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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 Magical Thinking
I currently have three quotes on the wall in my study at the church building. I suspect that this will change with time, but each phrase is a reminder to me and I hope will shape my ministry over the next few years. None of them is from the Bible, which perhaps itself is surprising.… Continue reading 3 phrases to live by
Or, to put the question more accurately, why did Sunday become the Lord’s Day rather than Christians continuing to keep the Sabbath? There is some debate in the Christian tradition about whether we should continue to keep the Sabbath, but now on a Sunday, or whether we should keep Sunday, but as the Lord’s Day—more… Continue reading Why is Sunday the Sabbath?
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
In a previous post, one of my most read, I explored what happened between Noah and Ham in Genesis 9. There are two particular possibilities, both plausible, though I come down on one side in that post. However, I’d like to nuance what I said previously, by exploring Noah’s relationship with wine. Noah sometimes gets… Continue reading Noah’s Vineyard
Elders should have sabbaticals, and that means all Elders, whether they are paid by the church or not. To help you follow my reasoning, let me first establish two principles. The Principle of Parity First, we should aim for parity among elders. This flows from the conviction that churches are led by teams of elders.… Continue reading Sabbaticals and Elders
We live in an attention economy. Increasingly this is causing an attention crisis. We are divided against ourselves by the many claims on our eyes and ears. A house divided cannot stand. Modern life is frenetic. Everything is lived at breakneck pace, and sometimes we do trip and break our proverbial necks. That’s one of… Continue reading We need Advent
Over the Summer, on Mondays, I’ll be reposting some of my favourite posts from nuakh. This post explores how Christians turn everything that should be an 'instrument' into a 'device.' 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… Continue reading Repost: When Christians Love Magic
How do you tell what’s good and what’s bad? How do you tell the difference between wisdom and folly? It’s not like it’s just intrinsic to all of us, or we would make fewer bad decisions. I think it’s tempting to suggest that our difficulty here is because our minds are blinded by sin. There’s… Continue reading Wisdom is Work
Creation is finished on the sixth day. God’s work is finished on the seventh day, when he rests (Gen 2). That is surprising to us, I think. God’s work includes his resting, literally his stopping, his sabbath. We want to position work against rest as though they are opposites. They aren’t, though they aren’t the… Continue reading Working and Resting
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