I hadn’t intended to write anything over the Christmas period. However my family (including nephew and niece) are currently out visiting fish (pet ones apparently rather than things you eat) so I thought I would jot down a brief thought. Each year at Woody Road we have a testimony evening on the final Sunday evening […]
As last year, I’m afraid that anybody looking for Christmas thoughts on the blog will be disappointed. That’s not just because of my “Bah-humbug” spirit but more because I have precious few thoughts at the best of times and I’m afraid any interesting thoughts on Christmas will need to be saved for the four sermons […]
Just over a year ago I wrote a series of posts on the subject of singleness and promised a review of Barry Danylak’s book Redeeming Singleness. It is described as giving a biblical theology of singleness. Let me be honest: it is not the easiest read in the world. There are reasons why it has […]
I had a very encouraging time last weekend. I was down in Kent teaching around eighty people for Oak Hall’s Unlocking the Bible weekend. Oak Hall does a terrific job of providing fellowship and teaching to Christians- especially a number who were there from smaller or struggling churches. A number of things excited me- meeting […]
Regulars to Woody Road will know that each year we have a vision statement. We’ve found it a useful way of spending some concentrated time thinking about one aspect of what God wants us to be. Often it is easy as we preach through books of the Bible, which is our normal pattern, to look […]
Last week David, Janet and I made the trek to Norfolk for the FIEC Leaders’ Conference. Leaving aside the somewhat surreal (and mildly enjoyable!) experience of staying in something akin to Butlins c.1950s complete with Christmas decorations this was a very good time- I’m grateful to the church for the opportunity of being there. As […]
We continued our series on work last Sunday evening when I contributed to the general cheerfulness of humanity by preaching on Ecclesiastes. Should you be feeling unduly happy at the moment you can bring yourself down to earth by listening to the sermon here. Some of the material in the sermon (the surveys from Oxford […]
Last week I spent 24 hours with three friends who are pastors of different churches- Speke Baptist Church (just outside Liverpool), Avenue Community Church (in Leicester) and Hockliffe Street Baptist Church (in Leighton Buzzard). We meet up like this three times a year. We’ve known each other for a while now so our times are […]
We started our series on work last night with David helpfully opening up Genesis 1-3 for us. I was particularly pleased with how the discussion panel worked afterwards with plenty of godly wisdom being brought out in response to the sermon. When I was putting the series together in the summer I read Tim Keller’s […]
This coming Sunday evening we start something different at Woody Road. We are beginning a four week topical series on the theme of work. If I’m honest I’m inherently suspicious of topical series and have tended to resist calls for them- God did not, after all, inspire the Bible to be written topically. So I […]