word | spirit | world | church
We live in a world of constant connection. We carry with us little black glass ‘communication’ devices that mean we’re connected at all times; there is no situation in which we can’t be reached or distracted or bothered by an economy built on attention. We’ve all been there: you’re having a deep conversation with a… Continue reading Constant Connection
Jesus has three bodies, which is the sort of nonsense saying that gets Christians in trouble. No, I’m not suggesting some sort of Trinitarian confusion where either the Father and Spirit have bodies (they don’t) or that all three persons are Jesus (they’re not), but in some classical accounts Jesus has three bodies. The three… Continue reading The Three Bodies of Christ
I was recently reading this fascinating article in Plough Magazine about intergenerational stewardship. I first heard about it while eating tapas with the editor, because apparently that’s my life now. Anyway, to the article: all well and good you might think, as long as you’re a German Prince with land that stretches back generations in… Continue reading Stewarding Stories
Recently, my wife’s Step-Grandmother died. Along with a plethora of other things, we inherited from her house stuffed with treasures a very large Bible. It’s about the size of a PC tower—they don’t make them like they used to. It’s the Step-Grandmother’s family Bible, it has all her family’s names written in it going back… Continue reading Written in the Book
The words that we use create the categories that we think in. Language is upstream of thought. Which sounds like a completely crazed thing to say, I imagine, though I’ve touched on the concept before when explaining why we can’t be ‘fixed’ and why ‘family’ is not a helpful term to use for the church,… Continue reading Language Matters
I’m the sort of person who spots patterns and thinks in patterns. That’s not by itself better or worse than someone who thinks in a different way (or doesn’t have a typology for how they think—which is the hallmark of a pattern-person), it’s just a thing. It has strengths: I can see that these three… Continue reading Seeing Patterns
I believe in Baptism in the Spirit. Admittedly, no one doesn’t, we just debate what we mean by that. But I believe in receiving the Holy Spirit as an experiential reality that (ideally) happens at conversion, though it can happen later. You can read my brief summary of how to approach this question, and my… Continue reading On Receiving the Spirit
Sayeth Taylor the prophetess. Wouldn’t be the first time she’s said something that at least has the ring of wisdom to it. Ok, so I’m mostly doing that terrible Jesus juke thing where a perennially uncool youth pastor type points at a thing in popular culture and then does a fairly clunky move towards something… Continue reading It’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me.
I suspect most of us give little thought to time. It’s simply something we move through, or exist in, or bemoan the passing of as the years slowly strip away the vigour of our youth. The fact that what time is amounts to a philosophical question that is notoriously tricky and nevertheless vital to any… Continue reading 5 Theses on Time
Lamentations is a difficult book. I’ve been reading through it with my Bible reading group recently and it’s heavy going. There’s much to gain, but when you read through it in your mornings you can slide through it fairly quickly. When you spend a few hours per chapter slowly chewing it over around a table… Continue reading A Lamenting Samaritan
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