I feel very privileged- I often get the chance to spend time with Christians who are doing a fantastic job. I think of friends I visited last week- doing tremendous work in a tricky church situation at great personal cost. Other faces come to mind- those who persevere through painful temptations or suffering, those who […]
Last Sunday evening we held a Guest Event looking at the perennial question- “Why does a loving God allow suffering?” You can listen to my talk plus a helpful interview with Helen here. I was conscious that the talk didn’t include much Bible- and rather a lot of CS Lewis! In preparation I had worked […]
We are eagerly anticipating the re-opening of our building on Sunday. Much work has been done and we are looking forward to meeting in a building that is more accessible and open to the community around us. There are various things I would love local people to be able to see. But one of the […]
It has been a particularly busy couple of months which somewhat explains my silence on here. I am aware that I’ve left Hudson Taylor in the middle of his life- and I plan to return to him soon. But I was conscious a couple of weeks ago at having been somewhat grumpy and grouchy in […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]