culture
“One in six people in the world is Chinese, while one in six languages in the world is Melanesian.” This statement has always intrigued me. While it may not be strictly accurate, it certainly infers something surprising about Melanesia. It is a place that gathers an astonishing number of mother-tongue, or vernacular, languages. With this…
READ MORE[Added, 23/05/23: a Parihaka update—see below] I picked it up from someone else. I don’t remember who it was, but I am so grateful. It is now one of the most frequent pieces of advice that I pass on to others willing to listen. With the view that opposes your own, always paint it in…
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I feel blessed, having just spent three different weeks doing three different things in three different parts of the M-world which speak three different languages. Given the concerns around security in these places, I’ll follow that grand tradition for people like me and express some dependency on images of sunrises and sunsets… Sunrise over Lake…
READ MOREIn the books I read sometimes I need to stop and ask Barby, “Can I read this aloud to you?” Like when Sanneh speaks of an African childhood: An African child hood such as mine was not littered with the kind of stimuli we associate with age-specific gadgets, including toys of every description and sophistication.…
READ MOREI don’t think I’ve ever read a book so slowly… “Well Paul, that is what happens when you stop to locate every place in Googlemaps and cross-reference every person in Wikipedia.” Yes, I know – but it was so captivating. Austria is now deep in my bucket-list and it has nothing to do with The…
READ MORERoad trips in the US of A. One of my favourite things to do, although they are not as much fun on my own, as I was this time. After meetings in Miami, I took a flight to Charlotte, rented a car and drove off to visit some of the people under my watch. 1068…
READ MOREI laughed. I would have laughed even more if the theatre had been filled with Singaporean-Chinese people, rather than Indians. That would have been great fun. Crazy Rich Asians is a comedy. We watched the sanitised version, with India’s censor adding bleeps/blobs and deleting scenes (probably – how am I to know, really?). Still, we…
READ MOREI gasped. Yes, I did. On the morning of 20 August 2018, I unfolded The Times of India – and I gasped. Why? This is what extended across the full front page: The initial gasp was due to my instinctive response: ‘this would never happen in New Zealand’. The delayed gasp originated with the boldness of the…
READ MOREI’ve enjoyed two books about India this year. One tells the story of the sudden extinguishing of the British Empire – “the largest empire the world had ever hosted … at its peak, six times the size of the Roman Empire” (Indian Summer, 333). The other recounts the gradual decay of the remnants of the Mughal…
READ MOREAmos. First Peter. Two of my favourite biblical books through which to preach. Doing so, however, creates tension inside me. Amos is a sustained attack by God, through his prophet, on the presence of injustice among the nations of the world – and especially within His people, Israel. It is unrelenting. It is blistering. God…
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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.