2025 in Review

It’s Epiphany today, Christmas is over, the new year doesn’t start today but it’s as good a day as any for reflecting on the last twelve months.

It’s become my tradition to celebrate the anniversary of nuakh with a review of the previous year of reading and writing on Epiphany. I’ve played with the usual format, but right at the top I’d like to say thank you for reading, sharing, and supporting my work.

2025 was my fifth year writing at nuakh. This lockdown project of trying to build a writing rhythm has become a notable part of my life. I’ve continued to publish twice a week and have mostly achieved that, with recycled content in the Summer and Advent to give me a chance to catch up with myself.

I’ve continued to break even on financial support, so the hosting is entirely paid for by a small band of supporters, which is greatly appreciated. Do consider joining them. I thought last year’s growth was considerable, but my readership has grown again by around 50%. I have no idea what good numbers look like on the internet these days, but I’m really pleased. Thanks for engaging, emailing, arguing, and considering what I’ve written about.

2025 at nuakh

Previously I’ve listed my five most read blog posts, but as I explained last year, getting traction via Google means that my most read posts aren’t typically ones from this year but the ones with numbers in the title that Google has decided to pull into its summarised answers sections. It’s a little less interesting to read about, but a lot of people seem to Google what Ham did to Noah, what 10 kinds of sin might be, the seven sacrifices in the Old Testament, and the 12 things that happened on the Cross.

My fifth most read post was from this year, but wasn’t from me! My, to date, only guest post from new friend Aaron Stead over at Hope Church Winchester, ‘Against Executive Pastors.‘

All this really tells us is that making the title sound like a listicle or deeply provocative is an effective driver of traffic. Clickbait works.

My favourite blog posts

My choices tend towards the things I’m really interested in and some of the insights I’ve had this year: the connection between Genesis 1 and 1 Corinthians 14 was an insight I’ll be dwelling on for a while, as I suspect was noticing the metamodern turn visible in our growing religiosity. Otherwise that’s two pieces on reading symbolically (one method and one practice) and what I think of as good writing about bread.

My favourite ever post remains Learning From The Hours from my first year of writing.

My books of the year

This was a poor reading year, for me. I read 66 books in 2025, and you can see the whole list here if you’re interested in that sort of thing. That’s the least I’ve read in a couple of years, part of which has been my Master’s flipping from a primarily reading to a primarily writing stage and part of which has been adapting to a new rhythm of reading.

The ironic thing is that being largely in control of my own time (that’s an illusion, but more true than in a secular job) and reading literally being one of the things I’m paid to do is that I ended up reading less. That isn’t, in and of itself, all that surprising, but it does make me want to attempt a more structured approach to reading this year.

Ranking the best is always difficult task, so I won’t try, but here are the eleven that stayed with me:

The Storied Life. Jared Wilson. A book about writing that made my soul sing. Written by a writer for writers, about your life and soul. Sublime.
Godric. Frederick Buechner. An odd novel that I just couldn’t really shake for months. A story of a medieval hermit. The writing often rises from prose into poetry in arresting ways.
Wine, Soil, and Salvation in the Hebrew Bible and New Testament. Mark Scarlata. The only book I read for my Master’s thesis on the list. The only academic book I’ve read that has wine pairings for each chapter. These facts are connected.
Henry V. Dan Jones. As ever, Jones’ history reads like a novel.
‘Tis Mercy All. Natalie Williams. It always feels slightly wrong to include books by people I know, and I expected a helpful book about how to be merciful to others. Instead, Natalie applied mercy to my soul with deeply insightful vulnerability. Wonderful.
Sense and Sensibility. Jane Austen. I’m now a pastor in Austen’s town, I feel I should be familiar with her oeuvre. It’s not as funny as Pride and Prejudice but the character portraits are excellent.
Theo of Golden. Allen Levi. This novel surprised me, it’s beautifully written, sweet and endearing, and then managed to make me sob at the climax.
The Atonement: An Introduction. Jeremy Treat. A short, to the point, and refreshingly clear book on the Atonement. Superbly helpful, my new ‘go to’ on the subject.
God is an Englishman. Bijan Omrani. An enjoyable book with a premise it convinced me of: what makes England English is a result of Christianity. It’s self-consciously trying to do for Englishness what Tom Holland did in Dominion for Western values.
Mere Christian Hermeneutics. Kevin J. Vanhoozer. I’ll need to chew on this more to know exactly what to do with it and where I want to agree and disagree, but its a hugely important contribution.
The Elder-Led Church. Murray Capill. There are lots of books about being an elder, but very few about the functioning of an eldership team. We’re going to use this with our developing eldership team.

