spirituality
It 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’ve always loved my Uncle Jack. While, inadvertently, the world knew him as the one who invented the name ‘kiwifruit’ (NB: the fruit is called ‘kiwifruit’, not kiwi, because the ‘kiwi’ is a seriously unappetizing, inedible bird!), I knew him in a far more personal way. When I entered university, Uncle Jack gave me a…
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 MOREThe recent decade has seen a steady stream of books on preaching aimed at the beginner. Not only did this alter a worrying trend, it also provided me with plenty of inspiration for my primary calling – namely, the training of preachers in indigenous, grassroots settings in the majority world. But in this season of…
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Earlier this month, in the space of 24 hours, two video clips arrived in my in-box. One is nine minutes in length. The other is six minutes. Both were recorded a long time ago and are rather limited, technically. Both feature men who were born in the same decade and then who died in the…
READ MOREI have a friend called Fred. Over these next four weeks, Fred is hosting his own Art Exhibition, in Nelson (New Zealand), around the theme, Memories, A Nelson Childhood. I feel this exuberant delight for him. He’s going home to Nelson, with his family, to exhibit his art for the public. It is wonderful. Under…
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,…
READ MOREWhen it comes to TV dramas, nobody does it better than the Brits. Nobody. This is a law of the Medes and Persians that cannot be altered. And so it came to pass, with a nudge from our daughter and a shared Netflix account to help welcome us home, that Barby and I discovered Shetland. It…
READ MOREThere are times when worship can be a bit of a worry. Here is one example that came to mind this week, for reasons I’ll explain later. There are two songs ‘out there’ with the same first line: Jesus, lover of my soul. One, written in 1993, starts like this: Jesus, lover of my soul; Jesus, I…
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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.