suffering
This book will take you less than 10 minutes to read aloud (which is the only way to read it). Once you’ve read it once, you’ll want to read it again and again (so keep it on the coffee table, next to the remote). I promise you. I would do you a great disservice if…
READ MOREAmos. First Peter. Two of my favourite biblical books through which to preach. Doing so, however, creates tension inside me. Amos is a sustained attack by God, through his prophet, on the presence of injustice among the nations of the world – and especially within His people, Israel. It is unrelenting. It is blistering. God…
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With snow on the ground, I missed it the first time I walked across it. The snow melted – and there it was: a line in the tiles and in the history of Sarajevo, capital city of Bosnia-Herzegovina (B-H) in the Balkans. Sarajevo Meeting of Cultures Although there is a common culture and language (to…
READ MOREMore than 1100 children were killed during the Siege of Sarajevo from 1992 to 1996. The city remembers the children in a couple of ways. Late one afternoon I trudged through the snow down Marshall Tito St from Pigeon Square for almost 2kms to find this memorial beside the road. It is a typical war…
READ MOREShe may live in LA. She may work with Hillsong Australia, but she is most definitely a Kiwi Brethren lass from the Hutt Valley. Her father was an All Black rugby player, for goodness sake. What better pedigree could there be?! I remember speaking at a conference where I was responsible for the adults in…
READ MOREWith all the fire and fury, shock and shame, filling the headlines coming out of the USA these days, it is easy to forget that over there, in the footnotes, there are so many tender, inspirational stories. I’ve loved living in two of them in recent months – both related to the game of basketball…
READ MOREAmateur sociologists and historians (like me) tend to be aware of two contrasting realities, spread two millennia apart. In the Western world of the twenty-first century, study after study demonstrates that it is difficult to distinguish the behaviour of a Christian from the behaviour of one who is not a Christian. It is not easy…
READ MORESadness and grief at-a-distance carries its challenges. Two years ago it was cancer that took the life of my best buddy from childhood – as well as being Best Man at each other’s weddings. This past week it was the death of Denise (once again to cancer), a precious friend and mentor whose orbit of…
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When we planned a week’s holiday on Sri Lanka’s southern coast, my mind was focused on one thing. Not the beaches. Not the surf. Not the tea. Not the parks. Not the yoga. Not the Buddha statues. Not the snorkeling. Not the coral. Just one thing. The tsunami. Upwards of 40,000 Sri Lankans lost their…
READ MOREIt had been a long trip. Two overnight flights, including one in United’s impossible economy class. I did arrive, finally, at Bogota’s flash airport at 5am, to be greeted by my friend and colleague, Jorge. It was a quick trip to his home – and a bed – only to be greeted by this confronting…
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.