The Sunday Refill – 7 Links for Your Weekend (2/10/16)

If you’re still coming to terms with the Sam Allardyce controversy, is it just a coincidence that Mary Berry stepped down from Great British Bake-Off the week before?! Yep, I think someone’s given her a tip-off and she’s been lining herself up. Odd prospect in many ways, but I tell you what, the half-time refreshments would be fantastic.

Anyway, here’s 7 other links from this week to hopefully provide a bit more edification than the last paragraph…

1) Yes, You Should Say Something: Overcoming Awkwardness with Grieving People – Some wise and pastoral advice for responding to those going through suffering from Nancy Guthrie.

2) Sneaking past the dragons: how to share the gospel in a suspicious world – I recently interviewed Nate Morgan-Locke, co-writer & co-presenter of the new resource Life Explored. Here he shares particularly about the value of story as an age-old means to ‘sneak past the dragons’.

3) How I use Evernote as a pastor – If you’ve never come across Evernote, Chris Green reckons it’s got potential to rock your world. Or something.

4) 5 Tips That Will Definitely Make You a Better Communicator – Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t so much about the process of faithfully exegeting a biblical text. But I reckon it still has some useful and simple advice about communication more generally to take on board.

5) You Know You’re Really Preaching the Gospel When… If we’re involved in any teaching or preaching ministry then I assume we can take it as read that we all want to be ‘faithfully preaching the gospel’. But how do we know that we are? Dave Harvey  has a crack at suggesting some (perhaps surprising) indicators…

6) Why is this photo so weird to look at? Did you see the photo this week of Hillary Clinton standing in front of a group of women taking selfies? And then did you see a gazillion people labelling it as a sad sign of our times on social media? Caroline O’Donoghue dares to ask what exactly was wrong with it in the first place. After all, haven’t we always been into self-documentation. Convinced? If you want more thoughts on selfies, then I have what I hope is a fair and stimulating chapter called ‘I Selfie Therefore I Am: Putting Me In The Frame’ in Filtered Grace – available for free download here.

7) On “Engaging Culture”: How Culture and Entertainment Is Different than Air – ‘Cultural engagement’ is something you increasingly hear Christian leaders talking about – both positively and negatively. But what does it mean? After all, is culture bad? Is culture good? And what does it even mean to engage it anyways? If you want a witty and persuasive introduction to some of the current thinking and debate on this issue, then you’ve got to take a few minutes out to read this by Ted Turnau, author of the excellent Popologetics.

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