word | spirit | world | church
The same reason its always sunny on my birthday. Some of you might want to point to a particularly memorable Easter weekend when it was a washout, or it snowed, or that you live in a part of the world when Easter is not a springtime festival and so my claim makes no sense (whether… Continue reading Why is it always sunny at Easter?
I recently read Jayber Crow. This was my first Wendell Berry novel (I’ve read his essays previously). I think I’m supposed to now buy a straw hat and try to purchase a smallholding in rural Kentucky? It’s a superlative novel, powerfully evoking a sense of place and the character of a community. The story itself… Continue reading Rooted in Place
To celebrate that 1993rd anniversary of the Christ walking out the back of death, here's a poem I wrote during lockdown (I've shared it here before) about the wonder of the resurrection's 'bright surprise.' 05/04/33 A day of shadows, hope was kept at bayThe weary sun’s attempted upward riseakin to our heart’s toil to comprehendA… Continue reading Easter’s Bright Surprise
The charismatic gifts, whether we mean the dramatic ones like tongues, interpretation, prophecy, and healing, or the behind the scenes ones we could mistake for talent, like administration, are a vital part of church life. The British New Church movement, of which my own reformed charismatic corner is a part, has had an enormous impact… Continue reading 5 reasons we drift away from the charismatic gifts
When you first touch biblical languages one of the first things you learn is that words have a semantic domain. What that means, in the simplest terms, is that a given word means different things in different contexts; you look up a word in a lexicon and that doesn’t mean it carries all of those… Continue reading Symbolic Domain
It is of course fair that just because something rhymes doesn’t make it true, and that old adages also aren’t necessarily true just because they’re oft repeated. It’s also true that not everyone is going to be a hundred book a year plus person; in fact, very few people are going to be in that… Continue reading “Leaders are Readers”
Obvious enough, except we’re increasingly wired to treat it like one. Technologies change the boundaries of what is possible for us and they effect the frame of how we approach the world. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If you also have screwdrivers, you’re able to distinguish the difference… Continue reading The Bible isn’t a smartphone.
The Bible is dominated by stories and symbols. Those symbols are embedded in story, they don’t exist on their own, but they gain their meaning through the procession of the narrative of the cosmos. We read their meaning into them because of story. As an aside, I wonder if this means that an eschatological ontology… Continue reading The Story of the Tree
As I write the recent revelations about Shawn Bolz—the Bethel church associated ‘Prophet’ who engaged in serial sexual misconduct and deliberately researched people so he could ‘accurately’ prophesy into their lives—are doing the rounds. I’m a charismatic, I think the gift of prophecy continues and should be eagerly sought (1 Corinthians 14). I wasn’t familiar… Continue reading Humility in Prophecy
Between Christmas and New Year a bunch of churches cancel church. You’ll often see the same behaviour on August Bank Holiday weekend too. Don’t. No, let me be more nuanced. It is, for example, entirely understandable that many church plants cannot maintain the momentum and volunteer strength required to run a Sunday at particular times… Continue reading On cancelling church
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