Scholarship • Serving • Ministry – Ian Paul
At some point today, someone reading this will be the one millionth page view on this blog! Mostly since June 2013, I have written 544 posts, comprising around 650,000 words, and had 10,277 comments. My first response to this is gratitude—gratitude to God for his faithfulness as I have responded to his call to write, …
In current discussions about the challenges facing the church, there is often a call for ‘strong leadership’. Sometimes this is explicit, but more often it is implicit: we need pioneering, courageous, risk-taking leaders who will help make the step-change that the church needs to address key issues. This approach raises a key pastoral, ministerial and …
Last Saturday I attended our Diocesan Synod—and came away having had a fascinating and absorbing time. (I am not sure I had ever anticipated saying that about a Diocesan Synod!) The first half of the meeting was what you might usually expect. We receive annual reports from across the diocese, the most important being the …
In the face of decline in church attendance, there is regular talk of the importance of growth—though that is accompanied by an insistence that concern for growth is not a reaction to decline, but a rediscovery that God wants to give growth, that healthy things grow naturally, and that growth is good for the church …
In doing some research on Matthew’s portrait of Jesus, I have been struck afresh by the poetic structuring of Jesus’ teaching. Noticing this raises interesting issues both about our engagement with the texts and our understanding of them, but also some questions about how the texts have come to us in their current form. A …
The latest Grove Worship booklet Accessible Baptisms introduces the Additional Baptism texts which were published at the end of last year. The author, Tim Stratford, was in parish ministry for many years, for some time in an outer estate in Liverpool, before becoming Archdeacon of Leicester in 2012. Like the best of sermons, the booklet starts …
The continuing decline in Church attendance and the apparent marginalization of Christian perspectives within the country naturally lead to the question of whether the Church should be disestablished. Does it make sense to have the life of the nation tied in to Christian belief by having a Church ‘established by law’ if so few people are actively involved in that Church, and a growing number don’t share its beliefs?
Last week, it happened. Half way through Holy Week, I finally got fed up with reciting the opening prayer in Common Worship. The offending text is as follows: Blessed are you, Lord God of our salvation, to you be praise and glory for ever. As a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief your only …
It is arguable that the greatest challenge currently facing the C of E is not to do with sexuality, not related to changes in culture and moral values, and unconnected with Church-State relations. It actually arises from a decision made around the time I started ordination training in 1989, that candidates needed ‘more experience of …
I spent most of the last two days in my first meeting of Archbishops’ Council. I think I am still processing the experience, not least because to what one person called ‘institutional vertigo’—it feels a little surreal to be considering questions of national and strategic importance, when there are few other places to experience this. …
It is often commented that ‘leadership’ is not a very biblical word, and this should be a concern not just to evangelicals (who particularly want to root their understanding in the biblical texts) but to anyone who is in a reformed or Protestant church for which Scripture is a key locus of authority. The first …
