word | spirit | world | church
We’re at the confluence of a few different currents in our cultures that influence our preaching. We’re in a discipleship crisis, where many Christians don’t know the faith. The knowledge of Christianity in the wider world is diminishing, certainly younger people aren’t reacting against it they simply aren’t familiar with it. At the same time… Continue reading Preaching with Weight
This is one of those topics you rarely hear anyone who isn’t a charismatic or Pentecostal talking about—what are the Ephesians 4 Ministries (or sometimes ‘fivefold ministry’) and should local churches care about them? Except, I recently noticed a definitely-not-a-charismatic friend mentioning them. This piece from Rhys Laverty that builds off some of my blogging… Continue reading Ephesians 4 Ministries
The Exodus 'motif' is one the Bible's recurring patterns or 'jokes.' We're supposed to spot it when we see it. The Biblical authors often play with the literary shapes they employ and they want us to notice when they subvert our expectations as well as use them. Jonah is a case in point: the author… Continue reading Jonah’s Backwards Exodus
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 Repost: The Bible is Music
As I write there’s just been a small Christian Twitter brouhaha (which places me temporally, not at all), over a new institution launched by The Gospel Coalition: The Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics. At the outset it’s worth saying that I was naturally warmly disposed towards the idea simply because more than one of the… Continue reading We Need Institutions
There’s a particular feature of my generation—Millennials—which makes faithfulness to the gospel harder than it needs to be, and makes disappointment with how our lives progress much more likely. I was born in the 1980s, and grew up in 1990s Southampton, which meant that in Christian circles Delirious? (or occasionally Deliriou5?) were local heroes. Many… Continue reading Expecting the Extraordinary
We all know how the world should be run. It’s simply obvious to us: the best people should run things, and everyone should get what they deserve. If you put that to 100 people, I suspect you would find the vast majority would agree that this an innately good idea. They call it a meritocracy—a… Continue reading God is a Giver
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