word | spirit | world | church
There’s an adage that gets thrown around in church circles, and maybe wider: healthy things grow. There’s an increasingly common quip in response that suggests that healthy things grow, and then stop growing. The only thing that keeps on growing constantly is cancer. The first is usually used to suggest either that your church not… Continue reading Good Growth
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
I’ve come across the idea, a few times recently, that the Bible doesn’t speak to everything. In the context I’m hearing it, this means that there are lots of matters of faith and practise that the Bible doesn’t tell us what to do on, so we have to figure it out for ourselves. Which is… Continue reading The Bible doesn’t speak to that
And stop trying to fix each other. Friends, you are not a machine. You are a beautiful, complex, confusing mess of a creature. This matters, because we talk about ourselves as though we are machines, and language creates the categories that our thought then fills. When we speak of ourselves as machines we start to… Continue reading Don’t Fix Me
There’s a common story people tell at Christmas time, not the one on which the world turns, or the one about the chimney-diving elf, but one about how all the traditions we use to celebrate the birth of Christ are actually pagan in origin. This varies in intensity, but these killjoys are keen to make… Continue reading On Christmas Trees
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 All Creation Waits
I wonder if you’ve ever cut down a tree? I’ve done a few small ones over the years, and it’s a hard job. We’ve mostly gone the root of chopping off all the branches with a big pair of loppers or a reciprocating saw, so that you’re left with a tall trunk in the ground… Continue reading Advent’s Axe
The forest burned down since last I went. England has faced a series of brutal heatwaves this summer along with much of the rest of Europe. Wildfires are uncommon here, but in the hottest heatwave the Lickey Hills above Birmingham sparked into blaze. Acres of woodland at the edge of the city were gone across… Continue reading After the Burning
“He’s no longer in the land of the living,” we say with great solemnity as we pronounce that our friend has fallen asleep on the sofa. It’s a phrase we use fairly commonly, either to mean prosaically, “they’re dead”—which is actually uncommon because we prefer cleaner euphemisms that hide the reality entirely—or to refer to… Continue reading The Land of the Living
Jesus hung on the cross, suspended between heaven and earth, dying. To us, a detail that we can perhaps use poetically but incidental among the whole. To the Church Fathers, however, an important point to understand the cross. When St Athanasius is exploring why God became Man in his famous On the Incarnation, he devotes… Continue reading High and Lifted Up
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