christian mind
In trying hard to include everything, a point can be reached where it becomes hard to exclude anything. Put a handful of topics on the table for discussion – mission, evangelism, dialogue, salvation, conversion – and it won’t be long before many of the older liberals (in the 1980s) and the younger postmoderns (in the…
READ MORE“It wouldn’t take much to draw me back into being a pastor again”.As a student, I heard Dr DA Carson make this comment. I’ve heard him say it a few more times in the subsequent decades. It impacts me. Still does. Why would an academic of this quality make such a statement? I daren’t speak…
READ MORE‘An emphasis in the teacher easily becomes an extreme in the student.’ This dictum comes to mind with the Reformed movement. While it is enjoying a global resurgence, there are a lot of ‘students’ running around out there, narrowing it all down to election and predestination with their ‘full of truth, empty of grace’ attitude.…
READ MORESometimes a page is difficult to turn. Like this one. It lists most of the names of those who died in a massacre of 159 missionaries over a few weeks in the summer of 1900 in ‘Shansi’. The right hand side contains the names of those who died from the China Inland Mission, known today…
READ MOREIn my first post, over ten years ago, I laid claim to a 30:30:30:10 identity (India:USA:NZ:Southland (NZ)). Each of these worlds has shaped me. Because of this I tend to claim some right, even responsibility, to wade into these worlds and reflect on them critically. Right now I am as concerned for the church in…
READ MOREDenzel (Washington) made me do it. The other night he pushed me over the edge. Here I sit, still recovering from the Fast & Furious family saying grace around the table at the end of a movie of excessive violence, destruction and abuse, and now … there sits Denzel. Struggling with alcoholism, there is this touching…
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Corruption. Prosperity teaching. ‘Big Man’ leadership. The evil trio. The devil’s trinity. Everywhere I go in this job, it does not take long for these three to surface in the conversation. I am just home from a visit to Ghana, and the combo was present there, too. It started at the airport, on arrival in…
READ MORENot so long ago, Barby and I had a pretty typical weekend in Bangalore. On the Saturday, Barby and I wandered through the local shopping area. She is dressed in salwar kameez (and I am occasionally wearing a kurta). As we wander, it is hard not to notice the many Indians, young adults and young families,…
READ MOREAtul Gawande’s Being Mortal takes me back to grace and truth. The author is concerned that we lack ‘a coherent view of how people might live successfully all the way to their very end, (as) we have allowed our fates to be controlled by the imperatives of medicine, technology, and strangers’ (9). Drawing a little on…
READ MORESaying thanks. Building trust. The first principles of leadership. Study them deeply and then do them creatively and repetitively and you will be well on your way in leadership roles, large or small. Take trust, for example. How do you build it? Well, it operates like a bank account. The deposits are made early –…
READ MOREAbout Me
the art of unpacking
After a childhood in India, a theological training in the USA and a pastoral ministry in Southland (New Zealand), I spent twenty years in theological education in New Zealand — first at Laidlaw College and then at Carey Baptist College, where I served as principal. In 2009 I began working with Langham Partnership and since 2013 I have been the Programme Director (Langham Preaching). Through it all I've cherished the experience of the 'gracious hand of God upon me' and I've relished the opportunity to 'unpack', or exegete, all that I encounter in my walk through life with Jesus.