word | spirit | world | church
It’s Christianese for “I want to.” Maybe that’s harsh, but I suspect most readers have thought that too. I’ve had many conversations where someone is suggesting doing something which is somewhere on the spectrum between ‘surprising’ and ‘deeply unwise,’ where they tell me that God has called them to do it. I suspect for some… Continue reading What is Calling?
The New Testament is full of metaphors used to describe the Church. Here are five of them. The People of God In God’s promise of deliverance to the Hebrews he says that ‘they will be his people’ and he ‘will be their God’ and they shall know him as Yahweh who has brought them out… Continue reading Five Pictures of the Church
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
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
I’ve come across the idea, a few times recently, that the Bible doesn’t speak to everything. In the context I’m hearing it, this means that there are lots of matters of faith and practise that the Bible doesn’t tell us what to do on, so we have to figure it out for ourselves. Which is… Continue reading The Bible doesn’t speak to that
I’ve argued before that British Christians don’t know their Bibles, and I’d like to push that thought a little further. I think there are a set of nested problems that inform and intensify each other, I’ll briefly touch on each in turn, mention what I understand some of the causes of this to be and… Continue reading We don’t know our Bibles
A couple of weeks ago I ran an event in Birmingham called 'Reading 2 Timothy', where we did exactly that: read the book of 2 Timothy over the course of a Saturday morning. It’s a Bible study, which probably doesn’t seem that revolutionary. It probably isn’t that revolutionary, to be honest, but I’ve not seen… Continue reading Reading the Whole
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 When Christians Love Magic
Today is Reformation Day! We celebrate that a monk with a mallet (and a desire to stoke debate among local academics) changed the world. There’s something there for the pedants amongst us, you never know what your gentle corrections might cause. Which considering the Reformation tore Europe into a generation of ‘religious war’ should give… Continue reading Reformation Day
If you’ll do me the favour of indulging me—and if you’re a regular reader then you often do so and I’m grateful for it, or if you’re a supporter then I’m thankful for your help to keep my site advert free—I’d like to tell you about a personal bugbear. Though the title may have given… Continue reading Bring Your Bible to Church
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