Reformation Day can be both a help and a hindrance in ministry in the 21st century. If our adherence to its truths and our interest in its main figures begins and ends with a nostalgic harking back to a bygone age, or an anachronistic copy and paste of certain mannerisms and quirks of Luther or…
I went to an all boys high school (comprehensive) in 1980s/90s Northern Ireland, a place where a friend's mother bluntly informed me that she would struggle to send her dog, and where an adult once told me that the pupils 'played tig with hatchets'. The teaching standards in the school were superb, the behavioural and…
These days I'm reading, thinking, and preaching a lot about heaven. This comes as a culmination of some preaching I did in 2018 on Christ's return, which in turn led me into conversations with people about the intermediate and final state. Last Lord's Day I preached on our bodily resurrection, and then spent time with…
When we prize the interests of party above those of the whole community, when we make our perspective prescriptive, our personal preferences into binding principles, then we have lost a significant part of our apology for the Christian faith, and our voice within the Church. This is a truth which seems sadly lost on much…
When postmodernism was at the height of its powers many of us feared that a loss of meaning would lead to a loss of morality. We were wrong. Instead of morality entering terminal decline, the loss of absolutes has led to its simultaneous intensification and misdirection. Morality or, more properly, moralism, is enjoying a major…
Recently Amnesty International, normally the darling of social media liberal chic, learned that even they are not immune from the censure of the Twitter censorati. In their case the collective outrage of so many smartphone sentinels and keyboard campaigners was focussed on a glossy cover they used for their magazine, in an effort to showcase…
