Tag: Local Church
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Preaching from a Place of Fullness
I have preached from a place of emptiness and from a place of fullness, and the experience of the one makes me long for the other. A settled ministry in one congregation is a privilege beyond description, and a responsibility beyond the strength of any pastor. The weight and momentum of feeding hungry souls, preaching…
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Who in the world am I preaching to?
I preach over 100 sermons annually. That amounts to more hours of preparation than I can hope to quantify, and around 250,000 words of written material produced for the pulpit each year. This is one of the main activities that I have been trained, commissioned, and employed for by the local church. This is what…
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An inherited garden (a ministry parable)
We recently moved to a new home and, given how much outdoor spaces are now being used for entertaining, we have poured some energy into our inherited garden. Previous occupants have worked hard to maintain, cultivate, and increase the ground, and that shows. Many of them remain in the neighbourhood, and have pledged themselves to…
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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…
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3 Reasons to Keep Going as a Pastor
Broadly, if not universally, these are extremely tough times to be a Pastor. Compared with the searing persecution of previous generations, or the relative penury of our nearer forbears, we do of course have it easy, but Pastors today are facing unique pressures. Following the shutdown of our public worship services globally, the diminishment of…
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Regather. Rejoice. Lament. Rebuild.
Church families are returning to their buildings once again in the UK and Ireland, after a break of almost four months. For many this is a welcome signal that some semblance of normality is once again being recovered, for others it is a time of intensified anxiety over what feel like huge steps forward in…
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Pastors, Covid, and Criticism
As the barriers erected by Covid 19 in the UK and Ireland start to lift a little, the prospect of being able to gather for public worship is beginning to glimmer on the horizon. Governmental sanction for regathering is simply affirmative of what many church leaders have been feeling – we are almost at the…
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‘I long to see you’ – the glory of contingency
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…
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Coronavirus, vulnerability, and dignity
In the present global health crisis there are some whose fears and needs could easily become a footnote to a larger narrative of reassurance and confidence. While coronavirus will one day be a memory, and while most who experience it will find it mild and minor, there is a margin of people for whom news…
THINKING PASTORALLY 