Categories
Africa

Aeroplanes

I flew home from Ivory Coast last night without any real stress and strain – just a straight forward trip. However, this morning the Ivorian Prime Minister’s plane was shot at with rockets as it came in to land in the city of Bouake.  Read the full story here.

Categories
Do Not Use

Lost in Untranslation

James Petticrew has just posted an interesting little article on finding good translations in English for common Christian terms like repent. If we are going to communicate the radical message of Jesus in today’s world this is definitely something we will need to do. Take a read, it’s worth the time.  HT Brian.

Categories
Politics

Goodbye Mr. Blair

I grew up in a working class family in the North East of England and as a result I have a deep down respect and affection for the labour party – even though these days, I vote LibDem. In 1997 when Tony Blair became prime minister, I was delighted and I continued to defend him […]

Categories
Observations Reviews

Rock and Roll Mountains

Some Saturday evening in an the upstairs room of a pub in Sunderland in early 1977. The disco music stops, and wonder of wonder, those haunting guitar notes and the gentle sound of the flute starts up – and immediately the floor clears of people who just want to ‘strut their funky stuff’. Amongst the […]

Categories
Africa Bible Translation Church: World

Kouya News

I flew into Abidjan yesterday for my second visit in six months. The city has changed a great deal since we left it in 2000, the civil war means that there are far fewer expatriots around – the SIL centre which used to be such a hive of activity is now depressingly quiet – my […]

Categories
Christian Life Observations

Out of Context Worship Songs

Surprisingly the post that has received the most comment or response lately is the one about worship songs.  But far be it from me to tread an easy path and I’ll once more go where fools fear to tread and say some words about a Matt Redman song: Blessed Be Your Name. Before you start […]

Categories
Observations

Chastity Ring

British schoolgirl Lydia Playfoot has been banned from wearing her chastity ring in school; a story which has made most of the mainstream media over the last few days. (BBC story here.) I must admit that my thoughts on this story are a little bit mixed. I agree with Andrew that it seems a little […]

Categories
Mission

Missional Preaching

One of the best articles I’ve seen on preaching in a long while comes from Brian’s blog. Here are a couple of extracts to whet your appetite. The communicator in missional preaching stands between the Church and World. This is the point of missional engagement. The God of mission is always moving toward the world […]

Categories
Observations

Signs of the Times

Our phone line is down, but I only discovered this when our broadband connection was not working well and I tried to phone the service provider.  These days our phone line is used far more for internet than it ever is for voice calls. Mind you, I don’t understand how the internet connection can work […]

Categories
Church: World Mission

Mapping World Mission.

One of the presentations here at ICCM was on the mission mapping project based at www.worldmap.org . Hidden a little more deeply in the site is an interactve map which can have various layers switched on and zoomed in and out like Google Earth. For example start here, tick the box for the Bible Translation […]