word | spirit | world | church
One of the qualifications for elders is hospitality (1 Timothy 3, Titus 1), which means ‘welcoming strangers.’ While this is an absolute expectation of pastors, most of the qualifications describe the ordinary Christian life. We’re meant to be welcoming strangers, and we’re all meant to be doing it (Hebrews 13). Yet, we’re terrible at it.… Continue reading Welcoming Strangers
Christianity is practised, and practiced, around the table. The table is one of our central metaphors for everything we do, and its around the table that we learn how to be disciples. We need more tables. We need more time around the table. Jesus ate with people all the time, they said of him that… Continue reading Repost: Around the Table
Have you ever considered what you eat and how you eat it from a theological angle? It’s a conviction of mine that everything is theological, and that God’s people can speak to all of life with his word and reflection. There’s nothing that the Bible doesn’t speak to, for all we must admit that some… Continue reading A Brief Theology of Food
The Church’s worship should include the celebration of the Lord’s Supper, with the gathered people of God eating and drinking Jesus’ body and blood together in order to receive from him. The Lord is the host who has laid the table for us. This is the plank of my eucharismatic manifesto which makes the charismatic… Continue reading A Eucharismatic Supper
Technology changes our lives. That’s a truism, you wouldn’t find anyone to disagree. The disagreement comes when we speak of particular technologies—whether pesticides or automated looms or Bluetooth speakers—and the particular ways they change our lives. Then we need to add an extra layer, not only are there specific ways that technologies change our lives,… Continue reading The digital world shapes us
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,… Continue reading Welcome requires walls
Jesus has three bodies, which is the sort of nonsense saying that gets Christians in trouble. No, I’m not suggesting some sort of Trinitarian confusion where either the Father and Spirit have bodies (they don’t) or that all three persons are Jesus (they’re not), but in some classical accounts Jesus has three bodies. The three… Continue reading The Three Bodies of Christ
When we gather to the table to eat the supper with the saints, we do exactly that. I wonder if you’ve ever considered it. If the Lord’s Supper is a participation in the marriage feast of the Lamb—and most Christians would be comfortable describing it as at least a prefiguring foretaste, though I’m going further… Continue reading A Great Cloud of Witnesses
At Jesus’ last supper he ate the Passover with his disciples, lamb, wine, bread, bitter herbs—the whole kit and caboodle. Which might seem like an obvious statement but is important for our understanding of how Jesus was inhabiting and renewing the Old Covenant Feast. Before we get into the details it might be worth noticing… Continue reading The Lamb at the Supper
Israel is given seven feasts. We can read about them in Leviticus 23, Numbers 28-29 and Deuteronomy 16. They come as a set, a week of feasts to pattern the year with, each mapping onto the days of the creation week. They mark the harvests and they operate liturgically: they tell the people of God… Continue reading The Supper in Israel’s Feasts
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