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 […]
I’ve been reflecting on sin recently. A number of things have made me ponder the subject: 1. Preparing for last Sunday with Jesus’ diagnosis of the world as evil. 2. Writing up my notes on Paul Tripp’s book A Dangerous Calling. This is his book on the nature of pastoral ministry and it is painfully […]
On Sunday morning we faced up to a painful diagnosis- Jesus says that what the world does is evil (John 7:7). You can listen to the sermon here. It is not something that he says just once. I noted Graham Beynon’s comment based on Matthew 7:11- “We think of ourselves as basically good people who […]
Don Carson has written a helpful chapter on the subject of church and state in his book Christ and Culture Revisited. He refers to the “rich complexity of biblical norms.” In other words- this is not a straightforward issue. The fact that God is creator of the world indicates that His values and priorities cannot […]
The case against strong Christian intervention- or the reasons why you may not want to sign the latest petition- in the non-Christian state need to be heard. There is a danger that we simply assume that it is the right thing to do. Groups such as the Christian Institute and Christian Concern make the case […]
In my first post I noted the differing reactions amongst evangelicals to the issue of whether Christians should seek to argue for biblical ethics to be put into national legislation. In this post I want to argue for an “interventionist” position- or, to put it another way, provide reasons for signing the Coalition for Marriage […]
On July 17th this year, the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act became law. It is now legal in this country for two people of the same gender to marry. Bible believing Christians obviously have a problem with that- God’s pattern for marriage revealed in creation is between a man and a woman. So how should […]
Last weekend saw our first services as a church back in St.Edward’s School Chapel and Summertown Hall in order to create space for our building project. I missed them as I was having a thoroughly enjoyable time with Magdalen Road Church on their weekend away. It was lovely to see the south coast again (although […]