word | spirit | world | church
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
I’ve argued elsewhere that the Sunday gathering is for worship, but as the priests gather in the Temple they find that the Lord comes to them. The occasion is worship, but we encounter God as he comes to us. As one of the four ‘events’ when God meets us as we worship him, Baptism is part of… Continue reading On Baptism
The Church isn’t in a hurry. Neither should Christians be. You can apply this in so many directions in our hurried world, but I’d like to think about our questions. Questions require time. Fast answers are usually trite ones. Some intellectual curiosities can be settled quickly by a swift Google, but real questions can’t be.… Continue reading Slow down
Someone asked me this a while back and I’ve been chewing on a substantive answer, that clicked for me in conversation the other day. We could phrase it another way: ‘why is the Holy Spirit not a ‘she’?’ To be fair, they asked me a slightly more nuanced question: why is God presented as male?… Continue reading Why is God male?
The Tabernacle, and the Temple, are a picture of the cosmos. Or, perhaps, the cosmos is a tabernacle. We know this because Moses tells us so in his structure. We see this first in the structure of Genesis 1. We have a two panelled story in 3 sections. What I mean is that day 4… Continue reading The Tabernacle and the Cosmos
Who would be for it? This might see like the easiest thing to argue in the world: exhaustion is bad. Of course there is a kind of tiredness which is good: a body worn out from hard work in the field (he types from behind his laptop) or a mind worn out from hard graft… Continue reading Against Exhaustion
This morning I sat on the floor in a house I dearly love, emptied of all its things. The three of us—Helen, me, and the cat—sat on the floor after the removal guys had taken all of our earthly possessions and packed them onto a van. We’re moving a few hours south, a long way… Continue reading A Theology of Place
Stretching Minds V We’ve been talking about how to stretch minds in this series of posts, and I’ve suggested fours approaches that aren’t about scheduling events. However we can schedule things that address whatever we think needs addressing. In this final post I’d like to suggest some events you could schedule. I imagine Pastors reading… Continue reading Teaching the Church
Glen Scrivener likes to say that pastoral care is evangelism for Christians, and evangelism is pastoral care for those who aren’t Christians. There’s a lot of insight in that aphorism, but one angle is to notice that you’re doing the same thing when you talk to your friends in church to your friends outside: you’re… Continue reading Church is Our Evangelism Strategy
I’m going to let you in on a secret that I’m only getting to grips with myself, it’s simple, but oddly revolutionary: hope is an action. We learn it. Hope is not an emotion, as though we summon it up and have a bright day looking at the future. We can certainly feel hopeful, but… Continue reading Hope is an action
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