Luke mentions bread on ten occasions in his gospel (using the word 15 times). While we can’t hang too much on the numbers, and in that count I’ve included the word artos but ignored words like zyme (leaven), I think it might be indicative that Luke has a theology of bread. It’s interesting—to me, at least—that Luke never mentions wine, using the phrase ‘fruit of the vine,’ but mentions bread often. Obviously, Luke is talking about wine at the Last Supper, but assuming that word choices are careful and deliberate acts of artistry, I feel like that choice is indicative of something.

In a previous post, I outlined the way Luke uses Psalm 118 through his gospel. Most of that is collected in the last week of his life. Luke does something similar with Psalm 110, all of which is also located in that last week, in and around the Temple. Jesus directly quotes from Psalm 110 twice; following three tests that Jesus faces in the temple he turns a question back on his questioners by asking them the meaning of Psalm 110.1 (Luke 20.41–44). If David called the Christ Lord, how can he be his son?

Luke’s gospel is full of references to the Psalms. In Jesus’ thesis statement for hermeneutical endeavour in Luke 24 he speaks of Moses and the Prophets, a typical Hebrew form of speaking, meaning the Old Testament. A few verses later when meeting with his disciples he says that Moses, the Prophets, and the Psalms testify that he would die and on the third day rise. The addition of the Psalms is unusual, drawing them out for special attention. There’s lots we could consider there, but we should at least notice that Luke loves the Psalms.

Trees are one of the Bible’s major symbols. We know that because the cross is described as a tree and the Bible is bookended by trees. If we follow G. K. Beale in thinking that the bookends of the story are important in understanding that story, then Eden and the New Jerusalem are ever before our eyes when reading the Bible. Both are Temples, copies in different ways of the heavenly Temple. The latter is a glorified, expanded, mature version of the former. That means that whenever we encounter temples, trees, mountains, rivers, snakes, seas, fruit or food more widely, we read it in a context of its immediate story but also in a context of the much wider biblical narrative that flows from Eden to New Jerusalem.

The church is facing a number of issues right now. Here in the UK the ongoing crisis of leadership in the wake of numerous high-profile cases of Pastors abusing their positions might be the most obvious. I’ve written about another crisis, of discipleship, where the average Christian’s faith doesn’t touch the sides of their life. Christians don’t know the basics of the faith, they don’t think ‘Christianly,’ and their lives are largely indistinguishable from those of their work colleagues. Liberalism reigns supreme. Our wider culture is also in crisis, a host of them, but the one I’ve touched on most is what John Vervaeke first named ‘The Meaning Crisis,’ which is in essence what happens to a culture when it stops running on the Christian metanarrative: …

Have you ever noticed that in Genesis chapter one, the days are the wrong way around? When I say the wrong way around, I mean backwards to what we expect, and before you rush off to compare the order of creation and question whether it means anything meaningful that the sun and moon come so late (it does, but that’s not our topic today), look at each day. They’re backwards. “And there was evening and there was morning, the first day” and each day thereafter. Evening, then morning. That’s backwards. We all know that days start in the morning, unless we’re pedantic enough to insist that they start in the middle of night.

Getting your head around the sacrificial system in the Old Testament can be difficult. Here’s my attempt to briefly summarise the various sacrifices. I’ve been helped by Leithart’s summaries in In Earth as it is in Heaven in this, but I haven’t followed him entirely (mistakes mine etc!). Tribute Offering The first sacrifices we find are the minchah or tribute offering, offered by Cain and Abel in Genesis 4. This is homage from an inferior to a superior, which is an appropriate response from us to God. We assume that Cain and Abel hoped that their sacrifice would, in some fashion, pass beyond the fiery sword at Eden’s gate into the presence of God.

There’s this strange moment in Noah’s life where he gets drunk, falls down naked, his son Ham sees him naked, and then he curses Ham. It leads to the frequent accusation that Noah was a drunkard, which at best might be true but is missing the wood for the trees. You can read the story in Genesis 9. Is Noah just an angry drunk? What did Ham do wrong? It’s also been the cause of much racist nonsense, with the curse of Ham linked to theories where a particular ‘race’ (in the modern sense rather than the Biblical one) are cursed because of their descent from Ham.

