Faith. Rebuilt
In my previous post (When sensitive and thoughtful people begin to doubt) I looked at 4 different sets of musicians who were christians earlier in their lives, but had struggled with faith since then. Now I want to share a few thoughts on how churches and parents might help their youth to be able to […]
Do you know someone who appeared to be a strong christian, and then began to doubt the truth of the whole thing? I’m guessing they were likely someone in their twenties, brought up as believers but suddenly facing questions they didn’t have answers for and issues they couldn’t easily resolve. And I’m guessing many of […]
How much do you and I know about Jesus? How much of it is really the truth about him? The obvious answer is that we know more about him than most ancient figures, because we have quite a few accounts of his life and teachings. But everyone seems to read them differently. In my previous […]
Thirty five years ago my life was changed after listening to a talk on prayer and spiritual warfare. I had been converted as a teen in a Presbyterian church where doctrine was regarded as the most important thing and God was known to be sovereign, ordaining everything according to his good purposes. But this doctrine […]
I was raised in a family of four noisy boys. As we grew up, we became quite opinionated, and often argued, quite amicably but noisily, about religious, political, ethical and a thousand more trivial issues that interested us. When each of us found girlfriends and eventually wives, they didn’t always find our loud and rambunctious […]
Did Jesus mean it to come to this? Yes!! I think he did!! One common theme of this blog is that the 21st century western church too often seems to have lost the vision of the mission of Jesus, and settled for something far less noble. So it is a great pleasure to be able […]
Did Jesus mean it to come to this? It is too easy to put words into Jesus’ mouth and say what he would or wouldn’t approve of. I won’t fall into that trap, but I will ask some pointed questions. If Jesus could have foreseen twenty-first century western christianity, what would he think? For instance, […]
The young adults in the group we lead asked us what it means to follow Jesus in 2018. The study and discussion took us in some interesting directions. This is what we learnt together.
The story so far ….. Last post (Urban tribes and the church) I discussed how on a recent holiday I was observing young urban Generation Z professionals, and musing what they might think about church, or at least most churches. I felt there were many ways that modern western christianity was an alien culture to […]
We’ve just come back from a short holiday in Melbourne, Australia’s second largest city. We stayed in South Yarra, an inner urban and somewhat hip location which is noticeably different to the suburb where we live in Sydney. The obvious differences start with the dense inner urban environment of high-rise apartments and offices, the streetscapes […]