Scholarship • Serving • Ministry – Ian Paul
Vicky Beeching, Undivided: Coming Out, Becoming Whole and Living Free from Shame (William Collins, 2018) Jayne Ozanne, Just Love: A Journey of Self-Acceptance (Darton, Longman and Todd, 2018) Andrew Atherstone writes: In a remarkable symbiosis, two new autobiographies have hit the shelves from two of the Church of England’s most prominent LGBT campaigners, published within a …
The churches in the West face a major challenge of culture and discipleship. The radical changes in culture over the last 30 years or so appear to have taken society further from the values of the gospel, and despite all our efforts, both members and leaders of our churches appear to being formed deeply by …
Every time the situation in Israel-Palestine hits the news, for Christians one of the issues that emerges is whether or not the modern State of Israel is a fulfilment of biblical prophecy. The main prophetic text appealed to is the later chapters of Ezekiel, particularly Ezekiel 39. But in order to understand whether there is …
At present, there are about 850,000 people in the United Kingdom with dementia. This number is expected to rise to one million people by the year 2025. Two-thirds of people with dementia live in the community and are supported by 670,000 family carers. One in 14 people over 65 years of age has dementia, while the …
Is being a follower of Jesus primarily about experiencing and living in God’s love, or primarily about living out the disciplines of discipleship? Is it about knowing that we are loved and accepted as we are, or about the need for change and transformation on the journey from sin to salvation? Is it about allowing …
There is a general, if unspoken, sense that clergy in the Church of England (and often in other denominations too) are indispensable in the local church. And yet this actually sits at odds with the ministry of Jesus and of the early apostolic leadership. This surprising contrast is captured well by the Bishop of Chelmsford, …
Last week I posted a link to a review of Richard Rohr’s The Divine Dance, written by Fred Sanders in 2016 soon after Rohr’s book was published. Sanders is well-known as a conservative theologian specialising on the question of the Trinity, and his review was pretty scathing—leading to my (slightly) tongue in cheek heading ‘Just …
My latest Grove booklet is on How to Interpret the Bible. After exploring the four questions of genre (kind of writing), (historical) context, content and canon, I offer the following conclusion. You might by now be wondering ‘What happened to simple, believing reading of the Bible that I was taught to do when I first came …
Many ordinary readers of the Bible feel very nervous when interpretation is mentioned. For some, ‘interpretation’ means ‘making the Bible mean what it doesn’t say.’ For others, it becomes the realm of experts who are schooled in complex issues of language and philosophy and threatens to remove the possibility of reading for themselves. They are …
Ministry amongst those with memory loss, often through the onset of dementia, can be very challenging—but it is a growing aspect of life as people live longer. In the latest Grove Mission and Evangelism booklet, Steven Morris tells the remarkable story of the development of a Memory Café at his church in North Wembley. The …
Michael Lakey writes: If the literature is any guide, the work of David Jacobus Bosch constitutes for many missiologists one of the major recent theological loci of critical reflection upon the nature and ends of Christian mission.[1] A Dutch-heritage, Protestant scholar, whose adult life coincided with the apartheid era in the Republic of South Africa (RSA), …
