word | spirit | world | church
The Church isn’t in a hurry. Neither should Christians be. You can apply this in so many directions in our hurried world, but I’d like to think about our questions (again!). Questions require time. Fast answers are usually trite ones. Some intellectual curiosities can be settled quickly by a swift Google, but real questions can’t… Continue reading Is Your Church Slow Enough?
Charismatics and Pentecostals have a reputation for being anti-intellectual. Although we’d love to say this was a myth, the reason it’s so often repeated is that it, unfortunately, does have some grounding in reality. We Pentecostals and Charismatics aren’t well known for being thinkers. That's the opening paragraph to Eucharisma, a new home for charismatic… Continue reading Eucharisma
“God said it, I believe it, that settles it.” Is this a helpful ‘creed’ for thinking about the faith and the Bible? I don’t think it is. There’s a lot of commend about this approach, people who say either the cliché or a more nuanced view of it tend to trust God. They tend to… Continue reading Ask Why
If I asked you to summarise the story of the Bible, I wonder what you’d say? I do often ask this in classroom settings with Christians and there are a whole host of frequently given answers. Typically, people tell some version of the story of redemption from sin involving the fall and then Jesus’ incarnation… Continue reading The Bible’s 3 Stories
As is mine. That’s how faith works. We all have hand-me-down faith. Sometimes I hear people talk as though faith that someone else gave you is somehow worse than faith that you found for yourself. I think that’s a mistake. I just had the privilege of watching eight baptisms and heard eight stories of people’s… Continue reading Your Faith is Secondhand
There’s an adage that gets thrown around in church circles, and maybe wider: healthy things grow. There’s an increasingly common quip in response that suggests that healthy things grow, and then stop growing. The only thing that keeps on growing constantly is cancer. The first is usually used to suggest either that your church not… Continue reading Good Growth
I’ll give you, it’s not the best question. We all intrinsically know what books are and how they work, it’s not a complex technology. A couple of boards with some paper glued or sewn between, right? Except, I fear that as we move into a post-literate society, its less instinctual than you might think. If… Continue reading What is a book?
The most undertrained group in churches are elders. Most church elders are not on staff at their churches. That’s not just thinking about very small churches that can’t pay one of their elders, but most eldership teams are going to be majority non-employed by their churches. As an aside, don’t call these guys ‘lay elders’… Continue reading Elders & Training
In the Old Testament, the Temple was a microcosm, a miniature copy of reality. We see this in the way it’s structured; it’s built as a copy of the Garden of Eden: a mountaintop land with trees. The Temple is on the apex of a mountain, it’s full of trees (the lampstands and the decorations),… Continue reading Church as Blueprint
This is the last part of my ongoing series exploring the letter written by St Polycarp to the church in Philippi, collaborating with my friend Adsum Try Ravenhill of the Raven’s Writing Desk. You can read the previous parts at these links: I; II; III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII, XIII. Dear Adsum And in turn, I write my final letter to you.… Continue reading Final Words: Polycarp XIV
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