Today Her Majesty the Queen will be celebrating her 90th birthday at street party on the Mall outside Buckingham Palace, and we’ll be holding our own (slightly smaller) tea party just outside church. I’ve enjoyed flicking through the new book, The Servant Queen and the King she serves. I particularly liked the poem she quotes
Read moreI love hearing about what God has been doing in the lives of Christians. It was great to hear on Sunday from Chris Stonehouse, wasn’t it. It is true to say that we can know people for years without actually finding out how they became a Christian and so, in some sense, we don’t really
Read moreDo you ever find yourself thinking that evangelism, that is, telling someone about Jesus, is particularly difficult these days? After all, people in the 21st century are more resistant than ever to the good news about Jesus: it seems impossible that those who refuse to believe that there could be only one truth, should ever
Read moreOn Thursday, I and a hundred or so others were asked the question: “Do you really care if people burn in hell forever?” It is a provocative question and the speaker meant it to be! As he went on I found myself reflecting that it doesn’t really look like I do care very much. In
Read moreIn April 2000, Ruby Eliason and Laura Edwards were killed in Cameroon, West Africa. Ruby was over eighty. Single all her life, she poured it out for one great thing: to make Jesus Christ known among the unreached, the poor, and the sick. Laura was a widow, a medical doctor, pushing eighty years old herself,
Read moreOne of my jobs at home is to pack the car, especially when we go on holiday. I don’t know why it’s my job, but it is. Actually, I think I’m quite good at it – just ask the rest of my family! And I don’t know if it’s always a dad’s job, but it
Read moreWe had a visit from some Jehovah’s Witnesses the other day, and they left a booklet with the title What Does the Bible Really Teach? What a great question! We may suspect some of the answers we will find in its pages, but let us say what a good question it is. First, we do
Read moreOnly a fool would attempt to answer that question, especially in such a short space as this. Yet it is a question that each of us intending to vote in the referendum on June 23rd will need to make up our minds about – unless we plan to abstain. What concerns me is that many
Read moreJesus famously said that his followers may live in the world, but that they are “not of the world” (John 17:15). Similarly, we may live in the ‘iWorld’, but we don’t have to belong to it. The ‘iWorld’, according to author Dale Kuehne, is marked by “a spirit of unfettered and individualism and freedom” –
Read moreFirst there was the iPod, then the iPhone, and now the iPad. But what is the iWorld? Is it Apple’s bid for utter world domination? Not quite, but not so far off either. Author Dale Kuehne believes that “the best way to describe and understand our present moment is to call it the ‘iWorld’”. He
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