word | spirit | world | church
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
Someone asked me this a while back and I’ve been chewing on a substantive answer, that clicked for me in conversation the other day. We could phrase it another way: ‘why is the Holy Spirit not a ‘she’?’ To be fair, they asked me a slightly more nuanced question: why is God presented as male?… Continue reading Why is God male?
I suspect that many churches feel that developing ‘teachers’ is straightforward, as its essentially the same as developing ‘shepherds.’ There’s something to that, the two are grammatically linked in Ephesians 4 in a way that the other three gifts aren’t. Except, I think it’s tricky. Developing any of these gifts has a challenge to it… Continue reading How do we develop Ephesians 4 teachers
Especially that thing that you’re sure it doesn’t. In John’s prologue we’re told that ‘all things’ were made through Jesus, and that there is nothing that has been made that was made without him. We’re hedged in by the positive and negative affirmations: if it was made, Jesus made it. Paul says something similar in… Continue reading Christianity speaks to everything
Have you ever noticed that every great act of redemption starts with a childless woman? The obvious one is that Jesus’ story starts—in Matthew and Luke’s tellings, at least—with Mary, before Jesus walks onto the page. We start with a young woman with no children, in her case an unmarried virgin. While Mary is the… Continue reading The Shape of Stories
The Tabernacle, and the Temple, are a picture of the cosmos. Or, perhaps, the cosmos is a tabernacle. We know this because Moses tells us so in his structure. We see this first in the structure of Genesis 1. We have a two panelled story in 3 sections. What I mean is that day 4… Continue reading The Tabernacle and the Cosmos
Who would be for it? This might see like the easiest thing to argue in the world: exhaustion is bad. Of course there is a kind of tiredness which is good: a body worn out from hard work in the field (he types from behind his laptop) or a mind worn out from hard graft… Continue reading Against Exhaustion
nuakh 