word | spirit | world | church
“He’s no longer in the land of the living,” we say with great solemnity as we pronounce that our friend has fallen asleep on the sofa. It’s a phrase we use fairly commonly, either to mean prosaically, “they’re dead”—which is actually uncommon because we prefer cleaner euphemisms that hide the reality entirely—or to refer to… Continue reading What is the ‘Land of the Living?’
Sounds paradoxical, doesn’t it? We think we know that to welcome is the very opposite of having a wall up. We’re wrong. Ivan Illich taught that the welcome of hospitality requires a threshold. By definition, we need to move over a threshold in order to be welcomed. If there is no threshold to move over, I can’t welcome… Continue reading Put up walls so you can welcome
Churches should embrace the life of God in the Spirit in all its fullness. That means both charismatic spiritual life and the sacramental life of the gathered church. ‘Eucharismatic’ is a term coined by Andrew Wilson in his excellent book Spirit and Sacrament, a portmanteau of eucharistic and charismatic. His book lays out his thesis, but… Continue reading Being Eucharismatic
Once a day dawned dark, the clouds hanging limp like wisps of smoke that clog the lungs after a fire has burned beyond its life. Tear-stained faces watched a man displayed, his torn body nailed to a tree torn from the ground and weeping over its foul fate. His face contorted with pain as his… Continue reading Last Words
I currently have three quotes on the wall in my study at the church building. I suspect that this will change with time, but each phrase is a reminder to me and I hope will shape my ministry over the next few years. None of them is from the Bible, which perhaps itself is surprising.… Continue reading 3 phrases to live by
The Bible exists in a symbolic world where particular images are common: trees, tables, bread and wine, mountains, the sea and its denizens, the creation week, and many more. These have specific meanings developed across the canon that they take with them (progressively) and that can be read backwards to fit texts within the Bible’s… Continue reading Isaiah’s trees
Or, to put the question more accurately, why did Sunday become the Lord’s Day rather than Christians continuing to keep the Sabbath? There is some debate in the Christian tradition about whether we should continue to keep the Sabbath, but now on a Sunday, or whether we should keep Sunday, but as the Lord’s Day—more… Continue reading Why is Sunday the Sabbath?
Worship has three, or maybe five, dynamic directions. There is a gift and receipt dynamic to it. It looks a little bit like this: Worship goes up, it goes out, or sideways, and it goes in. What I mean by this that the primary direction of our worship is towards God, or ‘upwards.’ We worship… Continue reading Directionality in Worship
I recently spoke at Commission’s Leadership and Governance conference, for elders and trustees. They’d asked me to give them a bit of a biblical overview—you can listen to it here—and I started by showing them God’s good governance in Genesis 1. My message went elsewhere over that, but I’d like to draw your attention to… Continue reading God and his agents
I suspect to many readers of the Bible this is a silly question. Honestly, who cares? The idea that I constantly want to convey is that we should ask the questions we find curious about the scriptures, assuming that there are answers deeper than the obvious. We can, of course, become enamoured of all sorts… Continue reading Why does Jesus eat so much fish?
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