word | spirit | world | church
The church is facing a number of issues right now. Here in the UK the ongoing crisis of leadership in the wake of numerous high-profile cases of Pastors abusing their positions might be the most obvious. I’ve written about another crisis, of discipleship, where the average Christian’s faith doesn’t touch the sides of their life.… Continue reading Navigating the Crises
The most undertrained group in churches are elders. Most church elders are not on staff at their churches. That’s not just thinking about very small churches that can’t pay one of their elders, but most eldership teams are going to be majority non-employed by their churches. As an aside, don’t call these guys ‘lay elders’… Continue reading Elders & Training
I was speaking to a friend and he suggested a startling thought: we want our discipleship to be gamified. On the face of it I could shrug it off, he and I are millennials, gamification is a Gen Z problem. They’re the generation that sees progress in terms of levelling up. We’re the I’m amazing,… Continue reading Repost: Next Level Discipleship
It was sat at a table in the University Starbucks that some of the things I’d read over the last few years about apologetics and Gen Z became real and urgent. I was having lunch with a student who had been around our church for a while. He had come along to my Life Group… Continue reading Repost: Useful and True
It’s something of a truism that we’re formed by everything around us. It’s common for people to point out that in the average church you’ve got at best two hours of people’s time a week to use to form them towards Christ—you might get a third of them for another two hours midweek—and everything else… Continue reading The Need for Christian Formation
Jesus wants you to do the next thing in your walk with him. The next act of repentance, the next act of forgiveness, crush the next idol, love the next person above yourself, refuse the next temptation, tear down the next boundary. And he wants you to do nothing else. This might sound like a… Continue reading A Conveyor Belt
We live in a digital world, or at least so it seems at times. We are surrounded by virtual places and technology that has inserted itself into our lives—for good and for ill. In this rapidly changing world, we have to learn what it looks like to follow Jesus. In lots of ways, it is… Continue reading Digital Discipleship
What is discipleship? This is one of those perennial questions that get’s thrown around by those in some sort of ministry. We’re all in favour, and we’re very happy to call a lot of things ‘discipleship’, but what is it? Maybe it’s easier to start with what it isn’t. It’s not going and having a… Continue reading On Discipleship
What’s the story of the church? How do we fit into God’s grand plan? It runs something like this: God created the world with the aim of making his name great by demonstrating the worth, glory and character of God the Son. It was his good pleasure to do so by making lesser beings and… Continue reading The Church’s Story
Back in the summer of 2019 I spent a few months reading everything I could find on Generation Z. I think I’m not exaggerating to say I read every scholarly paper I could access through my University, and every book on the subject in its libraries. I wrote a paper for my network of churches,… Continue reading Generation Z
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