leadership
It is one of the most eloquent of all Christian truths – the imago dei. Human beings are made in the image of God. There is a God-likeness about us which grants every person a dignity. ‘Let us make human beings in our image, in our likeness’ (Gen 1.27). Imagine what the world would be…
READ MOREI thought Michelle Obama’s speech yesterday was sensational. The words, the imagery, the warmth, the emotion – and the conviction. It was compelling. But I am not dumb. I know what’s going on. The implicit barbs, dozens of them, aimed at Romney and his friends. The explicit, even desperate, attempt to have the American people…
READ MOREThe New Zealand cricket team is at an all-time low, so I thought I’d try to turn myself into a big rugby fan – and stopped by Bob Howitt’s Graham Henry: Final Word (Harper Collins, 2012) for a read. It is not a classic and I managed to race through it on a return flight to Dunedin…
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 MOREAs I reflect on my time as a leader, one of the great delights was to watch and listen to young adults take their first steps in service – then to pray and lean on some Spirit-given (I hope!) discernment – before taking the risk of boldly speaking some words into their life about what…
READ MORE‘The first task of leadership is to say thank you’. I could take you to the very place where a mentor said that to me. I took it to heart. Saying thank-you, with sincerity and frequency and creativity, became one of the first principles of leadership for me. I found it overlapped neatly with a…
READ MOREI was fascinated by this article on cricinfo.com this morning. It reviews a new book by Greg Chappell where he criticises the Indian cricket team for its performance on the recent tour of Australia. In less than a day it has collected 245 comments and 652 ‘likes’ on facebook. I will neither read the former nor do the…
READ MOREThe value of Alister Chapman’s new book on John Stott lies with the fact that he does not appear to be a fan. A different voice has joined the conversation. And one senses that this conversation on Stott’s legacy is about to get thicker and deeper – and more intriguing (not the least because the…
READ MOREMany years ago I was arrested by a sentence about leadership at the start of a book from Kouzes & Posner: We treat leadership as a learnable set of practices … we hope to demystify it and show how each of us has the capacity to lead. (The Leadership Challenge, xxiv). Then along came Simon…
READ MOREIt is one of the books of the decade for me (NB: pages 273-275 provide an excellent summary of the argument): James Davison Hunter’s To Change the World (Oxford University Press, 2010). In trying to distill its influence, three affirmations come to mind. 1. Our understanding of culture and change can be so wrong Using words like ‘flawed’…
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.