Category: Evangelism
-
Embracing the Butterfly Effect Pt2. – Evangelism
Believing that big things can follow small actions offered in faith is one of the keys to understanding how God works in the world, and why what we do in our personal lives matters. In a world of well publicised biographies, grand gestures, and self-promotion, it is vital to understand that ministering in obscurity is…
-
Embracing the Butterfly Effect Pt.1: Prayer
It is amazing how language which begins life in the laboratory, or in the halls of the academy, can quickly filter down into everyday use – often stripped of its more technical dimensions. We have become accustomed to referencing ‘critical mass’ to express how things inevitably come to a head in our lives, and the…
-
Filtering for Repentance
One of the many vulnerabilities of the contemporary evangelical church is a stubborn mistaking of quantity for quality. This can be true at a local and global church level where attendances (or more recently ‘hits’ and ‘likes’) can be the marker for how well things are progressing and how much interest is being shown. It…
-
Some implications of an empty pulpit
Whether your cup is half empty or half full in the current global crisis, whether you credit or descry online ministry, the fact cannot be avoided that the era of vacant church buildings and silent pulpits is a significant and sad chapter in the history of the church. We are in the midst of a…
-
A Certain Sound through Theology
Earlier this week I posted about the danger of abdicating our responsibility to speak clearly to our world about God. The call there was to recognise the reality that we sometimes speak in muffled tones, that our meaning can be lost and our edge can be dulled. The motives for this inclination in our hearts…
-
An uncertain sound
There is a famous anecdote about a church producing some signage for the gable wall of their building, with the proud boast, ‘God is the answer’. An overnight graffiti artist, with a strong instinct for philosophy and irony, corresponded with the statement by spraying the words ‘What is the question?’ This story, be it true…
-
3 Christian responses to Coronavirus
Every day delivers fresh headlines, and further fuel for fear, about the global rise and spread of coronavirus. News broadcasts carry dramatic images of cities on lockdown, politicians visibly sweating from the symptoms of the condition, and a growing sense of inevitability that a pandemic is on the horizon. As cases mount up across the…
THINKING PASTORALLY 