Happy New Year Y'all! Sacred Treasure Tim Keller wrote a helpfully argued piece for the New Yorker last month: Can Evangelicalism Survive Donald Trump and Roy Moore. Chris Green has a good piece on sermon illustrations Ian Paul asks whether…
An old friend, Ross Hendry, is the chief exec of Spurgeon's Children's Charity, a UK organisation (no, that's not him on the left, that's Spurgeon). The charity was founded by its illustrious namesake, Charles Haddon Spurgeon, and continues today to…
IVP has been running a blog series on John Stott's thought - they've produced a number of short videos about it, accompanied by relevant posts. So I was delighted to contribute, writing the article to accompany the great David Turner.…
We are looking at ways to add value to the publication of What Angels Long To Read yesterday. So the first element of this is to make the graphics I made for the book (see right) available for download, in…
A week's meetings in Accra, Ghana last month gave the chance to visit a place I'd long known about but couldn't visualise. There are many of these horrors dotted along Africa's Atlantic coast. One of the most intact is Elmina…
Last weekend, my wife Rachel was going through some old boxes in her parents' attic. That kind of thing is usually quite a chore. But not this time. She's got quite the pedigree from British Christian history, has Rachel. It…
William Nicholson wrote Shadowlands, the play (which became the film) inspired by C.S.Lewis’s extraordinary testimony A Grief Observed. In it, he gave Lewis this lovely line, one he never actually uttered, but may as well have done.
We read to know we’re not alone
It’s been very moving to have messages in the last few days about my black dog posts. Thank you! At least it shows that it’s been worth it. As I mentioned in the first post, I’m genuinely not motivated by the kind of confessional culture that is all around us; still less am I trying to elicit sympathy. And I’m definitely not seeking advice or support (kind though some offers have been!). It is only to help those who don’t quite have the words for this yet. But I do realise that it’s raised lots of questions for some… (more…)
If you’re from a certain corner of the global harvest field that is the church, then Charles Haddon Spurgeon will be a familiar, if not revered, name. The ‘prince of preachers’ (as he was known) was perhaps the world’s first megapastor – but the wonderful thing about him was that it never went to his head, he wasn’t corrupt, he was a character of whom it could certainly be said that ‘what you see is what you get.’ A far cry, in other words, from the smooth-talking, chiseled and attractive megapastors of today. (more…)
RANT ALERT (This is v abnormal for me, but I’m quite exercised about it!)
I’m getting tired of people complaining about immigration, and just wish politicians would have the courage to speak up for it. The UK has ALWAYS been a country of immigrants – you just have to look at the history of London’s East End over the last 5 centuries to see this. (more…)