preaching
One of the gracious privileges of my life was to be able to head off, as a 21 year old, to Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (TEDS, near Chicago) to complete an MDiv degree. It shaped me, sandwiched as it was between the other profound ‘shapers’ — growing up in a culture-not-my-own (in India) and pastoring…
READ MOREYesterday, Covid-19 came close to heart and home, with the death of my friend, Pastor Ohm Prakash, in Pune (India). As is the custom, the funeral took place within a few hours, with a livestream on YouTube which I was able to watch. I am always a bit slow to roll out the great…
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The contemporary equivalents to the “altar with an inscription” (Acts 17.23) and “some of your own poets” (Acts 17.28) has always been a fascination to me. The Apostle Paul was flexible enough to commence his preaching from ‘texts’ in his culture — and then he was creative enough to move from there to Jesus.…
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I often dream of travelling back in time. I love history and think it would be so cool to pop in, here and there. However, right now, sitting in Auckland’s strictest lockdown yet, it is memories, not dreams, that fill my imagination. I’ve been reflecting on the great privilege of my working life — spending…
READ MOREIf you are up for it, I’d like to take you on a journey. A VacancySoon after I started teaching preaching (in 1989), I became fascinated by a space — a vacant space. James Engel created The Engel Scale in 1975. In it he attempted to describe ‘the spiritual decision process’, tracking how people moved…
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If there is one thing I’ve been learning from teaching preaching over the years, it is that merely participating in a course, or a seminar, doesn’t help much on its own. Such participation does not lead to much transformation—unless there is practice-practice-practice and, better still, there are opportunities to pass-it-on to others. This is one reason…
READ MOREExactly forty years ago, I did not fully appreciate what was up ahead of me… I had been accepted for MDiv studies at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (TEDS), near Chicago. All I really knew was that it would start with ‘Suicide Greek’ — learning the language over six days a week for six weeks, under…
READ MOREIt all started as I was reading Alan Kreider’s The Patient Ferment of the Early Church. On page 92, he quotes Gerhard Lohfink making what seemed to me, on a first reading, to be a most extraordinary claim: “(Is 2:2-4; Micah 4.1-4) is the prophetic passage the early Christian writers cited more often than any…
READ MORE2021 is a big year. It is 100 years since Barby’s father was born and 10 years since my father died—but also 100 years since John Stott was born and 10 years since John Stott died. These three have been the most influential men in my life. Here I’d like to focus on John Stott…
READ MOREWith the training of preachers as my vocation, and in seeking a more personal way in which to engage with Black Lives Matter, I decided to turn to the African-American preaching tradition in order to listen and learn – again. Martin Luther King Jr, Henry Mitchell and Robert C. Smith Jr have all featured in my…
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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.