Guarding God’s Reputation…
Have you ever sat through a sermon or a talk and heard the speaker express a view about God that made you think, “Well that makes God sound petty and small”? Usually the speaker means well, but has not thought deeply. An advantage of being 65 and of having preached my first sermon when I was 15 is that I now have half a century of sermon “thou shalt not’s” to sift through. In their own way they each say something about what the speaker thought about God, or perhaps didn’t think, because sometimes we make God sound so very mean and so very trivial. One that...
Read MoreWhen you say “Pastor”: What Images of Clergy tell us…
Don’t know if you have ever thought about the collective nouns for various professions. Some are perceptive, others tongue in cheek. Apparently one should speak of a “rash of dermatologists”, a “shower of meteorologists”, and a “boast of barristers”. When it comes to clergy the best I could find was “a rumble of clergy” – most were less flattering. What do you think of when you hear the word “pastor”, or “priest”, or “minister”, or “clergy”? The images that spring to mind are likely to...
Read MoreQuotable: Rachel Held Evans – Searching for Sunday
Rachel Held Evans 2015 book Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving and Finding the Church is well worth the read. As the sub title suggests, it is a book about loving, leaving and finding the church – and tells of a journey well worth pondering. Each chapter starts with a quote from a noteworthy figure, or a verse from the Bible. Here are a few of these quotes… I prefer a church which is bruised, hurting and dirty because it has been out in the streets, rather than a church which is unhealthy from being confined and from clinging to its own security… More than by fear of...
Read MoreReflections on 12 weeks in the UK…
I’m writing this while sitting in the Qantas lounge in London. Having heard that the flight back to Perth has been delayed 2 hours (which as they initially said it would be 3, is actually good news), I thought it better to jot down some of my thoughts from the time away, than to spend the time making constant trips to the food counter – tempting though the latter option is. For those who are not aware, Rosemary and I have just completed a 12 week Sabbatical in the UK where we were largely based at Spurgeon’s College in London, where I served as a visiting international scholar. It’s...
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