Women - Know your Place

Truly it is when our beliefs are brought face to face with experience that our theology is developed. Not in a study, where cool thoughts on divinity can be held up to the gentle light of a 12W compact incandescent bulb. For when we take those same thoughts out into the light, that is where they are exposed to the hard, clear, blue light of the day. And we find that, though low-energy lights are beloved of the environmental industry and save money, they're not very good if you actually want to see things.

And so I found in Coalville. Of the inhabitants in the round of said town, I will say little. They may well be charming, loving people in whose hearts the Gospel light, should it catch spark, might glow with a warming flame that far outshines a low-energy light bulb.
But of the people that my preaching attracted, I cannot say any of these things.

For as I drew a crowd of angry onlookers, I realised that their presence was offensive to my very text.

I was using a sign which, summarising as it does many Bible passages, comes - I seem to remember - from a religious programme of the 1990s. In that programme, a Mr Cholmondely-Warner used to offer very sound advice on how we should live our lives. I've always thought this slogan was snappy, witty and true to Biblical principles. Based in particular on 1 Tim 2:12, it reads simply "Women - know your place".

There you have it. Simple, godly, easy to remember - the perfect evangelistic slogan. But in Coalville, it would appear, women do not know their place. Maybe it is simply that many of them had to work to help support their families when the mine closed. As a result they have learnt the evils of self-reliance.

But in any case. I had to leave the town swiftly under a hail of Brussels Sprouts. But as I ran, wiping the vegetation from my face, I rejoiced. For so also they treated the prophets.