word | spirit | world | church
How do we make people more generous with their time and their money? It is a question many Pastors grapple with. Volunteering in churches has been declining for decades as culture has shifted and life has become both individualised and frenetically busy. Financial giving hasn’t had the same drop off as best I can tell—though… Continue reading Teaching Generosity
Have you ever thought about the fact that you don’t exist? This is the sort of thing that used to occupy my brain when I was studying philosophy at 17, suddenly worrying that I might be a figment of some alien’s imagination, or indeed that the world was my own solipsistic dream. This second one… Continue reading God is no thing
How do we deal with being angry at God? Is that a legitimate emotion? It’s tempting to just point to the book of Job and encourage you to meditate there—which is not bad advice, though it’s a complex book—but it is an experience that we have all had at some point I imagine. Life under… Continue reading Being Angry at God
Thickening Communities I The lack of male friendship is nothing short of an epidemic. The rise of therapy and a therapeutic culture for men and women is, not always but more often than we’d like to admit, a substitute for friendship. We’re lonely, we need friends, and you need good friends to live the Christian… Continue reading Friendship is a Discipleship Issue
Why our faith is shallow IV If people agree with my concerns about what I’m calling the discipleship crisis, it’s fairly common that they finger our preaching as the culprit. I think there’s something to this, which is what this post is about, but I also think it’s an easy mark. Not only is there… Continue reading The application cart
There is one truth in the glorious panoply that is the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints (Jude 3) that is particularly special to me. One that stands out as a shining beacon on the darkest of days, one that daily speaks to my heart and revives me in the truth.… Continue reading Resurrection is Inevitable
Knowing your heart is harder than you think it is. Your intentions are often not transparent, even to you. Sin’s dark shadow means we must always think that there’s an iceberg of ourselves we haven’t fathomed, with much unseen and looming beneath the surface. The motivations for our actions, our thoughts, our feelings, even for… Continue reading Know Thyself
I’m colourblind, and profoundly so. This admission in front of people usually results in a long litany of being asked what colours certain items in the room are and which colours I can’t see. I do pretty well at the test, you learn to cope and have some sense of what something might be. The… Continue reading Seeing in Colour
Christianity is weird. Really weird. In middle-class western churches we seem to have forgotten that in the name of respectability. That isn’t actually why, of course, though it’s an easy accusation to throw. In the evangelical world we’ve shuffled away the weirdness because it’s not easy to explain. We’re keen to get a hearing ‘for… Continue reading Making Christianity Weird Again
Sometimes light reflects, refracts, and disperses in water droplets causing its brilliant white radiance to split into the visible spectrum and hang suspended in the air. We call it a rainbow, as the sun breaks through rainclouds and colours bend the sky. It has a similar effect on most of us as snow does, we… Continue reading Repost: On Rainbows
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