word | spirit | world | church
Advent starts on Sunday, which will confuse some of you because you’re expecting it to start on Monday. Others of you will be appalled at the idea of ‘doing Christmas’ in November, even if it’s just one day, so it’s good news that ‘doing Christmas’ and celebrating Advent are quite different things. Advent is dark.… Continue reading Advent is Coming
This will initially seem like an odd claim to make, and a particularly odd claim to read on your phone, the most disembodying and dislocating device you own. Wisdom doesn’t feel embodied, wisdom is about ideas, surely? Ideas are immaterial if anything is, right? Your body isn’t relevant to things that we think, or so… Continue reading Wisdom is Embodied
I fear that, without really intending to, churches have a habit of infantilising people. We should treat people like adults. My new staff team tells me this is something I say a lot. In my experience, the vast majority of people act like they are treated. If we expect people to act in disciplined, orderly… Continue reading Treat People like Adults
One thing is for certain: it’s neither quiet, nor a revival. The term is now everywhere in the Christian discourse, the UK Bible Society released a report from some research they’d conducted that claims there has been a notable uptick in the number of young people, especially Gen Z men, attending church. That data has… Continue reading What is the ‘Quiet Revival’?
We have to thank a man of the north east, the Venerable Bede, for the fact that we all call the year I’m writing this 2025. Bede didn’t invent AD as a counting system (that was Dionysius Exiguus in the sixth century), but the eighth century he popularised it as a way of counting dates.… Continue reading Time Belongs to Jesus
We need to make distinctions. Is England a ‘Christian Nation?’ Perhaps unsurprisingly, it really depends what you mean by the question. There are reasonable definitions of ‘Christian Nation’ where England, and the UK, or one of the two, fit it, and there are reasonable definitions where they do not. This post is my attempt to… Continue reading Is England a Christian Nation?
What is wisdom? Does it have something to do with whether or not you put tomatoes in a fruit salad? Wisdom is a key Biblical concept, undervalued in the modern day. I rarely hear preaching about wisdom, for all it’s at the root of the problem of Eden and therefore we might assume also involved… Continue reading Understanding Wisdom
I am pro ‘symbolic’ reading of the Bible. This goes by a few different names, which aren’t entirely contiguous with each other: typology, spiritual reading, the four senses, allegory, maximalism, and more. These things aren’t the same, and they might not all even really be the same neck of the woods, but they are all… Continue reading Bad symbolic reading
This should be a straightforward question, but to answer it we need to make a number of distinctions. This felt like a largely American discourse until fairly recently, but the term is increasingly being used here in the UK as well. The problem is, it’s a big broad sloppy term that means as much or… Continue reading Am I a Christian Nationalist?
We undervalue the importance of hospitality for the Christian life: it’s a central feature of who we are and how we should be behaving because Christianity is practiced at the table. That aphorism is a deliberate double entendre, in fact, it contains two of them. Firstly, when talking about the table, I have two different… Continue reading Christianity is practiced at the table
nuakh 