I don’t like the bible, oh no . . . Let’s preach the Bible, big, mouthfuls of body building, stamina inducing, breath taking chunks. Let’s climb steep heights of dizzying proportions and challenging ascents of tricky terrain. Let’s take whole books and whole testaments and even the whole thing in single bite sermons. Let’s preach […]
I became fascinated at the way narrative was constructed sitting in my fifth and sixth form English classes; I had teachers who were outstanding. I still remember the excitement of tracing the motifs of light and dark – day and night – in William Goldings, Lord of the Flies, for myself. I started to appreciate […]
I’m working on a sermon focused on the Apostle Paul’s prayer in Colossians 1. My sermon is part of a sermon series on the connections between prayer and mission. I chose Paul’s prayer because I think it shows the upward spiral of the Christian life when we pursue knowledge of God coupled with obedience in […]
Sociologist Nancy Ammerman did some interesting research recently, recounted in her 2013 book Sacred Stories, Spiritual Tribes. She found that the people who demonstrate the greatest commitment to their faith or religion are the people who talk easily and frequently about the overlap between their faith/religion and their daily life. Ammerman has seen evidence that […]
Miroslav Volf contends that God’s people in current times and places must choose to live “against the tide” – a tide characterised by the inner pull toward self-absorption and away from care for others, impelled by what he calls a “culture stripped of grace” (Volf, Against the Tide (Eerdmans, 2010) xi-xii). In different ways, in […]
They make great introductions, serving to capture attention, orientating people from their world to the world of the Biblical text. They can aid application, serving to illustrate exegetical material or embody the gospel in life today. They can provide a way to engage the Bible, amplifying plot and character in the narrative genre’s of the […]
