3 phrases to live by – nuakh
I currently have three quotes on the wall in my study at the church building. I suspect that this will change with time, but each phrase is a reminder to me and I hope will shape my ministry over t…| nuakh
If you want to mature, you’re going to have to suffer. Actually, that’s not quite right. You are going to suffer, that’s the nature of life under the sun. Some of that will be petty, some of it will be serious, and (heaven-forfend) some of it will be so psychologically scarring that you’ll be getting… Continue reading Maturity Will Hurt→| nuakh
I love to read. That’s probably not a big surprise, it’s an unusual writer who doesn’t. I read more than most—honestly the stats on how much the average person reads make me sad. This YouGov survey has around three quarters of respondents saying they read a book last year, but the median number of books read a… Continue reading How to Read Books→| nuakh
I’ve argued elsewhere that the Sunday gathering is for worship, but as the priests gather in the Temple they find that the Lord comes to them. The occasion is worship, but we encounter God as he comes to us. As one of the four ‘events’ when God meets us as we worship him, Baptism is part of… Continue reading On Baptism→| nuakh
The Church isn’t in a hurry. Neither should Christians be. You can apply this in so many directions in our hurried world, but I’d like to think about our questions. Questions require time. Fast answers are usually trite ones. Some intellectual curiosities can be settled quickly by a swift Google, but real questions can’t be.… Continue reading Slow down→| nuakh
Evangelicals love magic. On the face of it that doesn’t sound like a true statement, perhaps you remember the mild panic over Harry Potter in the early 2000s, or the much bigger panic over Dungeons and Dragons in the eighties—witchcraft remains something we are inherently nervous about, sometimes leading to absurd extremes. Which is true… Continue reading Magical Thinking→| nuakh
“He’s no longer in the land of the living,” we say with great solemnity as we pronounce that our friend has fallen asleep on the sofa. It’s a phrase we use fairly commonly, either to mean prosaically, “they’re dead”—which is actually uncommon because we prefer cleaner euphemisms that hide the reality entirely—or to refer to… Continue reading What is the ‘Land of the Living?’→| nuakh
Sounds paradoxical, doesn’t it? We think we know that to welcome is the very opposite of having a wall up. We’re wrong. Ivan Illich taught that the welcome of hospitality requires a threshold. By definition, we need to move over a threshold in order to be welcomed. If there is no threshold to move over, I can’t welcome… Continue reading Put up walls so you can welcome→| nuakh
Churches should embrace the life of God in the Spirit in all its fullness. That means both charismatic spiritual life and the sacramental life of the gathered church. ‘Eucharismatic’ is a term coined by Andrew Wilson in his excellent book Spirit and Sacrament, a portmanteau of eucharistic and charismatic. His book lays out his thesis, but… Continue reading Being Eucharismatic→| nuakh
Once a day dawned dark, the clouds hanging limp like wisps of smoke that clog the lungs after a fire has burned beyond its life. Tear-stained faces watched a man displayed, his torn body nailed to a tree torn from the ground and weeping over its foul fate. His face contorted with pain as his… Continue reading Last Words→| nuakh
I currently have three quotes on the wall in my study at the church building. I suspect that this will change with time, but each phrase is a reminder to me and I hope will shape my ministry over t…| nuakh
The Bible exists in a symbolic world where particular images are common: trees, tables, bread and wine, mountains, the sea and its denizens, the creation week, and many more. These have specific me…| nuakh
Or, to put the question more accurately, why did Sunday become the Lord’s Day rather than Christians continuing to keep the Sabbath? There is some debate in the Christian tradition about whether we…| nuakh
Worship has three, or maybe five, dynamic directions. There is a gift and receipt dynamic to it. It looks a little bit like this: Worship goes up, it goes out, or sideways, and it goes in. What I m…| nuakh
Someone asked me this a while back and I’ve been chewing on a substantive answer, that clicked for me in conversation the other day. We could phrase it another way: ‘why is the Holy Spirit not a ‘s…| nuakh
Especially that thing that you’re sure it doesn’t. In John’s prologue we’re told that ‘all things’ were made through Jesus, and that there is nothing that has been made that was made without him. W…| nuakh
Lots of churches run leadership development programmes of one sort or another, but is that a good idea? I used to operate graduate development programmes for Rolls-Royce, while there I was involved…| nuakh
The church needs doctors, no not the kind you go and see if you’re unwell, the original kind. It is worth remembering that the medical profession stole the title of ‘doctor’—which literally means ‘…| nuakh
What is discipleship? This is one of those perennial questions that get’s thrown around by those in some sort of ministry. We’re all in favour, and we’re very happy to call a lot of things ‘discipl…| nuakh
The traditional Protestant answer to the question “what makes a church” is the preaching of the Word and the Sacraments. Most Protestant denominations have adhered to it to some extent or other, th…| nuakh
