Year: 2026

The spiritual gifts in 1 Corinthians 12

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The lectionary New Testament readings for the Pentecost, this coming Sunday, are 1 Corinthians 12.3b-13, Acts 2.1-21, and John 20.19-23—but the first or second reading must be from Acts. So I suspect most churches will read Acts and 1 Corinthians 12. Written commentary on Acts 2 can be found here, and video discussion here. Here … Continue Reading

Is the Church of England growing at last?

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This week, the Church of England released headline figures for church attendance in 2025. This is collated from the parish returns done in October each year, and Ken Eames and the statistics team in Church House do a great job. Before plunging into the numbers and offering some reflection, it is worth addressing the common … Continue Reading

How can we minister in deprived areas?

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John Root offers this review of Jonathan Macy Sowing Seeds with Songs of Joy: Growing God’s Garden in Forgotten Places. Jonathan Macy’s book began as a 13,000 word position paper for the Church of England Evangelical Council on Privilege, Class and Poverty, which he has extended into the present book looking at the response to … Continue Reading

What does Jesus have against us?

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Each year, during November, the Morning Prayer weekday lectionary takes us through the first few chapters of the Book of Revelation. In chapters 2 and 3, we have messages to the ekklesiae in seven cities of Roman Asia, the west end of what we now know as Turkey—and I happen to be sitting in one of those cities as I write, having just led a study tour around the seven. There are some important and challenging things to note about these messages.

First, these are not ‘letters’ as they are commonly called, since they do not have the features of first-century letter-writing. In fact, the whole of Revelation is a letter, with part of the introduction looking very similar to Pauline letters elsewhere in the NT. There is some debate in scholarship about how best to characterise this section, but the most persuasive suggestion is that these are royal proclamations from the risen Jesus who, having been raised, ascended and vindicated, exercises royal power from the throne he shares with the One seated there. And they are not written to ‘churches’ in the way we often think—institutions with buildings and leadership structures. They are addressed to the collective (and occasionally gathered) new Israel of God in Jesus.

Secondly, as is easy to see, the seven messages are striking in their consistent structure of seven main elements, including opening and closing phrases which are repeated word for word:

Loser! The Art of the Insult

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Mike Starkey writes: During the 2018 Centennial of World War I, Donald Trump was scheduled to visit the Aisle-Marne American Cemetery in France. The relentless rain made helicopter travel to the Cemetery impossible, but aides informed the President he could be driven instead. Trump’s response, according to accounts from a senior Defence Department official, was that he didn’t want to visit the cemetery, as it was ‘filled with losers’.

On the same trip, Trump reportedly said the 1,800 US marines killed in the World War I Battle of Belleau Wood were ‘suckers’ for being killed. When reports of Trump’s dismissive language about dead American service personnel appeared in the Atlantic magazine, a media storm erupted. Trump denied the reports, but in 2023 his former Chief of Staff John Kelly confirmed that Trump had, in fact, used both slurs on the French trip. 

What is beyond doubt is that the language of losers and winners has long been Trump’s characteristic benchmark for evaluating humanity, the trumpian equivalent of Jesus’s sheep and goats. In interviews, social media posts and rally speeches, loser has been his insult of choice.

Is church bureaucracy demonic?

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Former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has made a rather startling remark about Church bureaucracy. He was in a conversation at Unherd about evil and the demonic in culture—especially “the erosion of standards of truthfulness in public life and the normalisation of violence in word and deed”. And he was also worried about a church … Continue Reading