word | spirit | world | church
Sometimes the Christian life feels incredibly difficult. We wonder, perhaps, what the point of it all is. We wonder whether our attempts, faltering through they may be, at day-by-day faithfulness will every bear any fruit. We wonder whether our wanderings are leading us up the mountain of God or if we’re meandering around the foothills,… Continue reading The Plod of God
Leadership is a useless concept and we should stop talking about it. Ok, so that was a confirmed clickbait opener. I don’t really think that. I’ve designed and run award-winning worldwide leadership programmes for a household brand. I don’t think that was pointless. I’ve run leadership development programmes for a church too. I don’t think… Continue reading Against Leadership
We should desire wisdom. “Get wisdom!” Solomon tells us (Proverbs 4). We see that eating from wisdom’s tree (Genesis 3) was Adam’s mistake but also the destiny he was supposed to bear. We also see that one of the ways we learn wisdom is by suffering. Let’s not get this backwards, suffering is not our… Continue reading Learning wisdom
We think of time in a very distinctive way, which many of our forebears did not. We think it’s linear, we think it’s homogenous—progressing in ordered sections we call days or years or hours—and we think it’s largely ‘empty,’ a container that is indifferent to what we fill it with. I’ve been reading Charles Taylor’s… Continue reading Time and the Table
If you’ll do me the favour of indulging me—and if you’re a regular reader then you often do so and I’m grateful for it, or if you’re a supporter then I’m thankful for your help to keep my site advert free—I’d like to tell you about a personal bugbear. Though the title may have given… Continue reading Bring Your Bible to Church
We all struggle. We all suffer. We all know pain. At the same time, we’re acutely aware that we don’t have access to each other’s struggles except as they are related to us. There is nothing more humanising than suffering—this is the human condition—and there is nothing more isolating. When Christians suffer, when we experience… Continue reading The Privilege of Pain
Everybody loves community, or they say they do at least. We live in a land that is parched of the life-giving water of friendship and stripped bare of many of the settings that used to make this easy for people. Robert Nisbet in his book The Quest for Community argues that what he calls a… Continue reading The Quest for Community
Jesus told us to enter the kingdom like children. In fact, he was stronger than that, saying that if we did not receive the kingdom of God like a little child, we would not enter it (Luke 18). We’re familiar enough with it, and it conjures up doe-eyed sentiments of pudgy-cheeked children. Except, should it?… Continue reading Taking & Receiving
There’s a particular feature of my generation—Millennials—which makes faithfulness to the gospel harder than it needs to be, and makes disappointment with how our lives progress much more likely. I was born in the 1980s, and grew up in 1990s Southampton, which meant that in Christian circles Delirious? (or occasionally Deliriou5?) were local heroes. Many… Continue reading Expecting the Extraordinary
In Genesis chapter two we read of the man, newly created, being set into the garden and many of the details of what the garden was like. Each one of them drips with meaning, today I’d like to look at one that most of us know well: verse 18. Then the Lord God said, “It is not… Continue reading Fitted For Him
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