My Talks
gives you a selection of my public teaching -
Past Topics 3
The Paradox of Human Weakness
- We are more fruitful in life than we realise when we feel low and spent and, for all we know, less fruitful than we imagine when we are feeling great. How else can God’s strength be made perfect in our weakness?
The Experience Of Exile
- The Bible contains a stark example of crushing defeat and of the attempt to come to terms with this; it is a fertile source of thinking for a perplexed modern Church.
The taste of defeat is a sobering experience.
Recruitment Drive
- While modern job descriptions expect ever more unrealistic standards, Jesus continues to take us as we are; knowing what he can make of us. The British are renowned for their gift of understatement but this may be changing.
The Messenger
- How do we run with the baton of faith a previous generation has thrust into our hand? There has been much talk about intentional evangelism in Church circles recently. In a way the term intentional evangelism is meant to distinguish it ....
The Joseph Saga
- With the wrong tone of voice, it can sound trite to talk of the redemptive power of human suffering, but there is no denying the credibility of Joseph as a witness to this belief.
The Manefesto
- Many people have not read the words of Jesus. The easy recourse is to blame them for their carelessness; the harder task is to turn his script into the unwritten prose of our daily lives.
The Thrill Of The Chase
- In the case of David and Saul in the cave, we see a stronger power at work than all the weaponry used to defeat evil in modern storytelling. Many of us have recurring nightmares in life. One of mine is taking a maths exam without ....
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Building Sandcastles And Living In Them
- It is human nature to cut corners, to try and get away with as little as we can. God values human freedom so much, he allows us to do this, but there is always a reckoning.
The Backlash
- If we permit our relationships to be mediated digitally in the future, we may be drawing the kind of veil over our faces we are critical of some cultures for doing in practice.
Pigs Might Die
- When people present themselves turbulently before God, his work for them may have a raw, untamed quality about it which mirrors theirs. What happens when God moves in power? That we have to stop and think this answer ....