Evangelicals love magic. On the face of it that doesn’t sound like a true statement, perhaps you remember the mild panic over Harry Potter in the early 2000s, or the much bigger panic over Dungeons…| nuakh
What do you do when you need to cook for 30 people for a Sunday lunch? In our house, you get the cauldron out. Before you start reading out Macbeth and building a pyre, it’s a large steel preservin…| nuakh
Two years ago, you might have approached the pink house with its purple garage door and knocked wondering at the riot of colour you would have been greeted with inside. Instead, as you open the doo…| nuakh
God is a speaking God. It’s how he acts, how he creates, how he reveals himself. Throughout the Bible, God reveals truth and creates by speaking truth. As Glen Scrivener says, God is an external pr…| nuakh
Christian Formation III If we’re formed by what we think, what we feel, and what we do—as I’ve argued we are—how does being formed by what we think work? You do actually need to learn the faith. We…| nuakh
The ‘slippery slope’ is considered a logical fallacy. If I argue against your desire to do one thing because it will inevitably lead to another then I’m engaging in this fallacy. If you go and read…| nuakh
Christian Formation II If we’re formed by what we think, what we feel, and what we do—as I’ve argued we are—how does being formed by what we do work? I think there are two components to this: commu…| nuakh
Men don’t know how to be friends anymore. Have you noticed? Ancient literature expected men to have close friends, who could bitterly betray them if they proved false and be the close loves of thei…| nuakh
I’ve highlighted what I consider to be a discipleship crisis, where we separate discipleship from ‘life’ and we struggle to live Christianly. I’ve then tried to outline five reasons why our faith h…| nuakh
In Mark chapter 10 we encounter a famous story about a rich young ruler who thinks he keeps the commandments but find Jesus’ demand that he leave behind his wealth to follow him burdensome. Hidden …| nuakh
Why is our Faith Shallow V Matthew Lee Anderson says that our culture is in a crisis of attention. I think we all know this, even if we haven’t used this language. Have you noticed that it’s increa…| nuakh
Dust hung in the air. My skin was rough from living in this house for so long. The taste thick at the back of my mouth, though I was getting used to it. Somehow that was the scary bit. It was brick…| nuakh
Why our faith is shallow IV If people agree with my concerns about what I’m calling the discipleship crisis, it’s fairly common that they finger our preaching as the culprit. I think there’s someth…| nuakh
The pandemic has damaged our friendships. There was a recent Atlantic Op Ed that opined that all but the closest friendships we might have are slipping away. But things were broken before that, bac…| nuakh
This is one of those questions that no one other than me was asking. But here’s my apophatic answer. Rest is not relaxation. Repeat: Rest is not relaxation. It has become trendy in the evange…| nuakh
The bright spring day of April’s heatwave lasted for about five months, a single timeless moment. We were locked down due to Covid-19 from March through to June, and then with schools closed until …| nuakh
Men don’t know how to be friends anymore. Have you noticed? Ancient literature expected men to have close friends, who could bitterly betray them if they proved false and be the close loves of thei…| nuakh
Thank you for considering supporting my writing. Here are some of the various ways you can do so. Become a Patron Sign up to the Patreon and give monthly. Leave a tip If you can’t give monthl…| nuakh
Most of us think we know, which is fine, and we think it’s obvious, which could be fine, and we think that everyone else agrees with us because it’s obvious. Which is not true. You ask the average …| nuakh
I am convinced that every word of the Bible is about Jesus. The whole book, in all its several thousand years of composition history and score of different authors is a unified whole: it tells a si…| nuakh
Why is our faith shallow part I I’ve argued that we have a discipleship crisis, and outlined some of what I mean by that. I intend to take a few posts exploring why that might be. There are, I thin…| nuakh
What does our discipleship crisis look like? Our lives look the same as our neighbours and they shouldn’t. We don’t all have to be radical, but we do need a small number of radicals among us to hel…| nuakh
Over the Summer, on Mondays, I’ll be reposting some of my favourite posts from nuakh. This post explores how Christians turn everything that should be an ‘instrument’ into a ‘devi…| nuakh
To be a disciple is to be a learner or an apprentice. Discipleship isn’t a ‘thing’ that we sometimes do. Discipleship—or ‘followership’—is life. I’ve claimed the UK church is in a discipleshi…| nuakh
Over the Summer, on Mondays, I’ll be reposting some of my favourite posts from nuakh. This post explores why Adam names the woman Eve in Genesis 3. In Genesis chapter 3, after the events that…| nuakh
We are in a discipleship crisis. Caused, perhaps, by the many other crises in the air, but here in the UK our faith is shallow. To be more precise: our churches are not forming us into deep and ric…| nuakh
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 ob…| nuakh
The most undertrained group in churches are elders. Most church elders are not on staff at their churches. That’s not just thinking about very small churches that can’t pay one of their elders, but…| nuakh