When trying to describe sin and how it lives and corrupts our hearts, people often come up with “all sin is” statements. “All sin is idolatry” is a common one. The other day I said to a friend, “all sin is taking, isn’t it.” The very next day I found myself saying to someone else, “all sin is lying, I guess.” So, I’m wildly inconsistent, but I noticed myself doing it and wondered—as that’s three of the ten commandments, can we make similar statements for each of them?. I think you can, and I think all those statements have the benefit of being true.

Ok, mildly clickbait title, the more accurate question is “why has church planting slowed among the new churches, in the UK.” The majority of the church-planting movement I’m in (Commission, part of Newfrontiers) is based in India. They plant churches, despite being openly persecuted in some states, with rapidity. I’m told that around the world Commission plants approximately one church a week. In the UK, however, it’s infrequent. My church has just sent a family to plant a church in the north of Portugal, so we haven’t stopped, but generally speaking the pace is much slower.

In a previous post I quipped that the Bible was written by Jesus, to Jesus, and about Jesus. It’s a neat bit of rhetoric but needs some unpacking to communicate clearly. It’s possible to get the wrong end of this. The Bible is written by Jesus Let’s start with what I’m not saying. I am not claiming that the incarnate second person of the Trinity sat with a pen and wrote the New Testament. That is ludicrous, and I am making the same claim about the New as the Old so would need the Old Testament to be much younger than it in fact is.

There’s a series of important questions around what songs you sing on a Sunday: their theology and how well it coheres with the church’s, their singability by this particular congregation, song choices that best encourage and inspire expressions of praise, and what songs fit the moment or ‘stage’ of the morning you’ve reached. I’d like to explore something slightly different: the importance of singing ‘local’ songs. The Christian musical world in the UK was profoundly shaped by the British New Churches of the charismatic renewal. Graham Kendrick, Nathan Fellingham, and Stuart Townend (among many others) wrote songs—a few of which we still sing—that were sung around the new churches and then propagated through conferences and Bible weeks.

There’s a video of John Piper doing the rounds as I write; Piper offers some cautions for Biblical theology during a panel discussion. You can watch it here. Piper reflects on James Hamilton and others showing him connections all across the Psalter, and other parts of the Bible, that he’d never seen before. He’s delighted by that but cautions the audience that he doesn’t think him not having seen this before is a problem and that not everyone needs to do the wide cross-canon work that someone like Hamilton does.

I believe in eucharismatic church: word and spirit and sacrament church that takes seriously the history and theology of the church, believes in God’s action in all aspects of our gathered worship, and is devoted to reading the Bible three-dimensionally. Of course, not many—if any!—of these churches exist. I don’t lead one (yet), not least because change needs to be paced and taught well. These ideas mostly exist at the level of theory and need to be considered from several angles and tested in churches. Most of the theological work hasn’t been done, that will take time and resources.

Just before the Hebrews cross the Jordan, Joshua sends a second round of spies into Jericho. As best we can tell they don’t discover anything useful to the disposition of the troops during the upcoming siege—particularly because that disposition involves walking around the walls of the fort while blaring loudly on ram’s horns—but they do have a notably weird encounter with a woman called Rahab. Rahab is a prostitute. In a small semi-militarised fort like Jericho this means she runs a waystation or ‘inn,’ most likely the only place for anyone in Jericho is stay if they were visiting.

You are what you eat, said St Augustine. Well, he said ‘you become what you consume’ in the context of teaching on the Lord’s Supper. Nevertheless, the point is important. Consumption of the Supper has a formative effect into Christlikeness. The how and the why might be interesting, and I suspect Augustine and I part company somewhat in that explanation, but nevertheless the principle is vital. Marshall McLuhan famously said that we become what we behold. Paul says that’s its by beholding Jesus’ glory that we become like him (2 Corinthians 3).

