Scholarship • Serving • Ministry – Ian Paul
Savvas Costi writes: Much delight and anticipation accompanied the news that Graham McFarlane, Senior Lecturer in Systematic Theology at the London School of Theology (LST), where I studied, was releasing another book. A Model for Evangelical Theology may not be the most exciting title (as evidenced by the look on my wife’s face when she first …
Savvas Costi writes: We’re drowning in our own personas. Our cultural mood is one where the self has thrown off all constraints in the pursuit of self-discovery, where all absolutes have been dissolved and meta-narratives deconstructed; we followed Nietzsche’s lead in thinking we could philosophise with a hammer and deconstruct the house we were living …
One of the impacts of the lockdown in response to the coronavirus has been the abandonment of church buildings, and the move to broadcast services from the homes of clergy and other lay leaders involved in leading worship. The strong guidance from the Archbishops on this has been hotly debated, and the question raised as …
Around this time of year, there comes a recurrent debate about what people are ‘really’ doing when they celebrate Christmas. A while ago, there was a programme on Radio 4 exploring the origins of the tunes of carols. For example, the tune for Good King Wenceslas was originally a spring carol celebrating the fertility of nature. It is …
Richard Rohr is a well-known and popular teacher, and his books are regularly best-sellers. Despite that, he is something of a ‘Marmite’ theologian—people either adore or loathe him. Depending on which side you come down on, you will either find his latest book, The Universal Christ (London: SPCK, 2019) a scintillating and energetic tour de force of …
Three times in the last week or so, I have received a communication from someone which says ‘I know you are very busy…’ and these have stuck in my mind. One of these said ‘I am sure you are very busy—I know that I am.’ A couple of things struck me immediately. The first, and …
At the second Festival of Theology last week, the first talk was given by Graham Hunter, Vicar of St John’s Hoxton in London. This is what he said. Introduction – Trellis & Vine I spent the second half of August this year with my wife and children in a Provencal Mas – a converted farmhouse …
With the end of the big freeze promised, the time is coming for the first pruning of Spring. I love this time of year, and have reflected from my previous years’ experience on why pruning is so important and satisfying. These truths apply to the garden and to our lives. Pruning needs confidence. You only prune …
One of the constant temptations of evangelicalism is to decide that we have all the answers and so do not need to listen very carefully to what others say. A parallel temptation is to have the same attitude to God. He has revealed himself in Scripture and has made his will evident—so surely we just …
A couple of years ago, returning from a half-term break in France, we had a tyre blow out on the autoroute and, since almost everything is closed on a Sunday in France, we had an unplanned extra day there. We stayed over in St Quentin, a town of ancient foundation which was the capital of …
What is the relationship between duty and joy—discipline and desire? Is it possible to have formal, liturgical, structured worship services in which there is also freedom and space for distinctive ministries of the Holy Spirit? Are formal liturgies themselves ‘gifts’ of the Spirit to the church for enabling our worship? Is Holy Communion ‘like the …
