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Today I am a grumpy and gloomy sports fan. In a matter of days the transcendent Derrick Rose of the Chicago Bulls has gone down with a season-ending, maybe even career-slowing, knee injury … and then, horror of horrors, New Zealand Cricket has let John Wright walk away from being the coach of the national…
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’m confronting my fears. Like so many preachers I have done my little series on the seven churches in Revelation (ch 2-3), but never have I worked right through the rest of the book. I could use the excuse that my time as a preaching pastor was just five years and I couldn’t cover every…
READ MOREOnce upon a time the telephone would ring and either we would ignore it, or we’d encourage people to leave a message to which we’d give our attention at a later time. Why?! Because the people with whom we were sitting face-to-face took precedence – every time, every single time. It was seen as a…
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 MOREIn the recent NZ vs SA cricket series, two of the great all-rounders in the modern game were on show: Jacques Kallis and Daniel Vettori. But how do you measure what it means to be a great all-rounder? A simple little formula works well: take the difference between their batting average and their bowling average. One…
READ MOREBarby (my wife) was speaking with Gwennie (my mum)… The subject was parenting. It is interesting how both our sets of parents have always been reluctant to talk about the secret of parenting. They’d run a mile before taking a seminar on the subject. I guess they feel the task is never over and that…
READ MORE‘The first task of leadership is to say thank you’. I could take you to the very place where a mentor said that to me. I took it to heart. Saying thank-you, with sincerity and frequency and creativity, became one of the first principles of leadership for me. I found it overlapped neatly with a…
READ MOREI was fascinated by this article on cricinfo.com this morning. It reviews a new book by Greg Chappell where he criticises the Indian cricket team for its performance on the recent tour of Australia. In less than a day it has collected 245 comments and 652 ‘likes’ on facebook. I will neither read the former nor do the…
READ MOREIt seems that someone has clicked ‘refresh’ on colonialism. As I walked down Nathan Rd in Kowloon (Hong Kong) I lifted my eyes to the billboards (‘where does my help come from?’, I am tempted to add) filling the horizon and reckoned that 19 out of 20 were adorned with white and western images of…
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.