Archives: review

Review: “The Gospel and Personal Evangelism” by Mark Dever

Review

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The Gospel and Personal Evangelism

Mark Dever

Crossway, Wheaton, 2007, 128pp.

GospelPersonalEvangelism

There is much to commend about The Gospel and Personal Evangelism. It is warm, engaging and theologically accurate, and it left me encouraged to speak to friends about Jesus. However, it also left me with questions about the best way to mobilize us for this task. (more…)

Review: “Vintage Jesus” by Mark Driscoll

Review

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Vintage Jesus: Timeless answers to timely questions

Mark Driscoll and Gerry Breshears

Crossway Books, Wheaton, 2008, pp. 256.

VintageJesus

It is easy to like Mark Driscoll. How can you not like someone who founded a megachurch in his 20s, who has the flare of a stand-up comedian, and who can speak for an hour without wearying his audience? Minor differences aside, he is the poster boy for 21st-century Evangelical­­ism. And having spent considerable bandwidth downloading his sermons, I am constantly impressed at his sparkling use of language and his passionate conviction of the centrality of Christ. (more…)

We need more shack time

Review

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It has topped The New York Times’s bestseller list and has been called The Pilgrim’s Progress of our generation. But what is it about William P Young’s The Shack that has captivated so many people—Christian and non-Christian? Paul Grimmond investigates.

The Shack
William P Young
Windblown Media, Newbury Park, 256pp. (more…)

Windex for ministry

Resource Talk, Sola Panel

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Of the many funny and endearing things about the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding, one of my favourites is Gus’s habit of solving every problem with Windex. Pimples, backaches, grazes, smudges, stains—according to Gus, there’s very little that a squirt of Windex won’t fix.

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Dive into a book

Resource Talk, Sola Panel

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“I enjoyed your sermon this morning, but it was just too long. In this day and age, with shorter attention spans, you just can’t preach for longer than 20 minutes. For all our sakes, you just have to make it shorter. Anything longer than that is counter-productive!”

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The Word Became Flesh

Review

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The Word Became Flesh: Evangelicals and the incarnation

Edited by David Peterson

Paternoster Press, Carlisle, 2003, 216pp.

 

Available for ordering from Moore Books (more…)

Blast from the only slightly recent past

Resource Talk, Sola Panel

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Have you ever had the experience of reading something you’d written a long time ago and being surprised to meet yourself again? It might be a letter you wrote to your grandmother that she kept and then returned to you (grandmothers do these things), or a diary you scribbled in as a teenager that your mother dragged out of the shoebox in the storeroom, or an impassioned essay you wrote at Uni which you discover as you’re cleaning out the filing cabinet.

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Putting the ‘media’ into Matthias Media

Resource Talk, Sola Panel

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I’ve always loved movies about the movie-making business. (My favourite is The Player starring Tim Robbins.) I particularly like those scenes where the young, green scriptwriter is pitching his movie idea to the fat cat producer: “It’s Pretty Woman meets King Kong; it’s Thelma and Louise meets Blazing Saddles”. And the movie mogul just sits there, puffing on his cigar, and asking, “Yes, but does it have a sex scene?”

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Review: “The Old Evangelicalism”

Review

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The Old Evangelicalism: Old truths for a new awakening
Iain H Murray
Banner of Truth Trust, Edinburgh, 2005, 226pp.

Recent debates in my circles (about the nature of the Trinity, and about who is suitable to be ordained or to preside at the Lord’s Supper) show an uneasy footing with regard to theologians of the past. Sometimes we are keen to legitimate our standing in the apostolic tradition, and so we selectively cite those earlier divines who shared our opinions. Sometimes we confer on some past thinker a godlike authority, and then proceed to marry our thoughts precisely to theirs. Sometimes we are so convinced of an historically eccentric view, we ignore all our forebears, rebuffing them with a cry of “Sola scriptura!” (more…)