the missionaries to do the witnessing and we then believe that we are doing all we can for the Lord and we are proud of it.  Are we not all ministers of the gospel?
   
  Harry

Terry Rayburn <terryrayburn@...> wrote:
  Don't beat around the bush, Moe, what do you 
really think? :)

Seriously, I would consider banning women from 
reading the Bible in a church assembly as 
equivalent to the Pharisees under the Old Covenant
outlawing a needle carried in a lady's apron.

They were expressing an actual God-given scriptural principle
of that time and place, (namely, no work on the Sabbath),
but they were going beyond the scripture to their own
extra-biblical application of that principle.

That Pharasaic principle was this: better to err on the side
of extra-strict adherance than to even allow the *possibility*
of a violation.

Godly Pharisees (yes, there were such) did so out of a 
true reverance for the Lord, ungodly Pharisees, of whom
there were many, did it out of pure self-righteousness.

But even that Pharasaic principle was beyond 
scripture, and thus a sort of self-fulfilling principle.

While still despising sin and loving the precepts of the 
Lord in our hearts, yet we need to avoid over-exegeting
some passages. 

A good test sometimes is to ask the question, "Should 
someone be disciplined vis a vis Matt. 18, and put out
of the assembly for unrepentedly doing that?"

Terry Rayburn

Moe Bergeron wrote:
Now brethren, I suspect some of you are control freaks and are guilty of a
Gentile system of rule. You would have only the "duly authorized"
distributing the elements or bringing a word of encouragement,etc.,. The end
result is a bunch of spectators sitting beneath your chief seats.

I have said it before and I will say it again. Pastors emasculate more men
than all of the women libbers out there.

Retreating quickly,
moe
		
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