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I don’t usually rehash sermons on this blog but on this occasion I have found the four imperatives in 2 Timothy 2.1-7 to be so compelling – particularly as I work away at the interface between the Post-Christian West (P-CW) and Post-Western Christianity (P-WC)… “be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus” (2.1)…
READ MOREVolume Two is subtitled “training in the exercise of power” – and that is exactly what the book covers. Volume One was about locating the source of freedom as a leader and Volume Two moves on to articulate what it means to be a leader – and it is about power. Simon Walker opens with…
READ MOREIn recent months I have been discovering a treasure… Back in 1997, in the months leading up to taking on the principalship at Carey, God reassured me in His call through a (secular!) book called The Leadership Challenge (Kouzes and Posner). Its impact on me was enormous. Now in the months after finishing as Principal…
READ MOREAs a way of celebrating my fiftieth birthday I invited a bunch of friends to go with me on a pilgrimage to Marsden Cross in the Bay of Islands – the site of the first preaching of the gospel in Aotearoa-New Zealand. Along the way we stopped at various places where I told a little…
READ MOREI am on my way home after a ‘listening’ visit with Langham, as distinct from the usual ‘training’ trip, to East Africa and North India. The idea is to absorb the conversations of key people and then to participate in decisions which can progress the work the next stage. In East Africa, the Langham Preaching…
READ MORE[NB – I have added now the suggestions of readers to create my final ten selections] I guess you know the movie The Bucket List. A couple of old guys make a list of things they’d love to do before they kick-the-bucket and off they go and do them. I guess you’ve seen the big…
READ MOREWhile on the subject of major influences in my life… Dave and Angie Andrews (based now in Brisbane) came to live with us in New Delhi when I was barely a teenager. They view my parents as kinda like surrogate parents so I guess that makes them kinda like surrogate siblings – and they’ve been…
READ MOREIt is the first of September. Spring has sprung. The daffs are up. The lambs are out. And the magazine for the alumni of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (TEDS) arrived in the mail… It is a particularly good issue. As I read it through I find myself saying to my daughter Bethany, “You know my…
READ MOREOne of the major irritants for me in the training of preachers is the dependence people can develop on books and websites for their illustrations. “Omnibus volumes (and websites) of sermon anecdotes are the last refuge of a bankrupt intelligence.” They sound so second-hand, so predigested, so stale… We tend to walk past our best…
READ MOREThe ‘theology of the word’ is not where it needs to be today. Intimidated as we are by image and event, music and symbol, entertainment and short attention spans, and goodness only knows what else – we tend to lose our convictions about the Word of God and our appetite for it drains away as…
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.