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Observations Politics Theology

Darkness and Light

The British press have, rightly, been full of reports about the death of 10 Aid workers, including one British doctor, in Afghanistan over the weekend. The ten who died worked for a Christian Charity, the International Assistance Mission. IAM is a humanitarian organisation which has worked inside Afghanistan for forty years providing healthcare to people […]

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Church: World

Britain Doesn’t Want to Understand the Bible

The Independent reports an interesting survey which was carried out on behalf of the Centre for Biblical Literacy at St. John’s Durham. The public is widely ignorant of the stories and people who provide the basis of Christianity, a survey has found, despite 75 per cent of respondents owning a copy of the Bible. The […]

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Musing on General Themes

A Non-Conformist in an Anglican Church

Since we came to live in High Wycombe, Sue and I have been worshipping at Christ Church in Flackwell Heath.  We initially started going there because we have a few friends who are involved in the Church (we were at Bible college with the vicar). This is the first time I have regularly worshipped at […]

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Christian Life

Religion and Public Service

After Caroline Petrie’s suspension for offering to pray for a patient and her subsequent reinstatement, there are a number of other cases of problems for Christians in public service. According to the Telegraph, teachers could be disciplined for discussing relgion with their pupils. I’m always slightly suspicious of ‘could be’ news stories, because there is […]

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Observations

This Christianity Stuff Is Serious

The British media has been convulsed with stories about Creationism over the last few days. But while questions of origins are important, it is the way is the power of the Gospel to transform lives and help people to face the most heartbreaking parts of life that we should really be focussing on. A remarkable […]

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Christian Life

Black, White and Grey

Sometimes life is not as simple as we would like it to be, but human beings like to push things into simple black and white categories, when sometimes they are actually many shades of grey. This is something that we Evangelical Christians can be especially guilty of as this excellent (if a little long) post […]

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Church: World Theology

The Gospel and Culture: the homeless Gospel

A few days ago, I posted a short piece on the Gospel and Culture with five bullet points. I want to unpack each of these points in a series of posts over the next wee while, starting (somewhat strangely) with the first point: The original language and culture of the Gospel are not sacred… this […]

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Church: UK

The Future of Christianity Down Under

For Australia day, a number of erudite people have posted things about the future of the church in Australia – apparently this is a synchro-blog. I found Hamo’s post very well worth reading, if more than a little depressing. I know it may sound as though I lack faith, but I believe that what he […]

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Theology

Circular Reasoning

There is an interesting post over at Think Christian reflecting on the way that we often use circular reasoning to defend the Christian faith. The message of the Bible is true – we know this because the Bible says so… If people don’t believe in the Bible in the first place this sort of thing […]

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Christian Life

Are We Scared of Christmas?

I don’t mean scared of Christmas in the sense of worrying about how much it will all cost, or recovering from the annual fight to get round the supermarkets as people lay in enough food to survive the siege of Leningrad despite the fact that the shops will only be closed for a day or […]