Welcome to my website
I am a pastor and Christian educator.
In a nutshell, this is what I do…
Understand the Bible
My online ministry focussed on creating videos and songs to teach the Bible and the Christian faith.
The Bible Uncancelled
A short, weekday thought from the Bible published on video or podcast.
This Blog
I only write occasionally here now, as my attention is focussed on the two things I mention above. However, there is an archive of over 2,000 posts which I’ve made over the last 20+ years, these posts are all still accessible.
Latest Posts
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Hymnology: Love Divine and perfectionism
This morning I read an interesting post on the Church Society blog: Should we stop singing ‘Love Divine’? Charles Wesley is a great hymn writer and Love Divine has always been one of my favourites, but this post did make me reconsider. The goal of this little ‘hymnology’ series is to think about hymns and the theology…
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Genesis 3 and Gender
This morning I was preaching on Genesis 3 – ‘the fall of man’. It’s a fascinating passage, very carefully and cleverly constructed, and bears studying carefully. One of the things I noticed in my preparation time but didn’t really have time to elaborate on in the passage is the way gender is portrayed. In Genesis 1-2,…
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Hymnology: Trinitarian Worship
Last year, Andrew Wilson wrote A Songwriting Rant about modern worship songs. He brought a number of charges against contemporary worship songs, but the one which really made me think was the third one: 3. Lack of Trinitarianism. I was at a funeral recently singing “Eternal Father, strong to save” … The entire hymn, Victorian and…
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Hymnology: The greatest day in history
At Easter time, one of the things I often wonder is why we (and, I should say, I’m very much preaching to myself here) spend so much of the year more or less ignoring the resurrection. We talk about the cross an awful lot of the time, but often we don’t talk so much about…
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The Night Manager…
I’ve really been enjoying watching the BBC’s adaptation of The Night Manager by John Le Carré. Now it’s finished I will feel bereft on a Sunday night! I thought it was a brilliant, compelling piece of TV and I loved watching it. That said, I do have a couple of questions – to do with the…
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Messy Church (2): Some follow-up thoughts
My previous post on Messy Church generated a fair bit of interest and comment (on Facebook – unfortunately comments here remain closed). I thought it would be good to try and close out the matter with some clarifying comments.So, here goes: 1. A lot of good stuff happens at Messy Church. I didn’t make this clear in…
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Thinking about Messy Church…
I’ve been thinking a little bit about church planting recently – more on that some other time. Anyway, in my conversations about it, the idea of Messy Church has come up more than once. If you’ve not been to Messy Church and don’t know what it’s about, there’s plenty of information on the official website.…
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Comments closed
I’ve made the decision to close comments on this blog. This decision has been coming for a long time now, but my previous post finally decided me. It was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. The reason is mainly because I am no longer convinced that comments on blogs really achieve anything. In fact,…
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Review: The Atheist Who Didn't Exist
I’ve just finished reading “The Atheist Who Didn’t Exist” by Andy Bannister. The book is subtitled “or the dreadful consequences of bad arguments”, and that’s a pretty good summary of the book: examining various arguments made by writers such as Richard Dawkins (who else?) and the like to see whether they stand up. The point…
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Hymnology: By Faith we see the hand of God
February here at St Mark’s is ‘all-request’ month. People have the opportunity to request a favourite hymn or a song, and we’ll sing them at services throughout the month. My request for the month was “By Faith” by Townend and Getty. This is a song which is particularly inspired by the famous chapter 11 of Hebrews,…