A deep and abiding passion to see our churches grow is a very dangerous thing. That may seem an odd observation to make, but it is a critical one. If we run with a passion to grow things without at… (more…)
This article is an edited transcript of a talk given by Phil Colgan at the 2014 Nexus conference in Sydney, written up and edited by Sam Freney. Personal references throughout are therefore applicable to Phil, not Sam. In my… (more…)
Tony Payne talks with Phillip Jensen about the history of The Briefing—how it began, what its aims have been, and where we stand now. ~ Tony Payne: Phillip, The Briefing was really your idea. You drew together the resources to… (more…)
I suppose it’s like looking at old baby photos, but over the past month or so I’ve been browsing through some of the classic early articles in The Briefing. I chuckled over some of the ‘Lead Balloons’ we ran in… (more…)
This article is an edited transcript of an address given at the 2014 Nexus conference in Sydney. ~ And when [Paul] had said these things, he knelt down and prayed with them all. And there was much weeping on the… (more…)
“What do you do for work?” is one of the most common questions that we ask when we meet someone new. For most of us, work is right at the heart of how we see ourselves and how we explain… (more…)
Mark, how did you come to Christ?
I first heard the gospel in a Sunday School class at the local Baptist Church. However, my faith was nurtured by an ISCF group at high school, during a period when none of my family went to church at all. In the year of my HSC, I began to attend the local Anglican church, and the adventure took off from there.
Thanks to everyone who contributed comments in answer to the question that I raised in my previous post about Paul and his fellow apostles in 1 Corinthians 4 and the woman described in Proverbs 31. The particular, concrete detail that I zeroed in on was the contrast between how they dress (“poorly dressed” versus “fine linen and purple”), but I also had in mind the broader contrast between how they live and how they are seen by others (“held in disrepute” versus “praised in the gates”).
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.
Here at Matthias Media, we read and recommend the English Standard Version Bible (ESV) as a superior English translation of both Old and New Testaments. So it was with interest and some nervousness that I heard that there is coming, just around the corner now, a new ESV Bible: the ESV Study Bible. It was with interest because, well, it’s interesting; nervousness because Study Bibles, no matter how terrific they are, are the bane of every Bible study leader’s life. When you ask “What does the text say?”, there will always always be one nerdy member of the group who will say, “Well, it says here in the explanatory notes that …”. The faint thumping sound you hear next is me hitting myself upside of the head prior to saying, “Yes, that’s great, and thank you, but WHAT DOES THE TEXT SAY?!?!?”, veins bulging on my neck and eyes popping out of my head. My Bible studies, at least, can be intense affairs.
“We are poorly dressed … Be imitators of me.” (1 Cor 4:11, 16)
“All her household are clothed in scarlet… her clothing is fine linen and purple.” (Prov 31:21-22)
Christians and soldiers have a lot in common, or at least they should (2 Tim 2:3-4). Firstly they both know that submission equals survival. The wise infantry man always awaits the order to advance—especially when the machine gunner next to him is laying down cover fire.
It’s been interesting to follow the comments on Tony’s post about the ethics of everyday evangelism. Tony makes a helpful point: rather than getting caught up with the question of whether we must evangelize, it’s far more useful to ask how we can encourage, inspire and equip more Christians to talk about Jesus with their friends.
To keep the detail of my memory fresh as possible, I got home from church a couple of Sundays ago and headed straight to the computer to update my blog. Here, then, is my quick and dirty summary and quote from Peter Jensen, Archbishop of Sydney, answering a question he was asked at my church about how he became a Christian as a teenager at the 1959 Billy Graham Crusade in Sydney. If you click through, you will see that the very first thing he chose to speak about was the judgement of God!
I have to admit to a growing confusion. I often read these days about how the future—particularly a perceived continuity between the present and the new creation—ought to shape our Christian lives. Now at the risk of being told “Silly boy, go and sit in the corner of the class”, I’m not sure that I buy it.
I was struck the other week when a friend spoke to me about the hard time he was having drumming up interest in a sermon series on God. It seems it is so much easier to grab people’s interest if the sermons are recognizably about us in some way or other. This is, of course, simply another form of the age-old concern about relevance. In a consumer-oriented age, those who listen to sermons want to know the cash value up front.
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.
It’s funny and not necessarily good how a view can lodge in your head and stay there unchallenged for years, even though you hold other views on the same subject that actually contradict the first view and, unlike the first view, are actually based on evidence.
The approach of the Beijing Olympics is a worthwhile time to remember the persecution of Christians in China. According to this summary report from Voice of the Martyrs, “There are more Christians in prison in China than any other country in the world”.
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.
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?’.