word | spirit | world | church
In the past I’ve described evnagelical churches as living in an anticulture, have suggested that we are in an ebb of history, which can make us think Christendom was a terrible thing, which it wasn’t. Assuming you’re with me, and convicted that we don’t build anything, but that we also live at what feels like… Continue reading The Sons of the Prophets
We are a people of the Exodus. Our lives are exodus movements. I’ve written before around the edges of the idea of cosmic geography and about the way the sea was viewed in the Old Testament as the place of chaos and death. When the climactic act of Yahweh’s saving power happens at the beginning… Continue reading Our Emotional Exodus
To the ancients, friendship was the crown of life and the school of virtue. To us, it’s both of you clicking a button on Facebook. How far we have fallen. That might seem overdramatic. It wouldn’t be the first time I’d been accused of that, but I don’t think it is. God had declared our… Continue reading True Companions
“He’s no longer in the land of the living,” we say with great solemnity as we pronounce that our friend has fallen asleep on the sofa. It’s a phrase we use fairly commonly, either to mean prosaically, “they’re dead”—which is actually uncommon because we prefer cleaner euphemisms that hide the reality entirely—or to refer to… Continue reading The Land of the Living
Jericho falls after a band march around it (Joshua 6)—perhaps leading us to imagine they finally after seven days figured out the modular frequency of mortar so their trumpets tumble stones from atop one another. Jehoshaphat places the choir on the frontline (2 Chronicles 20)—perhaps making us wonder just how bad their last performance was… Continue reading Worship is Warfare
Life hurts. Or at least it does sometimes. If we’re honest, it hurts more often than most of us hear in church. Following Jesus is hard work. It is, in some sense, a way of pain. If you’re feeling that right now, the incomparable cuts of choosing to give up your rights again and again,… Continue reading The Sugar-Coating
The pandemic has damaged our friendships. There was a recent Atlantic Op Ed that opined that all but the closest friendships we might have are slipping away. But things were broken before that, back in 2018 the US Surgeon General announced a “loneliness epidemic”, especially facing middle-aged men. So, while the pandemic has made thing… Continue reading What are friends?
We treat the Bible like it’s arbitrary. I think it’s important that we understand that it isn’t. Perhaps we read that the God declares a particular action to be a sin. We aren’t entirely clear what would be wrong with it—our friends and neighbours don’t think it’s bad—and so we decide to follow the Lord… Continue reading Explaining the Food Laws
There are moments when suddenly it’s like you see the good news of the gospel for the first time. Have you ever had one of them? Where it’s all fresh and new and you almost want to ‘get saved’ again because you need to respond to the wonder of these truths? I’ve had a few… Continue reading Lemons and Thorns
Jesus wants you to do the next thing in your walk with him. The next act of repentance, the next act of forgiveness, crush the next idol, love the next person above yourself, refuse the next temptation, tear down the next boundary. And he wants you to do nothing else. This might sound like a… Continue reading A Conveyor Belt
nuakh 