I should have warned her, really. A friend of mine has just published her first book, and she is understandably quite excited. A parcel of copies arrived from her publisher, and she’s checked that it’s there on Amazon too. She’s nervous, but excited. But then she said, “Actually, I’m a bit disappointed too, because I
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The end of an evangelistic talk is usually commendably frank. It doesn’t matter wither this is a friendly over a BBQ, a major service, or the end of a course: we lay out the two ways, and invite people to lay their lives down for Christ. If they do that, we have resources, books, groups.
After 33 years as their pastor, John Piper preached his farewell sermon on Easter Sunday at Bethlehem Baptist.http://t.co/KH42MuUnFy/
So we (me and a team of students) were in Kent, to work with a church in an evangelistic push before Easter. Tons of prep. Lots of nervousness. But there is really only one thing to remember, and it is from Psalm 51:12-13 – Restore to me the joy of your salvation, and uphold me
Ever since I was an undergraduate I’ve had on my shelves Don Carson’s survey of New Testament commentaries. It’s his notes on every commentary and series that he’s read (a lot), with best buys marked up. It’s gone through various editions, been joined by Tremper Longman’s OT survey, and later this year will have its
One of my heroes is Chuck Yeager, the first man to break the sound barrier. But it’s not because he was the first, or the fastest, that makes him my hero. It’s what he chose to do to make that happen that makes him a parable of leadership. Many other people had tried before him,
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I first noticed it in Malcolm Gladwell’s clever little book Outliers. In almost every area of human creativity and endeavour, when you come across an overnight success story, you can bet that behind it lies hours of practice. Hours. 10,000 of them to be exact. Gladwell charts it in music, writing, the sciences – there’s
How far ahead do you you plan your sermons? Someone asked me this week, and was rather surprised when I said that my pattern in church was eighteen months ahead. Why so long? Here were my reasons Authenticity. I need to get inside this Biblical book and let it read me, repeatedly. I need to
Good question. True question. A small church with around twenty members is in a depressed part of town. Money is tight all round – the pastor is paid for by a generous denomination, weekly giving is around £25, and they have around £1000 in the bank. Most of the members are not tax payers. Years
People come to church for a lift. An encouragement. Maybe a challenge. They don’t want trouble. And those of us who stand behind the lectern agree with them. We’ll give them their lift and maybe their challenge. But we don’t like trouble either. So we conspire together to avoid certain subjects. Which isn’t healthy It’s
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It sounds so wrong when they say it but the flight attendants are right – if you’re travelling with children and the oxygen masks drop down, put your own on before fitting your kids’. Your instinct will be to help them, but if you conk out first, the kids can’t help you. And you can
An artist in a church decided that one way she could use her gifts was to design cards, especially ‘Thank you’ cards, for people to express their appreciation for each other. I didn’t buy any – partly because they were a bit pricey, but mostly because I thought they were a bit too over-the-top in
The business guru Peter Drucker says that the single most important characteristic of effectiveness is that we know where our time is spent. And ministry being ministry, that means a whole range of duties and tasks – including the unexpected. Into an already full week, God sends a funeral, a pile of urgent admin from
What are we here for? What is the purpose of anything and everything we do? If we’ve been paying any attention to John Piper then you’ll know the answer off the top of your head: we bring God glory. Here’s how 1 Peter puts it, and notice the two purposes: But you are a chosen
The Bible, we rightly say, is a library not one book. But unlike any other library, and unlike other religious books like the Qur’an, it has a coherent narrative from open to close. Getting to that coherence takes a little bit of work, but not much, and any Christian could be able to grasp the
You can define an organisation three ways – by its centre, which is what it holds most dear, its circumference, which is where the limits lie for what it may or may not accept, and by its cause, which is what gives it life, energy, and what it would die for. The centre for us,
Once upon a time, a man was invited to be the minister of a large, and orthodox church. They wanted someone with traditional reformed views, they said, who would preach and teach well. He was very enthusiastic. What he discovered was that by Reformed they meant, that they loved the words and ambience of the
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