#beth moore

As the new coronavirus took root across America, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sent states tainted test kits in early February that were themselves seeded with the virus, federal officials have confirmed.

The contamination made the tests uninterpretable, and—because testing is crucial for containment efforts—it lost the country invaluable time to get ahead of the advancing pandemic.

The CDC had been vague about what went wrong with the tests, initially only saying that “a problem in the manufacturing of one of the reagents” had led to the failure. Subsequent reporting suggested that the problem was with a negative control—that is, a part of the test meant to be free of any trace of the coronavirus as a critical reference for confirming that the test was working properly overall.

I don’t know how many of y’all are aware of this current drama amongst Baptists/evangelicals, but my cousin’s wife is all in a fuss about it so it keeps showing up in my news feed. 

John MacArthur, who is the senior pastor of Grace Community Church’s main location in LA (likely known to most of you as the church that Jinger and Jeremy currently attend) recently held a conference celebrating the anniversary of his ministry. At this conference, a moderator had several pastors play some sort of word association game where he would name a prominent Christian theme or person and the pastors were to give one-word or “pithy” responses with the first thing that came to their mind. The first person named was Beth Moore, the founder of Christian women’s ministry Living Proof Ministries. MacArthur’s response was simply “Go home”. 

He later elaborated on his stance, saying, ““The #MeToo movement, again, is the culture of reclaiming ground in the church. When the leaders of evangelicalism roll over for women preachers, the feminists have really won the battle. The primary effort in feminism is not equality, they don’t want equality, that’s why 99 percent of plumbers are men. They don’t want equal power to be a plumber, they want to be senators, preachers, congressmen, president, the power structure in a university. They want power, not equality.” This answer was reportedly met with applause. 

Many evangelicals, including a number of prominent preachers, have surprisingly posted statements in support of Beth Moore. Some denounce MacArthur’s entire message here, others just his condescending tone. Moore herself responded saying that she isn’t here to serve men, but to serve God. 

The stance my cousin’s wife took (and keeps repeating ad nauseam) is that this statement was not offensive because women should want to remain at home. That is where we belong, she claims. Her life is an example of how we can be much happier if we stay in our place. She claims that she knows some women were called to singleness and some are unable to have children, yet she continues to repeat that that is our place, at home managing the house and raising the children while the men work. There are also sub-arguments about at what age it becomes inappropriate for a woman to teach boys in Sunday school and whether or not it’s Beth Moore’s fault that men sometimes show up to her conferences that are aimed at women. Many of her friends are pointing out that even if his message was correct, all he did was make “the body of Christ” look bad by tearing down a sister in Christ like this; she is adamant that that no longer matters because of the way people are degrading him over it.