I wrote a few months ago about the so-called ‘quiet revival,’ which I argued is neither quiet nor a revival, but perhaps evidence of a reaction to the meaning crisis, or to sound incredibly pretentious, a metamodern turn. I was more positive about the reaction to the meaning crisis than about the metamodern turn. The first is searching for solidity in a world that’s liquid. The second is vibes all the way down. Now, the Bible Society who published the original research and gave the phenomenon its name, have retracted it.

Forgive me, this post is moderately pretentious. I’m intrigued by the idea of summarising someone’s thought. Particularly for a thinker who has a ‘project’ (in the academic sense), there’s an interesting thought experiment about which book or essay is the quintessential summary of their thought. For C. S. Lewis it’s Till We Have Faces—and for people who know Lewis, that claim from me tells you a lot about how I understand Lewis’ thought, and others might disagree—for James K. A. Smith it’s Imagining the Kingdom; for James Jordan it’s…

One of the reasons we struggle to make good judgements about a given technology is that we assume that any good use justifies the technology as a whole. Because our basic assumption is that technologies are neutral—they aren’t—we think that if a good use can be seen then we should assume that difference between good and bad uses is the nature of the human heart and the intent of the user. I recently heard Matt Hosier teach a brief theology of technology. He outlined that the key question as he understood it is the tendency of the technology.

It was evening, it was morning, it was the eighth day. All was bright and new in a garden cradling a rich man’s tomb. Spices floated on the air. A gardener met a woman wandering and called her name. The first humans’ first scene replaying on the sixth of April, the year of our Lord thirty-three. John is at pains in his gospel for you to see that Jesus’ resurrection is a recapitulation of Eden’s garden.

This is a large topic that, as is the nature of blogs, I’m going to think out loud around the edge of. It’s common in Evangelical spaces to be told that you shouldn’t necessarily trust your emotions, instead we’re pointed to eternal truth found in the Bible. It’s common in more Charismatic spaces to be told to engage firmly with your emotions and that expressing them is important to God. Those statements aren’t contradictory, and the desire to suggest that we should be careful of immediately trusting our emotions is wise.

The same reason its always sunny on my birthday. Some of you might want to point to a particularly memorable Easter weekend when it was a washout, or it snowed, or that you live in a part of the world when Easter is not a springtime festival and so my claim makes no sense (whether because of course it isn’t sunny or because ‘weather’ is a foreign concept because it does the same thing every day).

I recently read Jayber Crow. This was my first Wendell Berry novel (I’ve read his essays previously). I think I’m supposed to now buy a straw hat and try to purchase a smallholding in rural Kentucky? It’s a superlative novel, powerfully evoking a sense of place and the character of a community. The story itself is moving and worth your time.

To celebrate that 1993rd anniversary of the Christ walking out the back of death, here's a poem I wrote during lockdown (I've shared it here before) about the wonder of the resurrection's 'bright surprise.' 05/04/33 A day of shadows, hope was kept at bayThe weary sun’s attempted upward riseakin to our heart’s toil to comprehendA sign above bare scoffed “The King of the Jews”

The charismatic gifts, whether we mean the dramatic ones like tongues, interpretation, prophecy, and healing, or the behind the scenes ones we could mistake for talent, like administration, are a vital part of church life. The British New Church movement, of which my own reformed charismatic corner is a part, has had an enormous impact on the British church scene. This is sometimes overclaimed, jeans in church probably had more to do with the culture of the 1980s than it did Newfrontiers, but it cannot be denied that the various new church movements of the so-called second wave of the Spirit from the 1960s onwards have ‘changed the face of Christianity in this nation’ as the old often quoted prophecy declared.

When you first touch biblical languages one of the first things you learn is that words have a semantic domain. What that means, in the simplest terms, is that a given word means different things in different contexts; you look up a word in a lexicon and that doesn’t mean it carries all of those meanings you find into each occasion you find that word in a sentence.

