The Simple Pastor

As a child one of my favourite books of all time was a children’s version of Pilgrim’s Progress but I have to admit that before reading John Bunyan: The Christian by Gordon Wakefield my knowledge of the great author was a bit, well, basic. I knew he wrote Pilgrim’s Progress, of course, and I knew he [...]

Matthew Paul Turner is a product of American evangelicalism, something that turned out not to be a complete blessing. In fact, it pretty much shipwrecked his faith. Like many young men he regularly got stuck with internet pornography, simply tried harder to get himself free and like a fly stuck in a spider’s web, the [...]

Debra and Frank Green have been leading a remarkable prayer movement in Manchester, England that has since spread further afield through Redeeming our Communities. City Changing Prayer: Insights from Manchester’s impacting city-wide prayer movement is the story of their journey from gathering half a dozen people in their front room to pray to gathering thousands [...]

This small book (just 87 pages plus discussion questions) examines Jesus’ parables of the lost coin, the lost sheep and the prodigal son from Luke 15. The first two parables get a chapter each and the last one gets four chapters looking at the lost son, the gifts, the elder brother and the celebration. It’s [...]

John V Taylor wrote Enough is Enough in 1975, the year I was born, which makes it an ageing book but in many ways a prophetic book. He opens by discussing the publication of The Limits of Growth and the furore that surrounded it thirty years ago and so chapter one has a decidedly pessimistic feel to it. It [...]

The church in the western world is undergoing significant transition and it isn’t yet clear what the church of the future will look like, so says Eddie Gibbs in churchmorph: how megatrends are reshaping christian communities. Gibbs identifies five trends of today’s western world. The transition from modernity to post-modernity; the transition from the industrial [...]

I’d never heard of James Emery White before getting this book or the mega church he leads in America so when What they didn’t teach you in seminary: 25 Lessons for successful ministry in your church arrived in the post for review, I had no expectations one way or the other. After having read it, I [...]

In the interests of full disclosure I should say that I count some of the staff and members of Kings as friends and am part of the same family of churches as the author of this book, Steve Tibbert. It’s always a slightly tricky thing when you review a book by someone you know. Being a [...]

How do you go about discussing your faith with others? Do you feel awkward when they raise objections? More likely to back down or endlessly getting into arguments that ultimately seem a bit futile? Then Tactics: A game plan for discussing your Christian convictions by Gregory Koukl could be the book for you. In essence it’s [...]

The girl who played with fire by Stieg Larsson is the second in his bestselling trilogy after The girl with the dragon tattoo. It continues the adventures of Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander although this time the prominent roles are switched with Salander being the central character. As with the first I found it a page [...]

Count Zinzendorf is probably a name you’re not overly familiar with, although if you’ve ever read anything about John Wesley his name may ring a bell. In Phil Anderson’s The Lord of the Ring: A Journey in search of Count Zinzendorf we learn of how Zinzendorf was a contemporary of Wesley and Zinzendorf’s Moravian movement had a profound [...]

Young people don’t always get good PR and sometimes for good reasons. Gang violence, teenage pregnancies, anti-social behaviour, lack of education, employment and general delinquency can all add up to ruining lives young. These issues can be especially entrenched in some of the poorer estates of our nation. What is often less reported or remembered [...]