spirituality
I am in the happy position of having a 19 year old son recommending a Tim Keller book to me. I’m blessed and I know it (ah yes, that reminds me of a song – but we won’t go there). On Joseph’s recommendation, I ordered and read Keller’s The Freedom of Self-Forgetfulness. It is a…
READ MOREIt is a big day today. It is one year since my father died. Sometimes I wish I could rewind those final days, play them again, and slow them down. It is all such a blur. I had no idea that everything would happen so quickly. On a Friday we realised the end was coming. He…
READ MOREWith a British Olympics around the corner, I suspect David McClasland’s Pure Gold (Lion, 2012) has been republished with the possibility of a fresh readership in mind. If so, I succumbed – and am so glad I did. It caught my eye at Auckland Airport – and it filled that eye with more than few tears.…
READ MOREI have been thinking deep thoughts and feeling deep felts. There is Mary (not her real name). Mary and I worked together for seven years in a previous life. I think she would say that we were good friends. She had been a missionary overseas. There were little glimpses of life being difficult for her back then and…
READ MOREOnce upon a time the telephone would ring and either we would ignore it, or we’d encourage people to leave a message to which we’d give our attention at a later time. Why?! Because the people with whom we were sitting face-to-face took precedence – every time, every single time. It was seen as a…
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 MOREI am a timid chap. Always have been. Always will be. If I was to look at the sum of all my fears, dogs and flying figure regularly in the top ten. Not without good reason, I might add. As a little newspaper-delivery boy I had an awful experience of being bitten – and I’ve…
READ MOREI’ve struggled to be happy this Christmas. It was the Friday before Christmas that did it to me. In the morning I try to absorb the news that an enduring and close friend has a brain tumour. Cancer is sinister, evil. At midday I attend a funeral for the father of my brother-in-law. A simple,…
READ MOREThose of you familiar with the biographies of John Stott will remember that he once had a Kiwi curate at All Souls’ named Ted. Ted had the gall one day to criticise Stott about his preaching being beautifully biblical, but unconnected with the wider world. As the story goes, it was this interchange that became…
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.