As preparation for St Andrew’s Hall, where we will spend five months preparing with CMS for our move to Tanzania, I’m reading Duane Elmer’s Cross Cultural Servanthood: Serving the World in Christlike Humility. It’s a challenging read, not because it’s stuff I don’t know but because there are so many […]
John Owen was a 17th century Puritan. He wrote a whole treatise on The Mortification of Sin in Believers. He identified deceitfulness as the chief characteristic of sin such that you can think you have so understood grace that you tolerate and even love sin. Thus in order to mortify […]
These are my notes from the talks at Summer Encounter, the annual conference of CMS in South Australia. Dr David Williams is the head of development and training in CMS. His talks covered the three parables in Luke 18:1-30.
Christians and self-esteem has come up in conversation and on the blogosphere a few times for me recently and the resounding message that I hear reformed Christians giving is that self-esteem ought not to be based on ourselves but on looking to God. In his institutes, Calvin notes how we […]
In chapel today, Peter Adam preached against Freemasonry. He does not see it as a club or a community group or a situation you just sort of drift into. It’s a belief system (though some may not call it that) with deliberate vows and curses. He preached that they have […]
I’ve been having an ongoing conversation with myself about weakness. In my first post I asked some questions about competence in leadership. This time I’m thinking about sin.
We recently watched the 2007 debate between Richard Dawkins and John Lennox. One topic they touch on, unsurprisingly, is the argument that an ideology can be discredited by implicating it in atrocities. Christianity caused the Crusades and the Inquisition, therefore Christianity is false or evil. Atheism caused the Gulag and […]
Meet Jesus at uni 