Phill Sacre

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Trying to see the world from a Christian perspective

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This Blog

I only write occasionally here now, as you will see. However, there is an archive of over 2,000 posts which I’ve made over the last 20+ years, which are all still accessible.

Latest Posts

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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.…

  • 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,…

  • 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…

  • 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,…

  • Transgender and the new reality

      Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindbogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen it to see it as a final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.The argument goes something like this: “I refuse to prove that I exist,” says God, “for proof…

  • Hymnology: And can it be – ‘My chains fell off…’

    Last weekend I travelled down to High Leigh for a residential weekend with my fellow curates in the Chelmsford Diocese. On Friday evening we sang ‘And can it be’, one of my favourite hymns and one of Charles Wesley’s finest (in my opinion). The hymn tells the story of salvation from a first person perspective…