word | spirit | world | church
One of the qualifications for elders is hospitality (1 Timothy 3, Titus 1), which means ‘welcoming strangers.’ While this is an absolute expectation of pastors, most of the qualifications describe the ordinary Christian life. We’re meant to be welcoming strangers, and we’re all meant to be doing it (Hebrews 13). Yet, we’re terrible at it.… Continue reading Welcoming Strangers
Christianity is practised, and practiced, around the table. The table is one of our central metaphors for everything we do, and its around the table that we learn how to be disciples. We need more tables. We need more time around the table. Jesus ate with people all the time, they said of him that… Continue reading Repost: Around the Table
Technology changes our lives. That’s a truism, you wouldn’t find anyone to disagree. The disagreement comes when we speak of particular technologies—whether pesticides or automated looms or Bluetooth speakers—and the particular ways they change our lives. Then we need to add an extra layer, not only are there specific ways that technologies change our lives,… Continue reading The digital world shapes us
Sounds paradoxical, doesn’t it? We think we know that to welcome is the very opposite of having a wall up. We’re wrong. Ivan Illich taught that the welcome of hospitality requires a threshold. By definition, we need to move over a threshold in order to be welcomed. If there is no threshold to move over,… Continue reading Welcome requires walls
Jesus has three bodies, which is the sort of nonsense saying that gets Christians in trouble. No, I’m not suggesting some sort of Trinitarian confusion where either the Father and Spirit have bodies (they don’t) or that all three persons are Jesus (they’re not), but in some classical accounts Jesus has three bodies. The three… Continue reading The Three Bodies of Christ
An obvious yes, right? Except, where does it say that? You’re about to have a harder time than you expected. You might point to the use of genos in 1 Peter 2, though that’s usually translated ‘race’ and if we translated it family we would mean in the very broad sense that I and all… Continue reading Is the Church a Family?
In Mark chapter 10 we encounter a famous story about a rich young ruler who thinks he keeps the commandments but find Jesus’ demand that he leave behind his wealth to follow him burdensome. Hidden away at the very end of the story are these strange promises from Jesus: Peter began to say to him,… Continue reading My Hundred Homes
The world is infused with wonder, and the presence of God reveals truth that was previously unseen. When seen with the eyes of faith, every tree is a song that sings of life, of wisdom, of death that flowers with the scent of unknown spices. Every rock is the Rock and hides honey and gushing… Continue reading God has changed every table
Have you ever noticed how often secular advice on, for example, wellbeing coheres with what the church would say? It veers wildly away at points as well, but I don’t feel like we do a lot of noticing of when it’s the same. Not to pat ourselves on the back though—I see a bit of… Continue reading Church is for the Lonely
What do you do when you need to cook for 30 people for a Sunday lunch? In our house, you get the cauldron out. Before you start reading out Macbeth and building a pyre, it’s a large steel preserving pan that the group of students from our church we feed most weeks have dubbed ‘the… Continue reading Sunday Lunch is ministry
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