word | spirit | world | church
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 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
Stretching Minds I When exploring Matthew Lee Anderson’s book Called into Questions—which I blogged my way through earlier in the year—I kept returning to this theme that the church should be a community of enquiry. Essentially, churches should be places where it’s both safe to ask the actual questions that you have and where you’re… Continue reading A Community of Enquiry
Why is our Faith Shallow III How does the average new Christian in your church learn the faith? I’m sure you have some sort of membership process and maybe run some different programmes but I wonder how many churches have a rigorous way to do this? I suspect most would answer with, “the same way… Continue reading We Stopped Catechising
“In order to arrive at what you do not know, you must go by a way … of ignorance” says Eliot in East Coker. Commenting on this, Matthew Lee Anderson says, “It is a truth that is easy to write, but difficult to live out. Yet we can only learn when we are free to… Continue reading Learning not to know
We have an intellectual problem in the modern West. We’ve forgotten the intellectual underpinnings of all knowledge. That’s Jesus by the way. The resurrection of Jesus is the central beating fact of all existence. Our response to it is the core of our lives. Christians whose lives look the same as their neighbours are a… Continue reading Christ is the start of all inquiry
There is no greater unknown, no more difficult question that we can face, than whether we are ready to die. Matthew Lee Anderson, Called into Questions, 35. I think he’s right. We are scared of death. We live in a culture scared of death. It’s much commented on that the Victorians seemed prudish (to us)… Continue reading The art of dying
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 (again!). 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… Continue reading Is Your Church Slow Enough?
Christians are supposed to be the wise. I often wonder if we really are. While my own preaching and teaching, as well as that of others I know well or have sat under, contains a lot of practical application, I am beginning to suspect that I haven’t spent a lot of time teaching about wisdom… Continue reading Repost: Get Wisdom
Advent is a time for silence. Or, to put it a little better, Advent is a time for facing up to the silence of God. We don’t like to admit it. This is the time of year for declaring the Emmanuel—that God is with us—and for saying that God is the one who steps into… Continue reading The Hidden God
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