Tag: Ministry
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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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Book Review: The Least, the Last, and the Lost
The privilege and challenge of reaching non-Christians in the most deprived areas of the UK is the focus of this landmark book from Mez McConnell, the fruit of two decades of frontline work and deep-dive research. Mez, founder of 20Schemes and Pastor of Niddrie Community Church in Edinburgh leaves no stone unturned in his analysis…
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Considering a Call
On this day one year ago I received a phone call from an esteemed elder in a Baptist church over 50 miles from where we were serving the Lord. It was a conversation which had clearly been preceded by prayer, thought, and planning on the part of the elder team he was representing. The terms…
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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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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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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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Preaching under the smile and the smiting rod
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…
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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…
THINKING PASTORALLY 