word | spirit | world | church
A couple of weeks ago we were at a wedding. We were invited to the evening but not the reception, so we’d brought a few sausage rolls and a pack of crisps for lunch and went looking for somewhere to eat it before we went on to the afternoon activities we’d planned—exploring the Cotswolds in… Continue reading Burial is Hopeful
What’s the story of the church? How do we fit into God’s grand plan? It runs something like this: God created the world with the aim of making his name great by demonstrating the worth, glory and character of God the Son. It was his good pleasure to do so by making lesser beings and… Continue reading The Church’s Story
David Foster Wallace starts his famous speech This is Water by describing two young fish. They’re happily swimming along and meet an older fish coming the other way, who nods in greeting and says: “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them… Continue reading Reframing stories
Our age loves unfettered desire. This sounds like I’m talking solely about sex, but if you allow desire to take its broader meaning and think of wants, then it’s true isn’t it? We all intrinsically feel that we should live in a way that fulfils us, that gives us what we want. We all intrinsically… Continue reading Fettered Desire
The Bible is music. Or so Alastair Roberts and Andrew Wilson claim in the introduction to their superb Echoes of Exodus. I don’t know a lot about classical music, but the crux of the point is that we see various themes in the scriptures, and they are picked up and repeated by repeating stories or… Continue reading The Bible is Music
Our world is made of atoms, of spinning particles of energy careering around one another in a fabulously chaotic and surprisingly ordered way. Or so the story goes. I don’t mean to suggest that I doubt the scientists whose work informs our understanding of physics and matter; I have no reason to do so. What… Continue reading We are made of stories
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
It was sat at a table in the University Starbucks that some of the things I’d read over the last few years about apologetics and Gen Z became real and urgent. I was having lunch with a student who had been around our church for a while. He had come along to my Life Group… Continue reading Useful and True
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