word | spirit | world | church
We have to thank a man of the north east, the Venerable Bede, for the fact that we all call the year I’m writing this 2025. Bede didn’t invent AD as a counting system (that was Dionysius Exiguus in the sixth century), but the eighth century he popularised it as a way of counting dates.… Continue reading Time Belongs to Jesus
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
Places matter. They accrue meaning as we do meaningful things in them, but also they are better or worse for different things. I’d like to consider ‘response times,’ by which I mean the part of your Sunday meeting where people are invited to respond to preaching or prophecy and then are prayed for by someone… Continue reading The Location of Response Times
Have you ever noticed that in Genesis chapter one, the days are the wrong way around? When I say the wrong way around, I mean backwards to what we expect, and before you rush off to compare the order of creation and question whether it means anything meaningful that the sun and moon come so… Continue reading Evening, then Morning
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
All of us pattern our lives after something. All our church’s do too. For many that’s the agrarian calendar or the academic one. For your church it should be something of God’s life in the world. I’ve argued before that there is great wisdom to be found in the church calendar. Most churches follow a… Continue reading Church Calendar and Preaching
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?
I suspect most of us give little thought to time. It’s simply something we move through, or exist in, or bemoan the passing of as the years slowly strip away the vigour of our youth. The fact that what time is amounts to a philosophical question that is notoriously tricky and nevertheless vital to any… Continue reading 5 Theses on Time
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
Advent starts on Sunday, which will confuse some of you because you’re expecting it to start next Wednesday. Others of you will be appalled at the idea of ‘doing Christmas’ in November—well we won’t be, we’ll be celebrating Advent. Advent is dark. Advent is bleak. Advent is about staring at the wretched core of the… Continue reading Advent is coming
nuakh 