Categories
Bible & Mission

Hearing the Gospel Once or Twice?

No one has the right to hear the Gospel twice while there remains someone who has not heard it once. (Oswald J. Smith) This is the second post in what may become a series on famous sayings about Christian mission (the first one is here). This quote by Smith is one that turns up in […]

Categories
Do Not Use

The Great North Run

Last weekend, Sue and I drove up to Newcastle so that I could take part in the Great North Run, which is billed as the biggest half-marathon in the world. I did fairly well in a sort of tubby, middle-aged way. My time was two hours, twenty six minutes (and fifty one seconds) and I […]

Categories
Do Not Use

Bible and Mission Links 9

Over the last couple of weeks there have been some interesting blog posts on the issue of reading the Bible in oral and post-literate societies. With his usual subtlety, David Ker proclaims that Minority Langauge Bibles are An Endangered Species. I wish I could come up with snappy blog titles like that: the content is […]

Categories
Africa Mission Observations

Cities, Culture, Identity and Mission

I remember a university lecturer in Abidjan telling me that when left the city of Abidjan, he felt as though he was leaving Côte d’Ivoire all together. For him, the cosmopolitan city with its sky scrapers and supermarkets, not the rural majority, was the real Ivory Coast. For my translator colleagues and I, the opposite […]

Categories
Mission

Reading the Bible With the Global Church

Reading the Bible with the Global Church View another webinar from Wycliffe Bible Translators

Categories
Do Not Use

What Does The Bible Mean?

Tonight I am going to be lecturing on ‘How Do Other Cultures Read the Bible: Insights from the Worldwide Church’. Come along if you are in the High Wycombe area.  One of the points of my lecture is that people from different cultures come to the Bible with different backgrounds, asking different questions and with […]

Categories
Observations

Barnabas

This is a sermon I preached at Chinnor Congregational Church at a service celebrating the work of my colleague Ann Long. Ann was the Wycliffe administrator who took care of Sue and I before we went to Africa, and years later became the head of HR while I was director in Ivory Coast and latterly, […]

Categories
Do Not Use

Some Good Links

Of late, a good deal of what I have been doing is of the writing and creative variety. This means I’ve had very little by way of creative thought left over for blogging. Though I rather hope that all of this thinking and writing at work will produce something blogworthy at a later date. Anyway, […]

Categories
Do Not Use

Language and Bible Translation

This twenty minute video from the excellent Joel Hoffman is well worth a watch. It is funnier than most linguistics lectures and is certainly challenging and uncomfortable.