"I don't know what they're doing with their lives"
June 18th, 2016
“All the people we used to know They’re an illusion to me now Some are mathematicians Some are carpenters’ wives Don’t know how it all got started I don’t know what they’re doin’ with their lives But me, I’m still on the road” Bob Dylan: Tangled up in blue I’ve been attending our very middle […]
Signs of hope
June 9th, 2016
Do you ever lose hope, perhaps just for a moment? There are plenty of things we may feel hopeless about – ourselves or our circumstances, the world, politics. One of the things I often lose hope about is the church – it just seems to be drifting, a long way from the teachings of Jesus, […]
Three views on our acceptance with God
May 30th, 2016
North Haven on the NSW mid-north coast, from the top of Big Brother mountain. The reason for showing this photo will become apparent in the post. Photo (c) John Naylor and Google. Christians hold three different views on who gains acceptance with God. I have looked at what the Bible says in detail at Can […]
Three views on christianity and politics
May 21st, 2016
The combination of religion and politics can be explosive. It is very easy to hold our political views with religious zeal, and I am not always an exception. And so we often think that God is on our side of politics. (Or else we think God stands in the middle between the two polarised views.) […]
Three views on hell and judgment
May 11th, 2016
So far I have looked at two doctrinal issues in this series – Three different views of the Bible and three different ways to read it and Three different views of social justice and the gospel – and each time I have concluded that the truth lies between the two more polarised views. It probably […]
Three different views of social justice and the gospel
April 30th, 2016
What part do social justice and community welfare play in the church’s mission? Are they something different to the gospel, and not as important, or are they part of the gospel? There are several very different views on this.
Three different views of the Bible, and three different ways to read it
April 18th, 2016
Differences among christians We all know there are many, many matters on which christians hold different views. Many of them are merely matters of opinion and taste (though you would sometimes think they were highly important), but they include many important doctrines too. For many matters, there are a range of views, though often times […]
That sounds like a good idea!
April 8th, 2016
It seems to be a paradoxical fact that there are so many more people around in big cities, and yet people are lonelier. The crowds tend to isolate us rather than force us together. Smaller communities generally have a greater sense of, well, community. Yet some people are trying new ways to break this down.
Giving flowers, living in the opposite spirit
March 25th, 2016
Spiritual principles series Dealing with refugees is one of the most intractable problems facing governments across the western world. Not only is it difficult to control the number of people seeking asylum from crossing borders, but there is the fear that among the asylum seekers may be Taliban of DAESH fighters bent on suicide terrorism. […]
Walking wounded
March 11th, 2016
I must admit it jolted me a little. I was walking slowly through a local shopping centre when I was confronted with the sign shown above. 46 Australian soldiers have been killed on active duty in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, since 1999. But more than 5 times that number of returned soldiers have committed suicide […]
A list of all blog posts, in reverse chronological order, is on the Blog archive page.