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In the beginning
“In the beginning, when God created…” The opening verses/chapters of Genesis are almost guaranteed to excite debate. Whether it is science v. creationism, or poetry v. history, interpreting the opening part of Genesis seems to cause splits between Christians and atheists, and Christians and other Christians. Creationism (and its associated ‘young earth’ and ‘seven literal…
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Of blue parakeets and Bibles
I’ve just finished Scot McKnight’s book, The Blue Parakeet and have thoroughly enjoyed it, both as a challenge and an affirmation. His basic premise is that we all read the Bible with our own bias and preconceptions – and we should all be honest about that. Nothing new there really – except perhaps the call…
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The Nativity
There’s been plenty of chat on Facebook and on blogs about the new dramatisation of the nativity on the BBC. I’ve seen the first two and have been pleasantly surprised. Obviously it’s highly speculative, but in seeking to tell the human story behind the events so well-known to Christians, it has, I think, brought a…
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Missing the obvious
Sometimes I think I must be excruciatingly dim and I have to wonder why I ever felt I ought to respond to a call to ministry. I was reading a post on one of my favourite blogs earlier and came across these words: The entire trajectory of Scripture points to a kaleidoscopic people of God,…
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Bible in 5 statements
Stewart has challenged me to: Summarize the Bible in five statements, the first one word long, the second two, the third three, the fourth four and the last five words long. Or possibly you could do this in descending order. Tag five people. So… here goes… Witness God’s Love Humanity turns away Jesus died for…
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Oooo – pretty
No, not a shiny new sports car or fancy techno-toy, but a Bible. An NLT Mosaic Bible to be precise. Actually, to be even more precise, the ‘deluxe’ version: I ordered one a little while back and collected it today. And very pretty it is too. Lots of ‘niceness’ about it, including dictionary/concordance, Hebrew and…
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Confusion
I’ve uploaded the short talk I used for my speech training session to the downloads page (and fixed the non-working downloads while there). It’s called ‘Confusion’ and is a slightly different take on John 4 and Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well. It developed out of a passing thought as I was…
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Oh what a mystery I see
I’ve heard many conversations this advent about the ‘real’ Christmas story. I don’t know if it’s simply a fashionable trend or whether there are more people genuinely seeking answers, but it’s been surprising how many conversations there have been that including such statements as “There was no donkey!” or “It wasn’t actually a stable!” or…