word | spirit | world | church
It surprises many people I talk to, but it’s true that the more you do something the more you like it. Most of us assume that we keep things special by only doing them occasionally. There is a pleasure that comes from the occasional activity, but what we love we do. Our tastes are formed… Continue reading We Love What We Do
Church isn’t supposed to be hard work. I know you don’t believe me, but it’s not. So often I meet people in churches I’ve been involved in or from elsewhere who are working incredibly hard for Jesus. It’s laudable but it rarely looks to me like the Way of Jesus. Jesus taught a way of… Continue reading The Martyr Complex
Sayeth Taylor the prophetess. Wouldn’t be the first time she’s said something that at least has the ring of wisdom to it. Ok, so I’m mostly doing that terrible Jesus juke thing where a perennially uncool youth pastor type points at a thing in popular culture and then does a fairly clunky move towards something… Continue reading It’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me.
I suspect most of us give little thought to time. It’s simply something we move through, or exist in, or bemoan the passing of as the years slowly strip away the vigour of our youth. The fact that what time is amounts to a philosophical question that is notoriously tricky and nevertheless vital to any… Continue reading 5 Theses on Time
The Church Calendar is textured by periods of fasting followed by periods of feasting. For most 21st century Christians both seem pretty weird. Though my guess would be that you think you know your way around feasting—we are a culture of conspicuous consumption, after all—but fasting is anathema to the world we live in. Why… Continue reading Feasting & Fasting
Today is Reformation Day! We celebrate that a monk with a mallet (and a desire to stoke debate among local academics) changed the world. There’s something there for the pedants amongst us, you never know what your gentle corrections might cause. Which considering the Reformation tore Europe into a generation of ‘religious war’ should give… Continue reading Reformation Day
Israel had a cycle of a weekly Sabbath, seven feasts a year, a sabbatical year every seventh year, and a Jubliee year every seventh sabbatical year. Their days were patterned for them, and it was wisdom to follow them. They function how the Church calendar was designed by our Christian forbears to function for us—now… Continue reading Our Church Calendars
We live in the Between, this now and not yet time stretched by our waiting for the Kingdom to come on the one hand and by its grand arrival in the ascension of Christ on the other. Our eschatology is firmed realised, present and not yet present. The Kingdom is here, the Kingdom is not… Continue reading Longing, Lament, and Joy
There is a gift from God that we do not want. If we’re honest with ourselves, I suspect there are many gifts from God that we don’t want. We enjoy both sin and comfort too much to value all of God’s gifts; we are indicted by our lacklustre enthusiasm for the things of God. The… Continue reading The Gift of Dissatisfaction
The American opioid epidemic started because pharmaceutical companies wanted to eliminate pain. Whatever their motives, though we can be sure they were not altruistic, they manufactured situations where if someone told a hospital they were in pain they would be given an opioid painkiller. Pain was a problem to be eliminated. We can all roll… Continue reading When Pain is a Problem
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