word | spirit | world | church
Worship has three, or maybe five, dynamic directions. There is a gift and receipt dynamic to it. It looks a little bit like this: Worship goes up, it goes out, or sideways, and it goes in. What I mean by this that the primary direction of our worship is towards God, or ‘upwards.’ We worship… Continue reading Directionality in Worship
I recently spoke at Commission’s Leadership and Governance conference, for elders and trustees. They’d asked me to give them a bit of a biblical overview—you can listen to it here—and I started by showing them God’s good governance in Genesis 1. My message went elsewhere over that, but I’d like to draw your attention to… Continue reading God and his agents
I suspect to many readers of the Bible this is a silly question. Honestly, who cares? The idea that I constantly want to convey is that we should ask the questions we find curious about the scriptures, assuming that there are answers deeper than the obvious. We can, of course, become enamoured of all sorts… Continue reading Why does Jesus eat so much fish?
How do we make people more generous with their time and their money? It is a question many Pastors grapple with. Volunteering in churches has been declining for decades as culture has shifted and life has become both individualised and frenetically busy. Financial giving hasn’t had the same drop off as best I can tell—though… Continue reading Teaching Generosity
Places matter. They accrue meaning as we do meaningful things in them, but also they are better or worse for different things. I’d like to consider ‘response times,’ by which I mean the part of your Sunday meeting where people are invited to respond to preaching or prophecy and then are prayed for by someone… Continue reading The Location of Response Times
Have you ever thought about the fact that you don’t exist? This is the sort of thing that used to occupy my brain when I was studying philosophy at 17, suddenly worrying that I might be a figment of some alien’s imagination, or indeed that the world was my own solipsistic dream. This second one… Continue reading God is no thing
I’ve become enough of a trope of myself that friends quip about how much I talk about dragons. It’s part, apparently, of the trifecta of things I get excited about in the Bible: trees, tables, and dragons. In reality, I’ll rarely mention the word ‘dragon’ in my preaching and I can’t remember the last time… Continue reading On Dragons
Language is a powerful thing. I think we underestimate its power regularly in our lives. Christians often scoff at this, because it sounds like magical thinking: manifesting things doesn’t work, however many copies The Secret has sold. Some charismatic circles go the opposite way and get hyper vigilant over it, scolding friends for ‘speaking something… Continue reading The Power of Language
Lots of churches in the worlds I’m familiar with don’t have good succession plans for their current employed elders. There are a number of churches I’m familiar with where the paid pastors are nearing retirement and they haven’t been able to develop someone within the church to replace them. Many would not even be familiar… Continue reading Financing elders
The challenge I didn’t describe in my previous piece of developing leaders, and especially those nearest to my own heart—Ephesians 4 teachers, doctors of the church, pastor-theologians, or whatever you want to call them—was the challenge of recognising them. How do you recognise those that you should invest time and energy into and ‘develop’ in… Continue reading Recognising Leaders
nuakh 