Find Me In The River

The final gig in God’s Great Dance Floor UK Tour kicked off last night in Edinburgh. It was beautiful, it was memorable, it was powerful, it was intimate and probably, for that reason, the best gig I’ve ever been to. Here’s a more intimate moment. Continue reading “Find Me In The River”

Into the Barn to Burn (sermon)

From Plato to Heraclitus to Paul to the Holy Spirit

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Plato’s problem is that there isn’t enough stimuli in the world around us to reinforce the knowledge-based convictions we have in our heads; we don’t experience what we know. But Heraclitus would have said 100 years before that it doesn’t matter because everything is changing constantly anyway – you can’t step into the same river twice because before your second foot touches the water the river has moved on. The river changes.

And so is our knowledge-application-gap getting smaller or is it getting bigger as we continue to ‘know’ and struggle, (if we’re all honest), to experience? Are we changing and becoming more as our knowledge tells us we should be? Specifically, are we changing to progressively experience the power of the Holy Spirit that we see in the Bible?

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God’s Green Room Introduction: Habitat Loss

INTRODUCTION

– Habitat Loss –

The reddy-brown Orangutan and her little baby drifted through the air, suspended in a
metal cage. Their beautiful faces flecked with warm, bright sunlight through small air-holes
as they swung together in the sky beneath the helicopter that carried them like a tired
pendulum. The great apes were en-route to the jungle of Borneo to be released back into the
wild to be given a fighting chance of returning to their lofty world of tree-top canopies.Continue reading “God’s Green Room Introduction: Habitat Loss”

Fight as Though For Yourself

A friend loves at all times,
    and a brother is born for adversity.

 – Proverbs 17:17 –

The bible says this is what friends do and that this is what brothers are born for.

Q) Is this your experience? A) Probably not…at least, probably not entirely.

It’s more likely that you have been hurt by your friends, vice versa, and that you have shirked the risk of taking responsibility of the adversity of a brother (or sister, obviously). Continue reading “Fight as Though For Yourself”

Dream & Interpretation: Two Lions

I had a dream a few nights ago that I recognised intuitively was Jesus speaking to me while I slept. There were two scenes in the dream that relate to my own personal life but, I believe, also to a generation of young people:Continue reading “Dream & Interpretation: Two Lions”

Ancient Missional Adrenaline

KFC Church

When I read the book of Acts, I really want to be a believer, a lover, a follower of Christ. I’m glad to be. I’m proud to be. When I go to church, I often feel like there’s something very important missing and I can be left feeling like I do when I occasionally go to KFC for some fried chicken – i.e. I’ve just eaten a bucket of it but I want to eat something else to combat that slightly empty, greasy feeling that it leaves me with. (Not that I’ve ever been to a church that I would describe as being greasy, or ‘chickeny’).

I’ve been ‘in church’ all my life so I’m not talking about looking for the mythological ‘perfect church’. (It’ll be our wedding day when we are ‘perfect’). And I absolutely agree that church certainly isn’t all, or even mainly, about our consumption and ‘being fed’. But it is a bit, isn’t it? Even when we’re ‘self-feeders’. Believers need the gospel as much as unbelievers, surely? Pastors need discipling as much as anyone else, right?

What I am talking about is the frustrating and inadequate compromise that there seems to often be in churches who excel in one major area of ecclesiology but then struggle in others. Let me give you some examples:-Continue reading “Ancient Missional Adrenaline”

Russell Brand’s ‘Manifestations of the Infinite’

It’s been another harrowing week on planet earth. The terrible atrocities in Paris and Nigeria (and elsewhere not covered by the media) have again functioned as the exclamation mark for the statement of our times – of threat, fear, violence and deceit – churned out from terrorist groups all around the world: “we will strike anywhere; you are not safe”.

I don’t know about you but I have a world-view that includes a conception of a spiritual realm – that beyond the world that we see and touch and taste and hear, there is another ‘more real’ world…the world of the infinite. This isn’t a world of confusing and sad-feeling interstellar realities, or of the actual post-code of the Lady in Black; it is an actual realm of angels and demons and of armies of both.

You may or may not believe in ghosts – I do – though not Casper ghosts or any kind of ghost that can be ‘busted’ by Bill Murray or Dan Aykroyd. I believe in a spiritual dimension comprised of a Triune God, One God in perfect oneness and yet individually knowable in Three Persons: – The Holy Ghost (The Holy Spirit), Jesus Christ the Son of God and The Father. I believe in a Triune God like this because the Bible tells me that He is so. The Bible also tells me that angels and demons (try not to hear that as a Dan Brown novel title) are a major part of the unseen spiritual realm: angelic hosts that worship God and do His will and demonic spirits that wage war against the purposes of God in heavenly places and on the earth. These are some of the ‘big stories’ from the ‘big narrative’ of the Bible.

Russell Brand

Continue reading “Russell Brand’s ‘Manifestations of the Infinite’”