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If 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…
READ MORE‘On June 5, 2001, Eugene scratched the final sentence…’ (242). On this very day, twenty years ago, Peterson’s ten year project, The Message, was completed. So I thought I’d engage with the recent authorized biography of Peterson — Winn Collier’s A Burning in My Bones — on this day. I love The Message. Although I may never…
READ MORECricket is such an odd sport. “OK, settle down, sceptics and cynics 😀. I hear you, but this is not your moment.” The oddity I am wanting to observe is that when men’s cricket is played on the international stage, there are not one, but three, varieties to the game. What other sport is like…
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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…
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This week we received the news that Marva Dawn had died. I felt so sad. Three memories quickly come into focus. the pig route One was driving along the Pig Route, a back road from Queenstown to Dunedin, with Marva and Myron. It was late on a Saturday afternoon and the light was fading. Marva…
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 MOREAt any point in time I have this little stack of books I want to read. Usually there is a certain (sequential) order in mind, but when I am in peak form with my reading, books tend to be assigned to different chairs in the house … and I read them all at the same…
READ MOREI was on the ferry to Manly, in Sydney. I disembarked. I had a few hours to spare, before the start of a conference for teachers of preaching in nearby Dee Why. My eyes noticed a billboard on a cinema — near the ferry terminal, as I remember it (although Google maps provides no such…
READ MOREWe departed from Auckland just hours before a lockdown. We returned to Auckland just hours before another lockdown. It was all kinda odd — and yet we were so conscious of how blessed we were to be free to travel, even in that little window of time. After teaching a weeklong intensive course, Preaching and Communication…
READ MOREFifteen years ago, on one summery afternoon in the staff room at Carey Baptist College, Mike Crudge suggested to me that I should start writing a blog. And so it started … with a post entitled, Opening Our Own Document (15 February 2006). And 700 posts later, I guess that is exactly what I’ve continued…
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.