This past week I went to my first Acts29NJ church planters conference at Emergence Church, Totowa NJ about 18 – 20 minutes from where I grew up. The plenary and discussions got my mind working as I sought to apply what I learned from these planters and what I have experienced in ministry these 22… Read More Musical Tone
2013 is the year the Episcopal Church, well, The Diocese of New Jersey anyway, has discovered reading the Bible. I was thrilled to hear the presentation in our minister’s meeting of last September because the reading and particularly the hearing of the Bible preached is God’s primary means of grace. The cycle of local ministry… Read More Robert M. McCheyne and The B-I-B, L-E
The second phase of my praying life was in and after my conversion. It was a glorious response to what my new pattern revealed to me at that time. I don’t have the exact day, but there was a time as I prayed out the latest crisis and to put if fairly crudely all the… Read More This Praying Life, Phase 2
No, not the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge held by Isaac Newton and more recently by Stephen Hawking, but another “Lucasian” chair. This one is at St. Helen’s, Bishopgate and cheekily named by me for its long time Rector, Dick Lucas. St Helen’s, Bishopsgate is an Evangelical Anglican Church (Church of England) in the… Read More A Lucasian Chair
My return to a life of prayer started slowly in the beginnings of my conviction of sin and culminating in my conversion in 2007-08. When I say, “I started slowly,” I mean my understanding of what prayer truly is. What is prayer? Prayer is the act of forging a connection between two specific points: our… Read More This Praying Life, Phase 1
On this 350th anniversary of the Great Ejection, when the Puritans were ejected from the Church of England, I pulled down a volume of Thomas Manton, the ejected rector of St. Paul’s, Covent Garden. Of his influence, the First Bishop of Liverpool J.C. Ryle wrote, “If ever there was an English divine who must be classed… Read More Black Bartholomew’s Day