The Simple Pastor

Today is the best day of my year every year. Better than my birthday, better than my kids birthdays, better than holidays, better than our anniversary, better even than Christmas Day. My entire faith hinges and rests on the foundation of this day. Good Friday is not good if the resurrection never happened. Jesus would [...]

It should be obvious to most observers of the Western church that the debate about the nature, place and role of homosexuality and therefore the role and place of gay, lesbian and bisexuals within the church is a critical one. It is critical for a number of reasons, because already in many Western mainline denominations [...]

You may well have seen this a few days ago on the BBC news website that illustrates perfectly the dire state of the church in mainland Europe. The article profiles a Dutch church led by a man who doesn’t believe in a personal God or an afterlife or even the historical person of Jesus and [...]

A couple of days ago this post caught people’s attention in reaction to this opinion piece in the Guardian by Thomas Prosser. So other than banning Newday and the like, I thought I’d pick through the article and look for the problems that secularists like Prosser have with Christians like me. The obvious one – [...]

For a few years I’ve been proud to have played a small part in Newday a growing Christian youth festival. It’s nowhere near the size and scale of Soul Survivor but we share a similar passion to bring the Gospel to young people. It was no surprise to read something like this in the Guardian [...]

I found this piece by Margaret Hebblethwaite over at Cif interesting. She wonders whether current evangelicalism is Christianity for the TV age, that the performance matters, that we consume the product. Here are some thought-provoking comments. “Evangelical Christianity has already opened wide its arms and its heart. I just hope that it will also open [...]

This post by Phil Moore needs a plug, it’s excellent. God has called us to 1. He has called us to find out what the Koran says. 2. He has called us to point out to Muslims what the Koran says about Jesus. 3. Show them that they have fallen for a false, Jesusless Islam, [...]

Mark Meynell links to a 4 sermon series by Hugh Palmer at All Souls Langham Place on ‘Cash and the Christian’. This is (IMHO) absolutely spot on, “I was particularly struck by this simple point which came up more than once in the series: every time we give, we take one more step in the [...]

This book is a response to the St Andrews Day Statement on homosexuality in the Church written by (amongst others) Oliver O’Donovan, David Wright, Timothy Bradshaw. As a series of essays it’s both helpful and instructive. I appreciated better the positions of the revisionists from essays by Jeffrey John, Michael Vasey and Elizabeth Stuart. John’s [...]

This is something that I’ve wondered about for a while in a “I should be thinking about something else” kind of way. It seems to me that American Christians and pastors are fascinated by dead British Christians while British Christians/pastors are fascinated by American pastors. What’s with that? I read this morning that Josh Harris [...]

Internet Monk has the reply to this and it’s worth a read

Tim Challies posts this quote by Kevin DeYoung knowing if you’re emergent or not. I have to put a tick by a lot of those boxes. “After reading nearly five thousand pages of emerging-church literature, I have no doubt that the emerging church, while loosely defined and far from uniform, can be described and critiqued [...]