word | spirit | world | church
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
Someone asked me this a while back and I’ve been chewing on a substantive answer, that clicked for me in conversation the other day. We could phrase it another way: ‘why is the Holy Spirit not a ‘she’?’ To be fair, they asked me a slightly more nuanced question: why is God presented as male?… Continue reading Why is God male?
Have you ever noticed that every great act of redemption starts with a childless woman? The obvious one is that Jesus’ story starts—in Matthew and Luke’s tellings, at least—with Mary, before Jesus walks onto the page. We start with a young woman with no children, in her case an unmarried virgin. While Mary is the… Continue reading The Shape of Stories
There is no chance after. This line, emblazoned on the wall above my desk, comes from the undisputed best of C.S. Lewis’ fiction: Till We Have Faces. It may seem a strange book to many Christians, the retelling of a Greek myth that you’ll only be very vaguely familiar with (Psyche and Cupid) from the… Continue reading Die before you die
And that’s phenomenally good news. We often hear people declare that they ‘didn’t want to be a burden’ to their loved ones, especially their immediate family. Right now, in the zeitgeist, people might be talking about why they might choose to commit suicide when they’re diagnosed with some sort of life-altering or life-ending illness. We… Continue reading You Are a Burden
It’s a dreary winter Saturday. Frost has limned the limbs of trees with a stark outline against the grey sky. The house is slow and lazy as we sleep and read and emerge into the world. A small bowl of hastily made dough has been waiting overnight, doubling in size as it prepares itself for… Continue reading The Story of Bread
I’m a charismatic, and an occasionally whacky one. It’s not uncommon for people in my circles to highlight the importance of a 'spiritual realm' to how we understand the world. That’s where it can start to go off the rails. There are many mad things said under that heading, but it’s having a resurgence in… Continue reading Seen and Unseen
Over the next eight weeks I’m going to explore the tabernacle in Exodus and the way we find Christ represented in it. The conviction that this is appropriate comes first, because Jesus is described as ‘tabernacling’ amongst us in the incarnation (John 1), second because he refers to himself as the Temple—a later, larger, developed… Continue reading The Ark of the Covenant
Autumn’s final blast of anger against Winter’s unthinking hate is over, every leaf that cannot cling to life has lit the match to self-immolate in protest. We have enjoyed the beauty of that unconstrained rage. This is the story the seasons tell—or one of them at any rate. Snow lay on the ground earlier this… Continue reading Winter’s Story
In evangelical theological thinking we tend to use the category of whether or not something is ‘allowed’ a lot. Our disposition is that if it is not disallowed, then it’s allowed, and we can pragmatically decide whether that might work for us. You see this on display especially in relation to questions of ecclesiology: how… Continue reading Is it Fitting?
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