word | spirit | world | church
Abraham gets a bad rap, and I think lots of it extends from bad reading. We are talking, of course, about what is sometimes called the ‘sister fib.’ Abraham—still called Abram at the time—tells Pharaoh that Sarai (Sarah) is his sister rather than his wife, and hilarious hijinks ensue (Genesis 12). Actually no, not hilarious… Continue reading Rescuing Abraham
Or, more specifically, should they have vision statements? It’s common these days to expect a church to have a specific vision, often expressed in a pithy statement about what they will or won’t be seeking to do in their location. Sometimes it’s accompanied by a mission statement—which sometimes is the same thing, but at least… Continue reading Should churches have a vision?
Pray without ceasing (1 Thessalonians 5), the Bible tells us. We think: surely you don’t mean literally, Lord? As Christians we have a remarkable privilege; the one who not only made the world but contains to sustain it, and who the powers that run the world obey, has offered us constant conversation. We can chat… Continue reading Why we are tempted not to pray
Pastors hate being told that don’t have a real job—the old joke being that you only have to work one day a week. The thing is, it’s more true than you think. I’ve been an elder in a couple of churches for around ten years now. Which makes me pretty green in the pastoral stakes,… Continue reading Pastor, you don’t have a job
Lots of churches run leadership development programmes of one sort or another, but is that a good idea? I used to operate graduate development programmes for Rolls-Royce, while there I was involved with redesigning the early career leadership development programme which was at the time award-winning and worked across eleven different countries. It’s been seven… Continue reading 7 Leadership development principles
Behind my desk is a wall of words: 16 quotes or phrases that encourage me, each done in attractive typography. One of them is from N. D. Wilson, a writer whose wordsmithing I appreciate, even if I think we would think differently about very much where church and faith are concerned: heartbeats cannot be hoarded… Continue reading Lives are for living
The Bible is music. Or so Alastair Roberts and Andrew Wilson claim in the introduction to their superb Echoes of Exodus. I don’t know a lot about classical music, but the crux of the point is that we see various themes in the scriptures, and they are picked up and repeated by repeating stories or… Continue reading Repost: The Bible is Music
Some time last century Nietzsche killed God, or reported on our murder of the divine, anyway. As the trends and forces which made him declare that God was dead accelerated we have systematically done the same to each authority figure we encountered, in diminishing scales of authority like repeatedly smashing Russian dolls, until they are… Continue reading Killing the Schoolmaster
I was speaking to a friend and he suggested a startling thought: we want our discipleship to be gamified. On the face of it I could shrug it off, he and I are millennials, gamification is a Gen Z problem. They’re the generation that sees progress in terms of levelling up. We’re the I’m amazing,… Continue reading Repost: Next Level Discipleship
Theology is important. Constructive, imaginative, Christian thinking is important—and remains important for the church today. Occasionally you encounter someone in evangelical circles who sniffs at the idea of ‘constructive’ theology today. Their contention is usually something like, ‘it’s all already been worked out,’ suggesting that it’s the height of arrogance to think that you might… Continue reading The Theological Imagination
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