word | spirit | world | church
I was mist-coating a wall the other day; Helen was plastering a ceiling. A fairly standard Saturday in the Suffield household. We had some worship music on, which probably isn’t our norm for a hard work renovation day, but a change is as good as a rest. A song came on and the lyrics caught… Continue reading A ballad of breaking idols
Whether reacting against the formalism of ‘saying thank you’ before a meal in my youth, or the disdain of liturgy and repeated prayers that comes from my charismatic twenties, we rarely pray ‘grace’ before meals. I’m beginning to wonder what I’m losing from my own hang up. Thankfulness is a discipline that takes hard work… Continue reading Your table is a battlefield
I wrote this to open our worship on Easter Sunday 2021. https://youtu.be/gGCvf4zjtw4 05/04/33 T. M. Suffield A day of shadows, hope was kept at bay the weary sun’s attempted upward rise akin to our heart’s toil to comprehend a sign above bare scoffed “The King of the Jews” heavy is the head that wears a… Continue reading 05/04/33
At the end of 2019 everyone had a books of the decade list. A few friends of mine shared theirs with each other, which gave me a good list of reading material, and a book group span out of that discussion. It’s more recently morphed into a group that reads old Christian works that we… Continue reading 9 books that changed me
The cultural commentator’s big question at the moment is what will the world be like in the magical hereafter: post-Covid. How will this change us? Perhaps—as Mark Sayers suggests—this will quicken the move that was already happening as globalism gives in to the networked society (this seems plausible), or—as many have commented—we will see the… Continue reading AC: After-Covid
Sometimes light reflects, refracts, and disperses in water droplets causing its brilliant white radiance to split into the visible spectrum and hang suspended in the air. We call it a rainbow, as the sun breaks through rainclouds and colours bend the sky. It has a similar effect on most of us as snow does, we… Continue reading On Rainbows
In the last year I’ve read three different Christian self-help books. I wasn’t a particularly big fan of any of them, but they all came recommended by someone I trust, and they all had things I appreciated about them. There was wisdom in each and every one. I’m comfortable reading books I disagree with or… Continue reading On Biblicism
Christianity is practised, and practiced, around the table. The table is one of our central metaphors for everything we do, and its around the table that we learn how to be disciples. We need more tables. We need more time around the table. Jesus ate with people all the time, they said of him that… Continue reading Around the table
As I write this American Baptists are tearing each other apart over a complex set of ideologies and academic approaches collectively called “Critical Race Theory” and often abbreviated as CRT. By the time you read this—I am committed to the idea of cold takes—I would not be surprised if they were still devouring one another… Continue reading Plundering the Egyptians
In my day job I like metrics. I’ve got a bit of a reputation for it. In a certain meeting I’ve uttered the phrase “that’s not a metric” often enough that some people look and wait for me to say it whenever a way of measuring success is suggested. In most of the jobs I’ve… Continue reading Measuring Success
