Seven up…

1) Is there forgiveness for Liam Neeson’s sin? – It was fascinating to see the response to Liam Neeson’s ‘confession’ in the media this week. Striking to see the way it reveals a world that has little confidence room for grace. As Alan Jacobs has said, “When a society rejects the Christian account of who we are, it doesn’t become less moralistic but far more so, because it retains an inchoate sense of justice but has no means of offering and receiving forgiveness.”

2) The Most Attractive Quality in a Leader – I’d not heard this phrase before, but there’s something in it. Really challenging and stresses the need for spiritual formation, particularly in a social media age.

3) Dwell Richly course – This 5 session course looks like a brilliant free resource. It’s designed to equip local church music teams to lead others in singing the gospel, from the team at Music Ministry UK.

4) Preaching: Making it Personal – I’m enjoying this punchy series on preaching from Ray Evans. This is a simple tip about how we choose to phrase our ‘points’ in preaching, but it can have a big impact in how our preaching is heard.

5) Michael Green (1930-2019) – I never had the privilege of meeting Michael Green, but his great influence as a person and evangelist has been evident in the many and varied tributes that have emerged since his death on Wednesday. Here are a couple of more notable ones: from his friend J John, and from Michael Ots, who more recently worked with him on various ‘mission weeks’.

6) Digital Devotions? – Helpful interview with Andy Geers, the founder of PrayerMate, a hugely popular app that aims to help and support you in your prayer life.

7) The Man Who Wrote Most of Wikipedia – Named amongst TIME magazine’s most influential people on the internet, this is a fun little interview with someone you’ve probably never heard of, Steven Pruitt.

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Seven up…

1) Why Are Young People Pretending to Love Work? – There can be something of a fetishisation of productivity, and maybe that’s inevitable in a hyper-connected age.

2) The Whole Counsel of God – Oli Tucker has done some number-crunching on which parts of the Bible are preached most often in evangelical churches across the UK. In other words, to ask the question in reverse, where are our Bible blind-spots and our apparent ‘no-go areas’. The results make for interesting – and sometimes surprising – reading.

3) Foreign secretary launches Christian persecution review: The launch of this review is surely a positive development, conducted by the Bishop of Truro who noted that Christians are on the receiving end of 80% of religious persecution. That said, others have lambasted the Government for ensuring the review will effectively be ‘toothless’.

4) The train wreck that was the New Atheism – Interesting take on Hitchens, Dawkins, Dennett, Harris & co., from a self-identifying atheist.

5) Digital millennials and the Bible – Haven’t got my teeth into this yet, but this free-to-download report from Bible Society, Barna Group, and the CODEC Research Centre at Durham University will make for a decent read.

6) The State of Meetings – Doodle, i.e. those nice website people who help us communicate with each other about when we have free time in order to arrange to fill it with new meetings, have interviewed over 6,500 professionals across the UK, Germany and the USA and produced a report on what makes meetings work and what makes them not work. Some of it’s hardly rocket science, but there’s much in there that’s an important reminder.

7) Giant Mirrors. Ocean Whitening. Here’s How Exxon Wanted to Save the Planet – For something a bit different, this is kind-of-commendable-kind-of-crazy. A group of Exxon scientists came up a with bunch of fairly bonkers ideas to end climate change (none of which included reducing our dependence on fossil fuels). Full marks for creativity…

Seven up…

1) What stops people believing? Some informal market research – Jeremy Marshall shares from his own experiences of talking to people about the Christian faith.

2) Pink is for Death: New York Abortion Laws – This week NY state significantly expanded ‘abortion rights’, meaning that right upto just before birth, as, one critic put it, “the ‘attending physician’—in real life, very often an abortionist with a financial stake in the decision—can always say that in his medical judgment, the abortion was necessary to preserve the woman’s emotional ‘health,’ especially considered in light of her ‘familial’ situation.” Though there is real forgiveness available for those who have been part of abortions, as Christians we hold that the image of God is stamped on all – those outside and inside of the womb. It was horrific to see the way this was celebrated. Of course, as Francis Schaeffer showed, such developments aren’t a surprise once a culture has asserted atheistic foundations. And in this video Rachel Jankovic challenges us for using very similar ‘me first’ thinking within Christian culture.

3) Interactive Martin Luther King Jr. Speech – After MLK day this week, you might enjoy this interactive page weaving audio and images from the I Have A Dream speech, with context and history from the event – produced by a dedicated team from Stanford University.

4) Letter to House of Bishops re: their Transgender Pastoral Guidance – A growing and unprecedented number of people have signed this letter to the House of Bishops urging them to “revise, postpone or withdraw” the ‘Pastoral Guidance’ they issued just before Christmas, and spelling out a number of critical concerns with the document. The signatories include over 800 clergy, including area deans, archdeacons and retired bishops – and myself – as well as 700 lay members, including members of General Synod, Church Wardens and PCC members. As Ian Paul has said, “this is an area of debate that people are very cautious about commenting on. The fact that so many, from a wide range of traditions in the Church, have been prepared to ‘put their heads above the parapet’ is an indication of the strength of concern expressed here.”

5) Two questions to help your meetings work – Always good to be regularly made to think about how we do meetings – after all, most of us have enough of them! Thanks Chris Green.

6) Success and the Church Planter: A Response to This American Life – The popular secular podcast This American Life recently aired an episode looking at the rise of church planting in the US (this was after another podcast, Start Up, began a series following an individual church plant). But as this response article suggests, “perhaps Christians should take time to consider, lament, and repent” of the ways in which we have let the church-planting phenomenon at times become married “to American capitalistic ideals, creating a syncretism in the church that allows us to be evaluated by a secular audience as the “Christian version of Silicon Valley.” Some helpful checks.

7) Why Am I So Proud When I Finish a Candle? For something a bit different, I enjoyed this brief musing on millennial life.