travel
I have a soft spot for Sri Lanka. While I am unsure of the exact source of this softness, there are many tributaries which have contributed to its flow. God’s call usually works like the dawning of the day, rather than the lightning strike. It takes time. However for me, the Sri Lankan tsunami was…
READ MOREThe welcome I received at Yangon Airport earlier this week forced my fingers with this post. There I was in this massive queue (2500 arrivals each day now). I finally arrive at the immigration desk and face the official. He adjusts the camera with a smile. I catch myself just in time. Breaking into Hindi…
READ MOREOver Christmas I spent time getting to know Aung San Suu Kyi. I started with Justin Wintle’s book, Perfect Hostage, picked up at the bookshop in the departure area of Phnom Penh airport. Given the recent developments in the story, it is a bit dated (2007). However I found it valuable to begin my pilgrimage with…
READ MOREIt is not every day that the eye falls upon a book on leadership where the case studies, so charming in their sycophancy, include the likes of Mao Tse-Tung, Tito, Ceausescu, Chou En-Lai, Hodja (Albania), and Khrushchev. But such was the case when I wandered through one of my favourite bookshops – in the departure…
READ MOREParents tend to search for significance in the naming of their children. Barby and I are no different. A few things have happened this Christmas to bring this to mind, particularly with our three boys a long, long way away. Starting with the youngest, Joseph Daniel. Joseph and Daniel are the two prominent male characters…
READ MOREIt has been a long time coming. The final frontier. Through these 29 years in New Zealand, it is the only part of the country in which we have never holidayed. The East Cape. Not any more. Barby and I – together with our daughter Bethany – have just returned from a week travelling around the…
READ MOREPatrick Johnstone’s The Future of the Global Church is one for the ages. I’ll leave you to check out the website. Make sure you click here for the full Table of Contents and some sample pages from the book to get a quick sense of what the book covers. Here are my reasons for loving this book:…
READ MOREI have started a collection… My favourite menu entries from the places to which I travel. I’d like to say that I eat them before I photograph them, but that would be an untruth. And the fuzziness is due to my difficulties with the elementary facts of camera focus, rather than any peristaltic fussiness in my alimentary…
READ MOREI cannot escape the clutches of the question. Be it Islamabad or Jakarta or Delhi – or Sydney, Wellington, Bluffton (Ohio!) or Auckland. The same issue has been filling my ears and my lips. As I’ve watched experienced missionaries in action – Robin and Jenny, John and Rosemary, Steve and Ruth – the question has…
READ MOREThis is not an easy book to read. It is complicated because its subject matter is complicated. But as I worked my way through Anatol Lieven’s Pakistan: A Hard Country (Allen Lane: 2011), I found my understanding of Pakistan developing so much. 1. Lieven writes with both empathy and objectivity. He has lived and worked…
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.