word | spirit | world | church
It is of course fair that just because something rhymes doesn’t make it true, and that old adages also aren’t necessarily true just because they’re oft repeated. It’s also true that not everyone is going to be a hundred book a year plus person; in fact, very few people are going to be in that… Continue reading “Leaders are Readers”
Obvious enough, except we’re increasingly wired to treat it like one. Technologies change the boundaries of what is possible for us and they effect the frame of how we approach the world. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If you also have screwdrivers, you’re able to distinguish the difference… Continue reading The Bible isn’t a smartphone.
My third and final Bible study question is probably the most mundane. Everyone asks this in our Bible studies. I imagine my readers here are convinced, as are most participants in a Bible study, that the Bible should in some fashion change us and will have practical applications to us or to the world around… Continue reading How do we apply this?
The second question I ask when studying the Bible with others, is ‘Where’s Jesus?’ By this time, we’ve spent some time discussing what is strange about the text in question. We’ve got under the skin of it a bit and are trying to face it on its own terms. We have not applied it, discussed… Continue reading Where’s Jesus?
When God floods the earth in the days of Noah it’s like he turns the clock back on everything that’s happened in the last six chapters of Genesis, and the world reverts to Genesis 1. Before God created and ordered over seven days, the world was water. In Noah’s flood he unmakes and disorders by… Continue reading Decreation
What do we mean by ‘forgiveness’? If you’re meant to forgive someone, what does this actually mean? I fear that a lot of the ways we talk about forgiveness in the church are slightly out of step with how the Bible talks about forgiveness. While a thorough exegesis of the relevant passages would be helpful,… Continue reading 3 Kinds of Forgiveness
How do we engage young people in the faith? What can we do to keep them in the church? What will they be interested in and how can we use that to tell them about Jesus? How can we keep their attention? We could throw their phones in the sea. Or, if that’s off the… Continue reading Give them Meat
We read the Bible in two directions, horizontally and vertically. Or, because I really like the word, we read the Bible orthogonally. I’m using some of the language here of Michael Niebauer, who argues for these two angles of reading, horizontal and vertical. I depart from him in the below to some extent, but I’m… Continue reading Orthogonal Reading
I have 3 rules for preaching; I thought I’d share them with you. These are my first ports of call for assessing my own or someone else’s preaching. There is lots more that could be said and fed back on, but this is the centre of what I think we should be aiming for in… Continue reading 3 preaching rules
Evangelicals love magic. On the face of it that doesn’t sound like a true statement, perhaps you remember the mild panic over Harry Potter in the early 2000s, or the much bigger panic over Dungeons and Dragons in the eighties—witchcraft remains something we are inherently nervous about, sometimes leading to absurd extremes. Which is true… Continue reading Magical Thinking
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