The Simple Pastor

Here in Sweden, today is not known as Good Friday but The Long Friday (långfredagen) because ‘the day was marked by sorrow when the day was long and hard for Jesus.’ I was struck by The Gospel of Mark’s account and it’s repetition in just a few verses. This is from the ESV “And they crucified him and divided his garments among [...]

One of the lessons I learned in church planting was to make sure you put the most important things in first. It’s called foundation laying. This is obvious, everyone knows it. The trick comes in actually knowing that the foundation has been properly laid. The most important things also need to be laid clear in [...]

A  church must have a Sunday morning service or so I thought. If someone is looking for a church, they’ll look on a Sunday morning. Having a Sunday service gives you the sense of being a ‘proper’ church and as (hopefully) more people come, that sense of progress grows too. There are also lots of [...]

I’ve been enjoying reading John Stevens blog. He is the national director of FIEC but is also on the frontline planting a church in Market Harborough. In this post he writes about one ordinary Sunday in the life of the church plant. “We were low on numbers yesterday, which was discouraging. A number of couples were away [...]

The quest for the historical Jesus is littered with boring books; not so this one. Professor Bruce Fisk has combined the fictional story of Norm, a post-grad student exploring Israel in a personal quest to discover the ‘real’ Jesus with a textbook to all the historical and theological issues that arise from reading the Gospels [...]

The battle for faith in the public square currently has an interesting twist to it in the UK. It’s not just about who can (or can’t) be married. There is a contest for the freedom of Christians to practice their faith in regard to healing. Now admittedly there are significant differences within the Christian church [...]

Take a look at this parody of Hillsongs. I don’t know enough about the ministry of Hillsongs to know whether this parody hits the mark or not. I don’t know how focused on money they are or how generous to the poor they are. In some ways that’s not really the point. They have clearly [...]

This report about the World’s largest Christian TV channel ‘funding owners’ exorbitant lifestyle’ is an obvious example (if any were needed) of the logical outcome of preaching a prosperity message (gospel is not a word to be used in this connection as it is not good news). It seems clear to me, once again, that [...]

I was privileged to serve a church for ten years that highly valued children. Our second paid staff member was a gifted children’s worker. Many of our key investments of time and energy went into children and young people. A Kids Club that gathered (at its peak) around 60 children every week from the surrounding [...]

My friend Simon Guillebaud is currently 1800+ miles into cycling coast to coast across America. He’s hoping to raise vast sums of money for the incredibly poor and neglected Batwa (pygmy) tribe of Burundi. If you were looking for a fresh chance to be practice the grace of giving and grow in generosity then this [...]

Recently I read two different posts on the issue of denominations and I thought I’d repost them here. First I read Andrew Wilson’s what’s wrong with denominations? which articulates some of the conversations I’ve had with friends in the past. I’ve passionately argued that Newfrontiers is not a denomination and yet the differences haven’t been [...]

Just doing a bit of catching up and hopefully clearing the decks again for some more regular blogging (I know I’ve said that a lot recently!), but here are some links to entertain, inform and provoke. Hope you all have a good weekend. There are some amazing photos in this collection about the world’s most [...]