word | spirit | world | church
It’s Christianese for “I want to.” Maybe that’s harsh, but I suspect most readers have thought that too. I’ve had many conversations where someone is suggesting doing something which is somewhere on the spectrum between ‘surprising’ and ‘deeply unwise,’ where they tell me that God has called them to do it. I suspect for some… Continue reading What is Calling?
All of us pattern our lives after something. All our church’s do too. For many that’s the agrarian calendar or the academic one. For your church it should be something of God’s life in the world. I’ve argued before that there is great wisdom to be found in the church calendar. Most churches follow a… Continue reading Church Calendar and Preaching
The Church isn’t in a hurry. Neither should Christians be. You can apply this in so many directions in our hurried world, but I’d like to think about our questions (again!). Questions require time. Fast answers are usually trite ones. Some intellectual curiosities can be settled quickly by a swift Google, but real questions can’t… Continue reading Is Your Church Slow Enough?
Charismatics and Pentecostals have a reputation for being anti-intellectual. Although we’d love to say this was a myth, the reason it’s so often repeated is that it, unfortunately, does have some grounding in reality. We Pentecostals and Charismatics aren’t well known for being thinkers. That's the opening paragraph to Eucharisma, a new home for charismatic… Continue reading Eucharisma
“God said it, I believe it, that settles it.” Is this a helpful ‘creed’ for thinking about the faith and the Bible? I don’t think it is. There’s a lot of commend about this approach, people who say either the cliché or a more nuanced view of it tend to trust God. They tend to… Continue reading Ask Why
If I asked you to summarise the story of the Bible, I wonder what you’d say? I do often ask this in classroom settings with Christians and there are a whole host of frequently given answers. Typically, people tell some version of the story of redemption from sin involving the fall and then Jesus’ incarnation… Continue reading The Bible’s 3 Stories
As is mine. That’s how faith works. We all have hand-me-down faith. Sometimes I hear people talk as though faith that someone else gave you is somehow worse than faith that you found for yourself. I think that’s a mistake. I just had the privilege of watching eight baptisms and heard eight stories of people’s… Continue reading Your Faith is Secondhand
There’s an adage that gets thrown around in church circles, and maybe wider: healthy things grow. There’s an increasingly common quip in response that suggests that healthy things grow, and then stop growing. The only thing that keeps on growing constantly is cancer. The first is usually used to suggest either that your church not… Continue reading Good Growth
I’ll give you, it’s not the best question. We all intrinsically know what books are and how they work, it’s not a complex technology. A couple of boards with some paper glued or sewn between, right? Except, I fear that as we move into a post-literate society, its less instinctual than you might think. If… Continue reading What is a book?
The most undertrained group in churches are elders. Most church elders are not on staff at their churches. That’s not just thinking about very small churches that can’t pay one of their elders, but most eldership teams are going to be majority non-employed by their churches. As an aside, don’t call these guys ‘lay elders’… Continue reading Elders & Training