It is of course fair that just because something rhymes doesn’t make it true, and that old adages also aren’t necessarily true just because they’re oft repeated. It’s also true that not everyone is going to be a hundred book a year plus person; in fact, very few people are going to be in that category. We live in a moment where if you read 10-12 books a year, slightly less than one a month, you are one of the biggest readers in the world.

Obvious enough, except we’re increasingly wired to treat it like one. Technologies change the boundaries of what is possible for us and they effect the frame of how we approach the world. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If you also have screwdrivers, you’re able to distinguish the difference between screws and nails. You’re still going to look at a bolt and decide you hit it with a hammer.

The Bible is dominated by stories and symbols. Those symbols are embedded in story, they don’t exist on their own, but they gain their meaning through the procession of the narrative of the cosmos. We read their meaning into them because of story. As an aside, I wonder if this means that an eschatological ontology trumps a sacramental one…

As I write the recent revelations about Shawn Bolz—the Bethel church associated ‘Prophet’ who engaged in serial sexual misconduct and deliberately researched people so he could ‘accurately’ prophesy into their lives—are doing the rounds. I’m a charismatic, I think the gift of prophecy continues and should be eagerly sought (1 Corinthians 14). I wasn’t familiar with Bolz before these revelations, I would generally see what Bethel put out as at absolutely the opposite end of the charismatic spectrum to my own world, but it still has plenty of influence on some I know.

Between Christmas and New Year a bunch of churches cancel church. You’ll often see the same behaviour on August Bank Holiday weekend too. Don’t. No, let me be more nuanced. It is, for example, entirely understandable that many church plants cannot maintain the momentum and volunteer strength required to run a Sunday at particular times of year. If you live in the sort of place that people leave at holiday times then in plants it can be particularly challenging.

In January, we diet. That’s the sense you’ll get if you talk to the average person on the street. We overindulged at Christmas, but that’s long over, now we sit in the drab darkness trying to force ourselves to eat healthy things, go to the gym, or pound the pavement in the lashing rain. The story we’re told is: feasting is fun, but you have to pay for it afterwards.

The internet has a strange effect on us. Many people, myself included, have the ability to gain an ‘audience’ for something creative that they do—this writing, in my case—in a way can warp your sense of yourself and what it is that you’re actually doing. If you pull some reasonable numbers in terms of how many people read you, then that can exacerbate the effect.

An old Pastor of mine used to say that when someone spoke in tongues in a church meeting, it was like a spiritual hand grenade being rolled into the room. He was a military man, an ex-Para, so it sounded less odd from him than it does from me: a man who has only seen grenades in museums. His point, though grandiose, was a good one.

I’m towards the end (he says, hopefully) of a research degree. It’s Masters level rather than a terminal degree, but nevertheless requires true academic research. I’ve found adapting to it an uphill struggle. Most of the forms of writing I’ve trained myself in—the sermon, the blog post, and the article—are foreign to the academic world. I was told early on by my supervisor that ‘I write like a Pastor.’ He should know, I used to be his Pastor, a large part of the reason I ended up doing this programme with him.

I’ve argued at some length, that we need institutions to unite us in UK evangelicalism. What we have may well serve good purposes, but it isn’t managing to unite us, and they aren’t forming us well. There are two, contradictory, impulses to consider here. First, institutions, as Yuval Levin argues, mould us. This can very much cut both ways but can be a positive effect.

I’ve been in Alton now for around 9 months (as I write), having moved here to take a full-time role on staff at Harvest Church as part of the current team leader’s transition plan. I’ll be taking over as eldership team leader soon (Ed—yesterday, as it panned out!). Here are a few scattered thoughts reflecting on my experience so far.

It’s common in evangelical circles for people to talk about ‘going to heaven when they die.’ It’s common in slightly different evangelical circles to politely scoff at that phrase and remind people that the great hope of the Christian faith is the resurrection of the body. The scoffing isn’t particularly helpful, neither is NT Wright’s take on all of this as though he discovered something unique in the Bible rather than calling for people to return to the faith once for all delivered to the saints.

