Ministry. Theology. Culture.
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Moving home and thoughts of heaven
During the past four months my family and I have been contemplating a ministry move which has entailed relocating around 60 miles from where we have lived for the past (almost) eleven years. New ministry, new schools and community, a new church family, and a new neighbourhood are the fresh fields and novel mountains we…
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The courage of Christ
Like the best of portraits, the gospel accounts give us a view of Christ and his cross which is multi-faceted, narratively rich, and emotionally engaging. As one Easter follows another year on year, Christians find themselves reading the same texts, teaching the same truths, and yet their message and meaning come with disarming beauty and…
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Embracing the Butterfly Effect Pt.3 – Giving
The ‘butterfly effect’, the theory that small individual actions can operate within a wider ecosystem to affect huge change, is a wonderful metaphor for so many of our activities as Christians. When boiled down to their bare minimum, so much of what Christians do personally, and what the church does corporately, can seem hopelessly small…
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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…
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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…
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The Pain of Pretended Omniscience
There can be little doubt that in the present day most of us are awash with knowledge and parched for wisdom. We have rationalised the processes for understanding until we assume answers, are impatient with the process of learning, and struggle to confess genuine ignorance. We are constantly consuming unfiltered and mostly insignificant information, and…
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Bethlehem, Year Zero (An Advent Poem)
As 2020 comes to a close, I’ve noticed many folks make a comparison between the imperfections of our Christmas plans this year, and the difficulties of the first Advent. This poem is my attempt to capture something of that (YouTube version here): This year none of the pieces are in place, no finishing touch, just…
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Losing the Truth again
It doesn’t take a lot of research to discover that some subtle shifts are taking place in our society with regard to Truth. Having lived through the moral and political interregnum of postmodernism during the past twenty years, it appears that there is an increasing appetite for certainty, for verifiable facts, for bedrock ideas on…
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Misunderstanding the Church Pt.2
Living in the last dim rays of gospel light in Western culture can give the church a strong sense of isolation and marginalisation. The vestiges of public sympathy and visibility which may have been enjoyed in previous generations has diminished to the point where most of our work is undertaken in a context of obscurity…
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Misunderstanding the Church
Thomas Mann’s phrase that ‘everything is politics’ seems undeniably true in our society in the second decade of the twenty first century. Online platforms, initially created for socialising with (and snooping on) friends old and new have become charged spaces where affinities and antagonisms feed the insatiable beast of constant controversy. The era of having…
THINKING PASTORALLY 