church
The history of Aotearoa-New Zealand can be retold in a minor key. Every couple of decades a disaster seems to strike which pours a deep sadness into a generation of Kiwis and adds to our self-understanding as a nation. The Pike River mine disaster prompted me to post on this theme a couple of years ago.…
READ MOREI have been buzzing all summer over the discovery that the man (Sir James Stephen) who shaped the policy for New Zealand leading into the Treaty of Waitangi – on this very day, 173 years ago – was Wilberforce’s (step) nephew and was himself a child of the Clapham Sect. Then I discover (Keith Newman,…
READ MOREI have a soft spot for Sri Lanka. While I am unsure of the exact source of this softness, there are many tributaries which have contributed to its flow. God’s call usually works like the dawning of the day, rather than the lightning strike. It takes time. However for me, the Sri Lankan tsunami was…
READ MOREIt is a consistent theme. In the churches, mission organisations, and employers with whom I have been associated over the past twenty years, (almost) without exception they have tackled the same issue: identifying what good governance looks like and trying to make the changes to embrace it. I am at San Francisco airport on my…
READ MORESticking with the apocalyptic theme for one more post… As various scholars like to remind us, in the Book of Revelation ‘numbers are symbols, not statistics’. So, for example, the number 4 is a symbol which represents everything, all of something. A bit like the way the four winds, or the four corners, is a…
READ MOREAs I posted earlier in the year, a project for me in 2012 has been figuring out how to preach from the Book of Revelation. I’ve had the privilege of training people in Indonesia, Pakistan, China (in my work with Langham overseas) – and also people in Dunedin, Mt Roskill and New Plymouth (back home…
READ MOREWhen it comes to the application of the sermon, it is critical that we consider those unlike ourselves. When it comes to building community, it is critical that we include those unlike ourselves. As a man who both sermonises and builds community this means I must, just for starters, take care to consider and include women.…
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I enjoy sport and so there is no time quite like the Olympics. But I am also a Christian wanting to participate in the mission of God in the world. I try to watch the Olympics with other eyes… Watch the Flags—and intercede With the incomparable Operation World alongside, an anthem here and a flag…
READ MOREI have been a closet-anglican and a small-b-baptist pretty much all my Christian life. But it is my love of being interdenominational, international … and interserve (the mission family in which I grew up, known back then as bmmf) that has pretty much trumped everything else. But God has a sense of humour. He called…
READ MOREFashion really is a bit of a joke. Afterall is there anything which provokes greater shrieks of laughter than poring over old photos? ‘Look at that hair’ … ‘Those glasses are terrible’. Then on it progresses to the likes of shoes and make-up and shorts… Here is my question. If these styles can cause so much mirth a…
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.