Bible

How to make peace: Jeremiah 3 and 31.

Part of Jeremiah’s calling was to reach out to those living in the province of Ephraim, north of the dividing line between the southern kingdom of Judah (with its capital Jerusalem), and the northern kingdom of Israel (with its capital Samaria). The dispute between Ephraim (Joseph’s son) and Judah was an ancient one, going back …

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Sitting in Athens thinking about history

Sitting in Athens thinking about history. Anthony Sattin’s book Nomads: The Wanderers who Shaped our World is therapeutic and persuasive in its argument that the modernist telling of history represents ‘an invisible line’ through to civilisation and progress as defined in the West, to ‘people like us.’ In this idea, settledness, dominion over nature, and …

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Mission and the Wind

We’ve just spent a week in a Central Asian city famously known as “the windy city” (let the reader understand!) – and it really has been very blustery. Shutter-bangingly, tree-bendingly, dust-raisingly properly windy. So we’ve spent a week thinking about wind, and thinking about mission. They key verse we’ve been reflecting on together is John …

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The Man, The Woman and the Garden: Easter Reflections from John 20

The resurrection appearances in John’s brilliantly crafted narrative bring to poetic conclusion so many themes. There are multiple reiterated ideas from John’s gospel itself which find their climax in Chapter 20, as well as deeper underlying, intertextual, Biblical-theological ideas. Consider the significance of it being “the first day,” (20:1, 19), light and darkness (20:1), seeing …

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Belonging: The Bible’s Story of Race

I know that people are always looking for resources to help them think about issues like race, diversity and justice from a Biblical perspective. The church where I serve as Teaching Pastor has been on a journey on these issues over the last few years, that has been both hugely challenging and richly rewarding, and …

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