Gordon’s stirring and encouraging piece on Spurgeon finished with a typically Chengian twist of the knife: do we work hard enough these days in ministry? Has the pendulum swung too far towards stress-relief and self-maintenance? Do we worry too much about ‘overdoing it’, and thus fail to take up opportunities that come to hand?
Archives: tony-payne
Nowist Left and Right
Dread, joy and Morning Prayer
Standing on the 5th tee at St Michael’s in Sydney’s East, the golfer experiences a mixture of nervousness and dread. Here (with some translational notes for non-golfers) is what it’s like.
Christians and writing
What difference does being a Christian make to the task and craft of writing? I was left pondering this after Mark Tredinnick’s keynote address at Saturday’s Faithful Writer conference.
Psychosomatic wellness
I’m getting the hang of this blog business. When it’s the weekend and you want a rest, apparently what you do is drag out some ancient or obscure quote, and let that suffice for a post. The Pyromaniacs do this with Spurgeon, and it works a treat.
The ethics of everyday evangelism
Gav’s post on the “danger of living the gospel without speaking the gospel” has sparked off one of those debates that we evangelicals sometimes have—you know those ones which seem to become more hairsplitting and hard to follow the longer they go on. In this case, it’s the old question of ‘whose job is it to evangelize?’.
Shifting to the personal
Pastoral Ministry, Sola Panel
This morning, just for something different, and not at all because some of the Sola Panellists have gone quiet and there’s nothing in the cupboard (guys!), let me suggest that you spend your time doing some listening instead: check out this month’s Briefing Lounge podcast, Shifting to the personal’. (more…)
Charismatic culture
In the comments from one of my GAFCON posts, Sam asks this interesting question:
While reading the material on the GAFCON website during the conference I couldn’t help notice the charismatic flavour of many of the comments, particularly those of the African Bishops. Do you have any thoughts on how you see this impacting the wider Anglican community in the future?
Serendipity
Weird. Having uploaded my post about Jonathan Leeman’s excellent article on individualism about five minutes ago, I notice that Jonathan has just posted the first few paragraphs and a link to the article in pdf form. We didn’t organize this, I swear!
What if individualism isn’t really the problem?
One of the many rewards of running our first Matthias Media USA conference last year was the time spent getting to know our hosts at Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington DC—including Jonathan Leeman, who runs the always interesting 9Marks blog, and pulls together their eJournal.
Thoughts after GAFCON
I’d like to report that in the two weeks since GAFCON, I’ve been carefully going over my notes, digesting my observations, mulling over what I saw and heard, and preparing to deliver myself of some devastating post-conference insights. Of course, the reality is that I have been stumbling through a haze of jet lag and exhaustion, attempting to locate my wife and kids in the fog, and emerging into brief moments of clarity to stare with horror at the mountainous backlog on the desk.
Podcast: Shifting to the personal
Audio
Tony Payne interviews Col Marshall, former Director of the Ministry Training Strategy, about people-focused ministry (MP3).
Smell the coffee
Up front, Sola Panel
A recent edition of our denominational newspaper here in Sydney featured an extended and very positive series of articles on the Fairtrade movement. Fairtrade is a ‘think global, act local’ sort of initiative which involves consumers in the West attempting to improve the lot of poor and exploited farmers in the third world by buying ‘Fairtrade’ products. By buying certified ‘Fairtrade’ coffee, for example, you ensure that a higher income flows to the cooperatives that produce it (usually 10% or so above the market price). The edition featured stories about Christians involved in the Fairtrade movement, and contained strong encouragement for churches to get involved—not only as a means of adding valuable momentum to the whole movement, but as a culturally attractive way of building links with our community and sharing the gospel. (more…)
Blast from the only slightly recent past
Resource Talk, Sola Panel
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.
GAFCON final day: Making a Statement!
The final GAFCON Conference Statement has been released, and is reproduced in full below.
To understand what this statement means, let me take you back to GAFCON on Friday, shortly after 12 noon. The main ballroom was packed, and Professor Stephen Noll was reading out the Draft of the GAFCON Conference Statement. The press had been excluded, and we had all been strictly warned not to divulge anything to anyone. Slowly and deliberately, Professor Noll began to read, as PowerPoint slides of the text flashed up on the screens. The tension was palpable.