The Spirit of prophecy and renewal

Westbourne Grove Church, which I help to lead, is part of the Forge Sphere of churches in the south of England, which used to be part of Salt & Light, which is a network of “neocharismatic Evangelical” churches associated with the British New Church Movement.

So no surprise that the Forge summer camp at beautiful Ashburnham Place in East Sussex had some serious charismatic energy to it, boosted by rumours of a “quiet revival.”

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The parable of the rich man and Lazarus and the tale of Khamwas and Si-Osire
This is really just for fun. I was wondering whether to preach about wealth inequality next Sunday, but this is as far as I got. Jesus tells a quite elaborate story about an unnamed rich man and a poor man called Lazarus. One early manuscript gives the rich man the name Neuēs. ()
BNTS conference presentation: In the Form of One of the Pagan Gods
I was at the British New Testament Society conference this week, held at the magnificent St Patrick’s Pontifical University, Maynooth, in Ireland. This is the paper that I presented in the Divine Christology in Paul’s Letters session. It is a slightly updated summary of my argument in In… ( | 1 comment)
Speaking words of wisdom
I suspect that “fake news” is a piece of trashy political sloganeering that will blow away when the wind next changes direction. But the larger picture is troubling: digital technologies, in different ways, on different levels, are undermining our sense of what is real. Katherine Viner wrote in the… ()
The “voice of a god” and the “form of a god”
I think that something quite straightforward is going on when Paul writes that Jesus was en morphē theou—literally, “in form of god” (Phil. 2:6). English translations usually render this “in the form of God” or perhaps something like “in the nature of God.” But if there’s one thing that… ( | 2 comments)
What can we learn from “urban monasticism”?
In the Christian West, in the pre-modern world, the parish church met the religious needs of people living in the parish. It was necessitated by and sustained by a culture that had been in place, in one form or another, since the conversion of the Roman Empire under Constantine and his… ()
Between Jesus and Paul: where did it all go right?
The relationship between Jesus and Paul is much disputed. You will often hear people say that Paul turned the generous, kind, and progressive religion of Jesus into a monstrous theological and ecclesiastical system from which we are still recovering. Or that Jesus died for our sins and Paul told… ( | 14 comments)
What does it mean to be spiritual?
A narrative-historical approach brings into view the large-scale, national and civilisational events and processes that frame “theological” reflection. What it comes down to is that we cannot properly understand Jesus without taking into account the foreseen war against Rome, or understand the… ()