Here’s the text of that sermon I gave at Network Vineyard Church on 12 July 2009.
1. Introduction
I want to talk about an area of faith where my whole way of thinking was turned upside down. And that’s about heaven. I’m anticipating three possible reactions – boredom, disagreement and excitement. I hope the excited group of [...]
Last night I presented a paper to the Newbigin Group on “Writing novels for the kingdom.” Below is the introduction; if you like the sound of it, you can download the PDF file.
It might be much more appropriate to go off and write a novel (and not a ‘Christian’ novel where half the characters [...]
(I’m going to sound grumpy, but I’m not, I’ve just been thinking a lot about the use of the Bible.)
It concerns me how badly the Bible is used by most evangelicals. Much of it stems from a failure to understand what sort of book(s) the Bible is.
When I was nine, an elder in my Baptist [...]
I want to live with the grace and thankfulness of the Reverend Boughton in Marilynne Robinson’s novel Home:
The house embodied for him the general blessedness of his life, which was manifest, really indisputable. And which he never failed to acknowledge, especially when it stood over against particular sorrow. (p. 3)
This quote doesn’t get close enough [...]
A reluctant visitor to a megachurch last night, the ‘financial giving’ talk made me feel queasy and miserable. I wanted to run out of there. I believe they have that every week, a talk to encourage everyone to give more money, to ’sacrifice’ for the kingdom.
I guess you have to do that when you employ [...]
Two of my friends have lost their faith in the last three years.
‘Lost’ is a curious word to use here. They didn’t misplace it. It didn’t fall behind the couch. They’re not offering any rewards for it to be found.
I think plant metaphors are more apt here – for one of them, faith shrivelled up [...]
We had an interesting conversation at our house church last night about spiritual growth. Some of us have been Christians a long time and feel like we haven’t grown at all, that we still struggle with the same sins, that our inner selves have not been conformed to Christ.
Something one person said struck a chord [...]
In my journey out of fundamentalism over the last ten years, I started off being angry at it. I wanted to argue with every fundamentalist, to show them why they were wrong. Then I went through a period of morbid fascination and I started scrapbooks of outlandish examples of fundamentalist literature (pamphlets, tracts, posters) that [...]
In Christian Century magazine, I came across an extract from Kathleen Norris’s new book, Acedia and me : a marriage, monks and a writer’s life. I had to look up acedia. It means spiritual sloth.
Her take on acedia is that it is a failure to find meaning in the ordinary, repetitious daily tasks and experiences [...]
Some interesting things in the new issue of On the Road, the journal of the Anabaptist Association of Australia and New Zealand.
In a lengthy article, Mark Hurst explores the common threads of Anabaptism and New Monasticism. He quotes at length from Schlabach’s essay “The vow of stability : a premodern way through a hypermodern [...]
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 | Phil Wood on On The Road 42 |
| Phil Wood on Refugees and the media |
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