mission
In January each year two lists are published. 1. List One is the Open Doors’ World Watch List (WWL), identifying the countries where it is ‘most dangerous to follow Jesus’. Persecution is ‘any hostility experienced as a result of one’s identification with Christ’. Although people will quibble, the methodology looks pretty sophisticated, with a simple summary here. Every year…
READ MOREIt is great to be in the garden again. Whether it be horticultural, or human, I love watching growth. It is pretty much my favourite thing to do. I delight in nurturing plants, but also people, to completeness, to maturity, to fruitfulness and to all they are designed to be. The principles and the rhythms…
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“What do you bring back with you from the global church?” This was a question asked of me six months ago. I’ve been thinking about the answers ever since. What follows is a personal and a general response. I am not trying to defend a thesis, nor am I trying to gather all the exceptions. This is simply how…
READ MOREI love a good political cartoon. The New Testament scholar (at Ridley Hall, Cambridge, where John Stott studied), C. F. D. Moule, once observed that within its original audience, the parable of Jesus had numerous features in common with today’s political cartoon. That was the little spark that helped ignite my interest in the parables,…
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We arrived a little late to the party, but it was worth the wait. The Blessing Aotearoa New Zealand is exquisite as an expression of worship. Beautiful though it is as worship, I was even more stirred by its possibilities for mission. Not only was I stunned to see it on the news at the…
READ MOREIt is good to be home again in New Zealand. I enjoy being able to pop across to my mother’s home on Sunday evenings and watch the BBC’s Songs of Praise with her. But not today, as we are in covidian lockdown – again! With Songs of Praise I am not so keen on the choirs, the organs and…
READ MORE20/20 has always been associated with a clarity of vision, one that enables a certainty of purpose and a strength of step. But when 2020 finally arrived among us, it has brought confusion, uncertainty – and sickness. The irony is that those of us who have trumpeted our ‘wisdom, wealth and power’ down the decades,…
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Television can provide such a window onto the soul of a nation. Whenever I’m travelling in unfamiliar countries, I like having a TV to watch. The content. The style. The advertisements. The agenda. The people. The popular. It goes on and on… It is a window that fascinates me. Over the past seven years, when…
READ MOREDalrymple, google maps, and wikipedia have become such a happy triumvirate in my life. Because of it, his books take so long to read, especially this one where he traces the journey of a Byzantine monk through Greece, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Egypt: From the Holy Mountain: A Journey in the Shadow of Byzantium…
READ MOREI am sitting in the Cinderella Hotel in Mawlamyine (formerly Moulmein, in Myanmar), racing through a biography of Adoniram Judson, and I encounter this paragraph: Scattered around Moulmein are many Baptist churches and schools. Those schools, built and run by missionaries for more than a hundred years, are now nationalized. The government has taken over…
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.