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I am a little worried. I believe in contextualisation. Oh yes, I do. Isn’t the incarnation, the divine becoming human, the ultimate in contextualised activity? The Big-C is as necessary as it is unavoidable. But still I am worried. As I travel I am a little surprised at the appetite that there is for contextualisation.…
READ MOREI know CS Lewis is ‘the man’. One day when I have nothing to do, I am going to go through Mere Christianity and list all the times he finds the spiritually significant in the utterly ordinary and everyday. That is the simple secret of compelling illustration and nobody does it better. But there is one…
READ MOREIt is thirty years ago this month (February 1985) since I started as a pastor – at Georgetown Baptist Church in Invercargill, on the south coast of the South Island in New Zealand. Ten years ago this church closed its doors (although another church still uses the facilities). I was overwhelmed by an uncommon grief. I…
READ MOREThere is this hunger within to learn about the peoples of the world, particularly those ones about whom I know so little. Almost ten years ago I got lost in Meredith’s The State of Africa. It changed me. With my first visit to the Middle East looming in March, recent months have been devoted to Eugene…
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At our age, an overnight flight leads to an afternoon nap. Once that was over, Barby and I wandered out onto the streets of Yangon. No map to follow. Nowhere to go, in particular. From across the road we stumbled across this building. Just another church in all its faded glory? With more pigeons outside…
READ MORELast year my daughter Bethany asked me if she could cross-stitch some words that were precious to me. It took a few seconds to make up my mind. And so it came to pass, over Christmas, that some wise words arrived from the east (well, more the south, I guess), simply framed and starkly beautiful.…
READ MOREAbout this time yesterday there was a tear in the eye. Barby and I were returning home after a 40 hour visit to Vizakhapatnam – or Vizag, for short. In expressing my gratitude to the couple who had welcomed us into their home, I became a bit misty. Here we were – so very different…
READ MOREIt has been hard living so far from New Zealand during the two hundredth year celebrations of the arrival of the gospel – on Christmas Day, 1814. I’ve been following all the facebook chatter closely. I’ve loved that space at Oihi Bay for a number of years, even taking a horde of friends on a…
READ MOREAll I want for Christmas is my two front teeth … to sit in a pew stuffed with my kids, giving O Holy Night a real rip together. But it ain’t gonna happen this year. The divas line up to sing this song, don’t they? Go to youtube. They are all there. Mariah. Whitney. Celine.…
READ MOREIt was fun for Barby and I to go back ‘home’ to North India – and to introduce it to our friends of many years, Jan & Bill Dewar and Stephen & Bonnie Bond, whom we first met almost 30 years ago when we started in pastoral ministry in Invercargill. We find that there is…
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.