mission
Yes, that’s right – I have digested yet another Philip Jenkins’ book. It is becoming a compulsive behavioural disorder (particularly when I see the next one already on my desk). This one is a sane and measured response to the fear that Europe is becoming some sort of Eurabia where Christianity’s prospects, currently being dismantled…
READ MOREI guess if the church needs to be “reformed, always reforming” – then it might be OK for me to be converted, always converting. Won’t there always be blindspots to be exposed as I slide down the asymptote closer and closer to the full and complete truth of that horizontal line…yes, I think so. I…
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I live in NZ and listen to the sobered and scholarly voices on the challenge of the post-Christian West. I work in Asia and listen to the enthusiastic vibrancy of a post-Western Christianity. I live in NZ and listen to the church speaking “mission, mission, mission”. I work in Asia and listen to the church…
READ MOREWhile I’ve travelled over these recent weeks, I have heard some remarkable things… In Peru, the church is “living in a time of harvest” – the 1% ‘evangelical’ in 1989 has mushroomed to 15% today – which amounts to 4 million people and 20,000 churches. In Zimbabwe, the inflation rate is so bad that some…
READ MOREI often receive disbelieving looks from friends in Britain, Australia and the USA when I claim that New Zealand is more secular, more anti-Christian, than any of their countries. So conscious are they of the challenge which they face that they find it difficult to believe that somewhere else could be harder. But maybe this…
READ MOREI am in the midst of another period of real distress about the prominence which alcohol and its abuse has in our society. The son of close friends had his drink spiked on the weekend. Very scary with complete memory loss for some hours! My son in high-school tells me that a group of his…
READ MOREIt took me awhile to get a hang of the direction in which Mark Noll was heading in his latest book, The New Shape of World Christianity (IVP, 2009). I know the guy is an elite historian but every now and then he seemed to be going down the same path as Jerry Falwell did…
READ MOREIt happened again. Sitting in yet another Majority World church context – this time the Graduation Ceremony of the Phnom Penh Bible School in Cambodia – and I find it staring me in the face from the front wall in huge font. The whole focus is on maturity: “help your people grow in Christ”. This…
READ MOREFirst you need to understand that I am an Indian lad. And as a boy in India, I could never understand why that country which fills the space between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans stood behind Pakistan, while that country which provided the shoulders on which the Arctic Circle sits stood behind India. It seemed…
READ MOREThat previous post prompted an observation that I had meant to post last month – but forgot. When I was in Thailand a couple of Cambodian pastors at the seminar really wanted to go out for ice cream. A bit of a novelty for them. So we did. We took the ice cream cones and…
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.