The best articles I read this year

I don’t have anything to recommend under this heading this year, I may retire it if this continues. Honestly, this is because I spend a lot less time online and so get recommended a lot less good articles: I’ve simply read less articles this year. Everything good I read was in a print edition of Mere Orthodoxy.

Articles and Projects

As I predicted last year I haven’t published anything this year. I suspect that will continue as while I plan to submit my MA-by-Research thesis this year it’ll eat most of my energy and if I do write anything publishable I doubt it’ll be published in 2026.

I’ve got one idea brewing (about the nature of attention and its connection to charismatic encounter) that I’d need to do some reading for. It’s possible I’ll manage that reading this year!

Secondly, last year we launched the journal Eucharisma and I promised two more issues in 2025. That… did not happen. We’ve got enough articles submitted to pull an issue together, but time to edit is slight. I expect this to come out in early 2026 and I continually apologise to all the wonderful writers waiting for feedback on their labours. All I can say here is that full time ministry and my studies have eaten my time for side projects. I believe in Eucharisma, and in the many things that I hope it could become a launchpad for, but its going to be a slow burn unless a significant team develops. If you’d like to volunteer, drop me a message!

It’s not really a project, but we moved to a new town, in a different part of the country for me to help pastor a church in rural Hampshire. It was of course, a huge change in lots of ways: new house, new place, new jobs for both of us. The Lord’s been faithful.

Developing as a writer

My blogging this year has been scattergun, if I’m honest. My output has been ok, though I haven’t always managed the two-a-week that I attempt. My backlog that allows me to commit to cold takes has been eroded, though I’ve managed to build a little of it up again through December.

I wrote last year about enjoying writing in series because the discipline helped me rather than always facing a blank page. I completed a short series at the start of the year about finding Jesus in the tabernacle and need to lean more into this sort of writing in the coming year I expect.

Nevertheless I think I wrote some helpful pieces for my own thinking. Despite my reasonably wide reach, I’ll continue to insist that blog posts are not articles, they are thinking out loud that might join together into whole ideas over time. I reserve the right to change my mind on a thought I put out in this form, but this form of thinking is profoundly useful to me. I’ve been able to work through some questions I, or other pastors I’m talking to, are thinking to figure out what I think. I’ve had at least one ‘while writing’ revelation that only the act of writing would have allowed me to get to. I post mostly because that keeps me honest on writing and I’m glad that it helps others.

What I haven’t managed since moving to Alton to join Harvest Church and the wider Commission network of churches, is the same rhythm of writing twice a week. It’s largely ad hoc and I feel like I’m fighting for the time. This should be easier once my thesis is done, until I do something stupid like go and write a book (talk me off that ledge for a least a year or two, please), but its my primary goal for the year: find a rhythm.

I had the opportunity to speak at a conference this year, as well as to appear on a podcast. Both new, and fun, experiences for me. Neither is the real work of being an elder in a local church.

Developing nuakh

Again, I’ve done no real development work this year, I just wrote two posts a week as much as I could. My buffer isn’t as long as I’d like. Nevertheless, a (to me) mind-boggling number of people seem to have read something I’ve written, and a small dedicated band read all of it. I’m grateful.

Thank you for reading

Beyond that: thank you for reading. If you’d like to keep supporting nuakh then there are three ways you can do that.

The first is the easiest: you can sign up for my mailing list. Scroll all the way to the bottom of this post to do that. A lot of my readers find me via my social media feeds, which is great but fragile. Those websites may or may not exist in a year’s time. It helps me as a writer to have a direct connection to you by having your email address. Currently all you’ll receive is an email about a new blog post every time it goes up.

The second is the hardest: you can give financially. Most Christians expect good content to be free. I think that’s probably always been the case, but it means that all theological reflection runs on patronage rather than a commercial model. If you like the way I think and would like to help me develop further, do prayerfully consider becoming a patron at a level you can afford. If we want to encourage reflection we’ll need to financially free pastors and others to do this. Your money goes towards my hosting.

The third is… the Goldilocks zone? When you like my writing, share it. Text or email the piece to your friends, like or share or retweet the post on your algorithmic hellscape of choice. We all know how the algorithms work by now, your ‘like’ makes a significant difference. If you mostly come here via Facebook consider adding my pages to your ‘favourites’ so it actually shows up in your newsfeed.

If you don’t want to do any of that, you’re still welcome, friends. I hope what I write here and elsewhere is helpful in forming you towards Jesus.

However you’re feeling as we enter a new year pregnant with possibility and pain, know this: Jesus is on the throne, and he will not cast out his people.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash