Precious are the times when a classic hymn transfixes you. One did this week. Under pressure for a sermon draft deadline, my head was down and the fingers moving across the keyboard as iTunes played a shuffle of songs behind. That’s when I heard Anglican John Newton’s 1779 hymn, “I Asked the Lord that I… Read More I Asked the Lord that I Might Grow
There are times in a regular pattern of study in God’s word and in a regular pattern of prayer that brings together who God is in his holiness and my deep and desperate need in my sinfulness, to see afresh the amazing grace and mercy in our Savior’s bloody sacrifice done for me as a… Read More Man A Nothing
I read a blog by Brian Croft the other day who asked some questions concerning our assumptions on decline that got me thinking. Like him the more I hear the push “to overcome” the “plateau or decline” the more I pause and think of scenarios where a church’s decline in numbers is not necessarily a… Read More Decline and…
This is a tale of two Richards: George Richards and Richard Rohr. George Richards was a minister in the Reformed Church in the USA in the late teens/early twenties of the last century. He was the chairman of the American Council on Organic Union, what became the twentieth-century ecumenical movement. Richard Rohr is a present-day… Read More A Tale of Two Richards
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
The Vicar's Garden 