First Post!

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Welcome to my newer, shinier, more relevant-to-me blog! My older, clunkier blog, mostly about theology and church politics is here.

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Monday Morning Mail, 3rd June 2013

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Dear all, I'm just back from a week off (and already submerged in work!). On Saturday, Lydia was bridesmaid at the wedding of one of her best friends. As we were away from home, I decided to do something I don't do as much as I used to, but which is well worth doing - I decided to learn a few Bible verses - in this case Psalm 36:7-9, because I was reading Ps 36 that morning anyway. Learning stuff by rote isn't very fashionable these days - after all we can access pretty much any information we want at the touch of a button and so if I ever wanted to know what those verses say it wouldn't be difficult to find out. But even without modern technology, I've still got a Bible within reach most of the time, and I can read fairly well, so what's the point of learning verses? One of the great strengths of learning verses is that it helps truths come to mind more often, which helps me to think about them and pray them. Yes, I know I can find out what Ps 36:7-9 are ea...
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"I'm not a very good Christian" (Monday Morning Mail)

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One of the things I love about my job is the chance to sit down with folk and listen to them tell me about their walk with God. And they'll often say something like "I'm not a very good Christian..." Of course, on one level there may well be things to discuss or ways that I can help. On another level, it's brilliant that folk recognise that, because in this world there aren't super-duper Christians and awesome Christians and totally obedient Christians, there are just "not very good" Christians, and when we let him, God works through us anyway! I remember I used to have a big problem with this, and, being me, I'd talked it up into a big intellectual conundrum. "How can I promise to follow God," I would ask, "when I know that I will let him down and fail to keep my promises because I'm still sinful?" And for a year or so, I let that question paralyse me in my Christian life. The answer, when it ca...
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Sharing Jesus with Families and Friends (Monday Mail)

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Greetings! Yesterday at St Jude's we were thinking particularly about how to share God's love and the good news of Jesus with our families and close friends. I said I'd found one book in particular really helpful, which was Bringing the Gospel Home by R. Newman (the link is to the IVP online bookshop, where it's only £5 at the moment...) Incidentally, Newman's earlier book Questioning Evangelism is also really good for thinking through how to share the good news in our conversations more generally. We looked at the theme yesterday through the lens of Jesus' conversation with the woman of Samaria in John 4 . As so often in John's gospel, the story serves to illustrate a lot of what has already been said about Jesus. So in John 3:17 we read that "God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him", and in John 1:17, John sums up Jesus' message as " Grace and truth ". An...
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