On the morning of last week’s THINK conference our satirical blogger, Saint Stuffed Shirt, tweeted: “Gathering with Calvinists today to consider ‘Is Calvinism incoherent?’ Can't for the life of me imagine what the answer will be!”

Yesterday, Matt Hosier made the case that if we could just disentangle five point Calvinism from the TULIP acronym, and get back to the essence of what the Canons of Dordt were saying, we’d find it much easier to accept it. It won’t be a surprise to those who were there, and probably many other readers of this blog, that I'm not so sure. (I’m also not sure that “much of the debate” at the THINK conference centred on Limited Atonement; by my recollection, it was discussed for about ten minutes out of a six hour day, but that's by the by). As someone who believes the scriptures teach both unconditional election and the preservation of the saints, yet still finds five point Calvinism as a system problematic in various ways, I thought I might explain why.

Giving last week's THINK conference the title, “Is Calvinism Incoherent?” might have been expected to produce a rather binary response of either “Yes” or “No”. Almost inevitably though, a more “shades of grey” picture emerged. Helpfully, our keynote speaker, Mike Ovey, pointed out that no human has entirely coherent thought, so it would be unfair to expect Calvinism to be without its anomalies. However, much of the debate focussed on the coherence or otherwise of the TULIP system, and in particular on the “L” of limited atonement.

Did Jesus of Nazareth exist? Well, obviously. It's one of those questions that answers itself just by being asked; the only people who answer in the negative are cranky mythicists, professional atheists and conspiracy theorists. Aren't they?

Carl Trueman’s posts on the Reformation21 blog are eagerly anticipated by some of us who post here at WYTM. His theology and emphases do not correspond exactly with where we stand, but often they do, and more generally Trueman writes the kind of punchy, thought-provoking pieces that we aspire to.

The other day I was having dinner with some other pastors and the conversation worked around to the ubiquity of electronic communication and entertainment. One of my colleagues was lamenting the umbilical cord that seems to exist between young people and their electronic devices – iPod permanently on, phone ceaselessly examined, you know the story. Another pastor interrupted him, pointing out the extent to which we, too, were wired up – I had been playing online chess with another pastor via my phone, we had been looking at someone’s photos on their iPad, texting had taken place. Rather than seeing our electronic connections as worrisome, argued my friend, we should recognize how useful they are, and the extent to which they can build communication, and thus community. He had a strong point, and is the kind of person who expresses his points strongly, so the discussion rather fizzled out at that point and we moved onto something else.

Yesterday, I explored some of the ways in which the charismatic-missional tension is felt by those of us who are convinced that we as churches are called to mission, and called to experience the person and work of the Holy Spirit in greater power and intimacy. Today, I want to suggest some ways forward. I have already started by doing the unforgivable, and coining a new piece of jargon, charismissional, for the fusion of spiritual and evangelistic zeal I am hoping for. (It may not be new; who knows?) As someone who regularly mocks Christian leadership jargon being used without irony - my favourites of late are being invited to a "roundtable" and asked to help "set plumbline" for people - and who has written pieces trying to disentangle words like "missional" and "Reformed", this might seem out of character. I hope it does. But whatever you say about neologisms, they do have the power to make people stop and think about how their constituent parts work together. So charismissional it is.

I've been thinking quite a bit about the "charismatic-missional tension" recently. Some prefer not to think of it as a tension for theological reasons (since to be truly charismatic and truly missional are, surely, one and the same), and many will object to framing it as one because it makes it sound like a spectrum - highly charismatic and non-missional at one end, highly missional and non-charismatic at the other - that necessarily requires believers, and leaders, to compromise. But that said, I am confident that most readers of this blog will know what I mean when I call it that.