3 preaching rules – nuakh
I have 3 rules for preaching; I thought I’d share them with you. These are my first ports of call for assessing my own or someone else’s preaching. There is lots more that could be said and fed bac…| nuakh
When God floods the earth in the days of Noah it’s like he turns the clock back on everything that’s happened in the last six chapters of Genesis, and the world reverts to Genesis 1. Before God created and ordered over seven days, the world was water. In Noah’s flood he unmakes and disorders by… Continue reading Decreation→| nuakh
You carry in your pocket a whole world. That hand-sized brick of black glass is a window to anything and everything that there is. You could find out what is known publicly about anyone you meet. You could learn from someone else how they think you should complete any tasks you’re about to do. You… Continue reading The World in your Pocket→| nuakh
What do we mean by ‘forgiveness’? If you’re meant to forgive someone, what does this actually mean? I fear that a lot of the ways we talk about forgiveness in the church are slightly out of step with how the Bible talks about forgiveness. While a thorough exegesis of the relevant passages would be helpful,… Continue reading 3 Kinds of Forgiveness→| nuakh
How do we engage young people in the faith? What can we do to keep them in the church? What will they be interested in and how can we use that to tell them about Jesus? How can we keep their attention? We could throw their phones in the sea. Or, if that’s off the… Continue reading Give them Meat→| nuakh
We read the Bible in two directions, horizontally and vertically. Or, because I really like the word, we read the Bible orthogonally. I’m using some of the language here of Michael Niebauer, who argues for these two angles of reading, horizontal and vertical. I depart from him in the below to some extent, but I’m… Continue reading Orthogonal Reading→| nuakh
Spurgeon’s College has recently closed with immediate effect as its financial situation became untenable. This raises some interesting questions, even for those of us in movements in the UK that rarely use residential training settings. Spurgeon’s had recently become a university, with its own degree awarding powers. It was the only independent evangelical Bible College… Continue reading Training for Ministry→| nuakh
What do we do when those who have helped our theological development take a step in a direction that really concerns us? As I write, there’s just been a bruhaha on X about John Mark Comer changing his mind away from penal substitutionary atonement. To be precise, though little of the storm has been, he… Continue reading When Guides Fall→| nuakh
I have 3 rules for preaching; I thought I’d share them with you. These are my first ports of call for assessing my own or someone else’s preaching. There is lots more that could be said and fed back on, but this is the centre of what I think we should be aiming for in… Continue reading 3 preaching rules→| nuakh
We live in a deeply connected world. There are some signs that geopolitically that might be changing, but individually it’s as true as ever. The distraction devices in our pockets keep us connected to each other, people with our specific interests, what’s going on in the world, things somewhere we should be anxious about that… Continue reading Practising Disconnection→| nuakh
Paul in 1 Corinthians 14 is keen to express to the Corinthians that worship should be orderly. Yes, you can have a flow of charismatic life with everyone bringing their prayer, tongue, Bible reading, prophecy, and the rest, but you must also have some order. At the very least you need to take it in… Continue reading Order and the Charismatic→| nuakh
I have 3 rules for preaching; I thought I’d share them with you. These are my first ports of call for assessing my own or someone else’s preaching. There is lots more that could be said and fed bac…| nuakh
There is no one who is higher than the Lord Jesus. He is Yahweh, God of gods, King of kings, Lord of lords. He is seated on the throne in the heavenly temple and the train of his robe fills the pla…| nuakh
I’ll give you, it’s not the best question. We all intrinsically know what books are and how they work, it’s not a complex technology. A couple of boards with some paper glued or sewn between, right…| nuakh
It’s something of a truism that we’re formed by everything around us. It’s common for people to point out that in the average church you’ve got at best two hours of people’s time a week to use to f…| nuakh
I’ve been reading Charles Taylor’s famous magnum opus, A Secular Age. It’s a monumental achievement that I’ve been chewing over slowly for approaching a year now, though its sheer scope and breadth…| 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
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
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
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
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
