word | spirit | world | church
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
Spurgeon’s College has recently closed with immediate effect as its financial situation became untenable. This raises some interesting questions, even for those of us in movements in the UK that rarely use residential training settings. Spurgeon’s had recently become a university, with its own degree awarding powers. It was the only independent evangelical Bible College… Continue reading Training for Ministry
What do we do when those who have helped our theological development take a step in a direction that really concerns us? As I write, there’s just been a bruhaha on X about John Mark Comer changing his mind away from penal substitutionary atonement. To be precise, though little of the storm has been, he… Continue reading When Guides Fall
I have 3 rules for preaching; I thought I’d share them with you. These are my first ports of call for assessing my own or someone else’s preaching. There is lots more that could be said and fed back on, but this is the centre of what I think we should be aiming for in… Continue reading 3 preaching rules
Paul in 1 Corinthians 14 is keen to express to the Corinthians that worship should be orderly. Yes, you can have a flow of charismatic life with everyone bringing their prayer, tongue, Bible reading, prophecy, and the rest, but you must also have some order. At the very least you need to take it in… Continue reading Order and the Charismatic
I’ve argued elsewhere that the Sunday gathering is for worship, but as the priests gather in the Temple they find that the Lord comes to them. The occasion is worship, but we encounter God as he comes to us. As one of the four ‘events’ when God meets us as we worship him, Baptism is part of… Continue reading On Baptism
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. 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 be.… Continue reading Slow down
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
Places matter. They accrue meaning as we do meaningful things in them, but also they are better or worse for different things. I’d like to consider ‘response times,’ by which I mean the part of your Sunday meeting where people are invited to respond to preaching or prophecy and then are prayed for by someone… Continue reading The Location of Response Times
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