word | spirit | world | church
The church needs doctors, no not the kind you go and see if you’re unwell, the original kind. It is worth remembering that the medical profession stole the title of ‘doctor’—which literally means ‘teacher’—from the Universities and Churches. But that’s not the point I want to address, I’ve recently argued that the church needs to… Continue reading Doctors of the Church
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,… Continue reading A Eucharismatic Manifesto
It’s something of a truism that we’re formed by everything around us. It’s common for people to point out that in the average church you’ve got at best two hours of people’s time a week to use to form them towards Christ—you might get a third of them for another two hours midweek—and everything else… Continue reading The Need for Christian Formation
I’m a charismatic, one of the perennial questions in charismatic theology is ‘what is the Baptism in the Holy Spirit?’ Other Christians who know and interact with charismatics and Pentecostals may well have answers to the same question, but its less likely to be a matter of debate. Among charismatics, it’s one of the fault… Continue reading Baptism in the Holy Spirit: a taxonomy
And stop trying to fix each other. Friends, you are not a machine. You are a beautiful, complex, confusing mess of a creature. This matters, because we talk about ourselves as though we are machines, and language creates the categories that our thought then fills. When we speak of ourselves as machines we start to… Continue reading Don’t Fix Me
An obvious yes, right? Except, where does it say that? You’re about to have a harder time than you expected. You might point to the use of genos in 1 Peter 2, though that’s usually translated ‘race’ and if we translated it family we would mean in the very broad sense that I and all… Continue reading Is the Church a Family?
A much more experienced writer than me recently gave me some writing advice about editors: He suggested that you don’t always need to make the changes editors suggest—and every writer breathes a sigh of dramatic relief. But you do need to assume that they have spotted something that’s wrong and that section or idea needs… Continue reading Leading is Editing
I’ve worked in a global corporate company and in some large public sector institutions. Every one of them has gone through some sort of major change programme while I was there. It’s the nature of the beast, nothing is perfect so every five years or so it gets reinvented—usually fixing a real problem by creating… Continue reading Leading Change
Leadership is a useless concept and we should stop talking about it. Ok, so that was a confirmed clickbait opener. I don’t really think that. I’ve designed and run award-winning worldwide leadership programmes for a household brand. I don’t think that was pointless. I’ve run leadership development programmes for a church too. I don’t think… Continue reading Against Leadership
In Genesis chapter two we read of the man, newly created, being set into the garden and many of the details of what the garden was like. Each one of them drips with meaning, today I’d like to look at one that most of us know well: verse 18. Then the Lord God said, “It is not… Continue reading Fitted For Him
nuakh 