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…
As I write these words, our home has descended into the silence of sleep on a Saturday night, and I am alone in the study. In earlier, more normal days, these were the moments when the Lord's Day, the pulpit, and the task of preaching were given final reflection. These were the hours in which…
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…
How are we to answer the exigencies and anxieties of the hour? What tone of voice and approach should we assume when the world is crying out for answers? What dangers lie in uncertain speech, in mumbled sounds, as men and women hunger and thirst to know true reality? During this week I have been…
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…
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…
These are undoubtedly the strangest of days. We are in a state of upheaval and disruption, and we have no idea when or if normal service might resume. We are living in a cultural pause, an on-air silence which becomes more uncomfortable by the day, an interval which is quickly seeming to be longer than…
In approaching the narrative sections of Scripture, there is always the danger of foreclosure, of assuming the conclusion, and missing the true nature of the issues at hand. The story is always easier when you can read the ending, the drama reduced when you know the outcome, but give a man or woman the middle…
At the moment it seems like everything is interim. The decisions that we were agonising over a fortnight ago about public events and human contact seem like the naive deliberations of an earlier age, such has been the spread of coronavirus and the protective measures seeking to shore up our defences. The United Kingdom and…
A measure of our new sense of normality is that the decision whether or not to run church services has become a global point of conversation. A month ago such circumstances were not on the radar of most, a year ago they would have been unintelligible. In the United Kingdom we are presently teetering on…