I suspect most of my readers won’t need convincing that ‘leaders are readers’ and that Pastors, whether paid or not, should be devoting some of their time to reading books that encourage their souls and to books that sharpen their minds. Evidently, those who are paid so that they don’t have to work should be devoting more of their time to reading than those who do have to work jobs in order to provide for their households.

My third and final Bible study question is probably the most mundane. Everyone asks this in our Bible studies. I imagine my readers here are convinced, as are most participants in a Bible study, that the Bible should in some fashion change us and will have practical applications to us or to the world around us. The only point I’d like to make in this post is why I deliberately leave it to last.

The second question I ask when studying the Bible with others, is ‘Where’s Jesus?’ By this time, we’ve spent some time discussing what is strange about the text in question. We’ve got under the skin of it a bit and are trying to face it on its own terms. We have not applied it, discussed its relevance for us, or anything similar; we’ve deliberately kept exploring the text for some time.

In ministry ‘success criteria’ matter. On the face of it that sounds like business speak, exactly the sort of thing I am critical of creeping into pastoral work. Except I’m not sure that’s it. Practically speaking, to do something well you need to know how you are going to assess it afterwards. I’ve noticed in multiple churches that when we review things we review them against a whole range of unvoiced criteria.

When I lead a Bible study, I invariably ask the same three questions every time. The first is simply ‘what’s weird?’ Occasionally, depending on the group, the text, and how easy it is for them to follow, I might start with a fourth: ‘what’s going on?’ This is the basic comprehension question, which does sometimes need to be asked. When leading a Bible study with teenagers I might drop this first question altogether and spend longer on the comprehension.

It’s Epiphany today, Christmas is over, the new year doesn’t start today but it’s as good a day as any for reflecting on the last twelve months. It’s become my tradition to celebrate the anniversary of nuakh with a review of the previous year of reading and writing on Epiphany. I've played with the usual format, but right at the top I’d like to say thank you for reading, sharing, and supporting my work.

Advent is a time for silence. Or, to put it a little better, Advent is a time for facing up to the silence of God. We don’t like to admit it. This is the time of year for declaring the Emmanuel—that God is with us—and for saying that God is the one who steps into our world and our worlds to ring the changes, to announce the kingdom.

I recently had the joy of having a chat with Jez Field of New Ground's Life and Leadership podcast about all things 'eucharismatic.' You can, if you so desire, listen to it here below or at your podcast venue of choice. Our conversation ranged all over the place, and there were many aspects of being 'eucharismatic' that we didn't touch on, but hopefully it's of interest to readers of…

In the western liturgical traditions, the last seven days of advent include singing these seven chants—they would be largely unknown to churches like mine whose hymnody owes more to Hillsong than ancient Latin verse. Except, I bet you recognise them. They’re the content of the only advent hymn most of us know, O Come, O Come, Emmanuel. They’re sung in reverse order, but spell out an acrostic (in Latin, so you’d never notice) of…

Nietzsche attacked Christianity with all the strength his mind and powerful prose could summon up. His hatred for Christians was sourced in part because he considered the faith to be a religion for the weak and a religion that idolised and encouraged weakness. For Nietzsche the way of Jesus propagated what he called ‘slave morality’ and stopped humanity rising to reach our potential.

This is a time full of feasting. Everywhere you go it seems you’re offered a plate of mince pies or piece of stollen, perhaps with a glass of mulled wine. You can’t escape it—biscuits and coffee at church become wine and cake week after week. Or at least that’s normal in the UK, I’m told this is less normal in North America and can only conclude it’s because you hate Christmas, what else could it be?

You’d be forgiven for thinking I was speaking of January, named after the Roman god Janus who had two faces to look forwards and backwards in the year. Rather, Advent—the first season of the Christian year—has two faces. One face is a face of joy, the face we associate with our Christmas traditions, with chocolate and feasting. From this mouth Advent bids to us “