word | spirit | world | church
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
The bright spring day of April’s heatwave lasted for about five months, a single timeless moment. We were locked down due to Covid-19 from March through to June, and then with schools closed until September those who could continued to work from home. I lived without rhythm. My work was at home on my laptop,… Continue reading Repost: The Rhythm of Rest
Church isn’t supposed to be hard work. I know you don’t believe me, but it’s not. So often I meet people in churches I’ve been involved in or from elsewhere who are working incredibly hard for Jesus. It’s laudable but it rarely looks to me like the Way of Jesus. Jesus taught a way of… Continue reading The Martyr Complex
The words that we use create the categories that we think in. Language is upstream of thought. Which sounds like a completely crazed thing to say, I imagine, though I’ve touched on the concept before when explaining why we can’t be ‘fixed’ and why ‘family’ is not a helpful term to use for the church,… Continue reading Language Matters
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 When Christians Love Magic
We think of time in a very distinctive way, which many of our forebears did not. We think it’s linear, we think it’s homogenous—progressing in ordered sections we call days or years or hours—and we think it’s largely ‘empty,’ a container that is indifferent to what we fill it with. I’ve been reading Charles Taylor’s… Continue reading Time and the Table
There’s a lull in your day, a small moment of nothing among the busy tides of time. Is it an oasis to indulge, or a terror to smother? Most of us would talk that a small gap of peace in our over-scheduled lives would be a delight—but my actions, and I’m guessing many of yours… Continue reading Eating Ourselves Dull
There’s this odd moment in the midst of our Easter celebrations, you might call it ‘Holy Saturday’ or just that day in the long weekend that doesn’t have a name. It’s that strange day caught between Friday’s sorrow and Sunday’s joy, where ‘nothing happened.’ Or maybe, an awful lot happened. There are I think three… Continue reading Holy Saturday
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
I have been blessed over the last year by the books Every Moment Holy that have come out of the Rabbit Room. These are two volumes of liturgies for ordinary moments of everyday life—written prayers about normal stuff and about the horrifically brutal stuff that sometimes happens to us. After writing about how social media… Continue reading A liturgy for social media
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