Scholarship • Serving • Ministry – Ian Paul
Andrew Goddard writes: There are multiple visions for the future of the Anglican Communion. One, being offered by Gafcon, is found in the Abuja Affirmation. Another is found in the Nairobi-Cairo Proposals (NCPs) developed by the Inter-Anglican Standing Commission on Unity, Faith, and Order (IASCUFO), which will be considered by the Anglican Consultative Council (ACC) …
The lectionary readings for Easter 5 are 1 Peter 2.2-10 and John 14.1-14. You can see the video discussion of the reading from 1 Peter here, and at the end of this piece. When I read this text, I cannot help but feel it has a slightly strange, dream-like quality to it, and I think …
The lectionary readings for Easter 5 are 1 Peter 2.2-10 and John 14.1-14. In 1 Peter 2, we jump back to before last week’s reading (!) in order to line up with discussion about places to abide in John 14. This well-known passage is saturated with OT references, both implicit and explicit, which we need …
Yesterday, US President Donald Trump took part in ‘America Reads the Bible,’ a week-long event where the whole Bible is read in public, including by well-known politicians and church leaders. The aim of this movement seems laudable enough: Just as Ezra read the Word aloud to the people of Israel (Nehemiah 8:1–3), awakening revival and …
In our church we have a Spanish-speaking congregation, who join in on Sundays (where we have songs and readings in different languages and simultaneous translation) but who also have their own Spanish-language service on a Tuesday evening. We have been given funding for a Spanish speaking pastor, but also seek to integrate ministry across the …
The lectionary gospel readers for the Fourth Sunday of Easter take the three parts of John 10 in turn; being in Year A, we are reading the first ten verses. You can watch the video discussion of the passage here, and it is linked below. The epistle is 1 Peter 2.19–25, a challenge passage both …
The lectionary epistle for Easter 4 is 1 Peter 2.19–end. Peter sees out a challenge call for us to endure suffering following the example of Jesus. But to make proper sense of this, we need to read it in its context, and notice the different language that Peter uses of us as slaves of God, …
John Hudghton writes: Jesus and the Rat King I am sometimes shocked at how little knowledge there is amongst clergy and congregations of the geopolitical context of Jesus’ ministry. Maybe there is too much busy-ness and too much to read, but it does strike me that there is more awareness of subsequent theology and ecclesiastical …
The lectionary readings for the Third Sunday in Easter ignore the particular gospel for the year, and instead cycle round Luke 24 and John 21: in Year B we have the second half of Luke 24, Jesus meeting the group of frightened disciples; in Year C, the miraculous catch of fish in John 21; and …
The lectionary epistle for Easter 3 in Year A is 1 Peter 1.17–23. In this section, Peter begins by reflecting on the significant of the impartiality of God’s love—he is not like a king who shows favouritism to some, by lifting their bowed face to look at him, but treats all equally—as Peter discovered in …
At the Society of Biblical Literature annual conference in Atlanta in 2015, I attended several papers on the Book of Revelation. The one that I have continued to think about—and which provoked most merriment when I reported it on Facebook—looked at the question of whether Jesus has breasts in Revelation 1.13 (given by Sarah Shier …
