Wednesday night is a highlight of my week.
Around about 7:30pm some 15-20 young adults descend on our place. (Actually, they’re all university students, so it’s usually a fair bit after the ‘official’ start time.) I fire up my coffee machine—I have an industrial-grade behemoth for just this reason—and we sit down together to share our lives around God’s word. (more…)
Just in to our office are the advance copies of The Course of Your Life. Tony Payne tells us that it is the “most important thing I’ve ever written.” That is a bold claim. But, having read through the manuscript many times, I agree with him. I am excited to start a disciple-making team with this resource. (more…)
To help you do know what’s going on over here, we’ve come up with a variety of options to keep you updated with the latest and greatest from The Briefing. (more…)
We were reading the second half of Romans 1 in Bible study the other night, and I asked the group what they thought would happen around the water cooler at work if they actually expressed out loud what Romans 1 says about gay sex.
There was an awkward silence. (more…)
My last three posts are examples of a church-history long debate. One on the merits and primacy of systematic theology verses biblical theology. (Being trained at a liberal seminary, I also recognize it as the way liberals pit bible passages against others) (more…)
My last post started us down the track of trying to figure out what Paul was thinking when he wrote in1 Thessalonians 2:19-20: (more…)
My kids can’t remember a time before the internet and mobile phones, and they find it hard to imagine how such a world existed. But I got thinking the other day—can we imagine a time before Bibles? That is, a time before the widespread availability of cheap, accessible Bible translations in the common language of our culture? A time when literacy was not as universal as it is in most modern Western societies? (more…)
September 1 has come at last, and we’re thrilled to be launching our new Briefing site. We hope you enjoy having a browse around. Here’s a quick guide to some of the main new features:
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Is God on your to-do list, or is he helping you accomplish those goals? Tony Payne shares the secret to keeping the church/God/Bible ball in the air. (more…)
It’s a cliché that turns up in bad journalism and badly written TV and movie melodramas: “It was a very close shave, and they only escaped by the skin of their teeth”. (more…)
The Bible is like a newspaper in many ways:
Before you do anything else today (apart from reading your Bible, brushing your teeth and praying), point your browser to Barry Newman’s blog, set it on autopilot and wait for the good stuff to roll in. Right now he is looking at what the Bible has to say about the soul. (more…)
A few people have asked me about the magpie (which actually turned out to be a currawong) and its eggs since I wrote about them a couple of months ago. The good news was that the currawong’s boldness was vindicated and the nest survived. (more…)
Just over a year ago, I started a blog. I was full of enthusiasm and daring—the kind of enthusiasm that only comes from an almost complete ignorance of the project you’re about to embark upon. I guessed it would be a great opportunity for ministry. What I didn’t anticipate is how God used this new ministry to perform surgery on my heart. (more…)