There’s been a fair bit of back and forth on the web about Ross Douthat’s Bad Religion: How we became a nation of heretics. Tim Keller gives some detailed interaction with the book here and here. Although the book is obviously American in its orientation it does seem to make significant points about the decline of Christianity in the broader Western or Western-influenced culture. Discussion on its applicability to South African Christianity would be interesting.
The passing of Chuck Colson has been all over a bunch of different sites. There have been some amazing testimonies and tributes to what clearly appears to having been an amazing life. There have also been some fairly poor postmortem assessments of his life. I thought this one from the Daily Maverick was particularly bad. I’ll be honest, I’ve been rather disappointed by the unbalanced stream of reporting on religion or faith-based issues that has come from the Daily Maverick recently.
Neil Powell has a great summary of a talk that Tim Keller recently gave on the 5 things that keep his ministry strong. A very good reminder.
I enjoyed these thoughts by Daniel Kirk on how abstinence is being (wrongly) pitched in contemporary evangelicalism.
New York – Knoxville – New York. That’s been our movement over the weekend. On Friday morning at 3am we got up and flew out of Newark Airport to Knoxville, Tennessee. There we spent the weekend with folk from Cedar Springs Presbyterian. Most of the weekend was spent meeting people from the church and speaking [...]
So the blog has revived a bit with this trip to New York – I haven’t really written about much else lately. I do feel a little bit of reluctance in some ways to make this blog, as it stands, a priority. Not because I don’t think blogging is valuable and not because I’ve got [...]
Two Sundays have come and gone since I last updated you (ya – sorry about that – things have been crazy busy). A lot has happened and this post will turn into an essay if I give you all the details so I’ll pick out the highlights of the last 12 days or so. From [...]
So, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday update… Tuesday we listened to some of the intensive guys give presentations about their future plants and then we watched Tim Keller’s address at last year’s Dwell Conference, entitled ‘Dwelling in the Gospel‘. After that we had a bit of fun planning a philosophy of ministry for a simulated occasion [...]
I guess you can only appreciate Times Square (above) when you’re actually there. I think I’ve seen a hundred pictures or clips of the area but it’s quite something to see all the lit up advertising. So, yes, we were in Times Square this weekend, but let me back track a bit first… On Friday [...]
This is some of what we presented at the church planting center last Tuesday morning. We made everyone here fall in love in Cape Town.
I think I’m going to lose some weight over the course of this trip with all the walking – none of the places we need to go to regularly are right next to a subway station, we always have to walk a few blocks so I’m getting plenty of exercise (although that huge calzone pizza [...]
Ok, so these updates are not exactly daily – but there’s a lot going on that keeps us really busy so that’s my excuse. It’s Tuesday afternoon as I write this, I’m sitting in our apartment’s living room still enjoying the amazing view of Manhattan. We’ve been here for a week now and it’s still [...]
I drove through Ravensmead on the way to work a few mornings ago. It’s not my usual route but I had an early morning airport run and so the chance to drive through parts of the city that I normally don’t. You often hear people talk about places where there’s a church on every corner. [...]
The really great people at Redeemer City to City have just launched their new website which gives interested people a comprehensive view of what City to City does around the world. There are loads of great resources from Tim Keller, City to City staff members and other church planters. The site also has great videos [...]
Just a quick shout-out for my friend and colleague Lenny Long (follow him on twitter) who is taking a small bunch of people off and planting The Vine Church in the Burgundy Estate area of Cape Town. They have two main informal gatherings at the moment on Sunday morning 10am and then on Wednesday evenings [...]
On Friday Robin and I head off to Johannesburg and Durban for two weeks. The first purpose of our trip is to get a bit of rest time in. Church planting is busy work and its been full steam ahead since the beginning of the year. The second purpose is to continue raising the profile [...]
Here’s something you probably didn’t know: According to the Global World Cities Ranking, Cape Town is the 16th (level with 5 other cities) most prominent city in the world where English is the Lingua Franca (English is not necessarily the most widely spoken language in each of these cases but it is the language on which each [...]
A church planter based in Cape Town. Husband to Robin and father of Genevieve. I am captivated by the hope of the gospel and I constantly dream about seeing it at work in my city. Dream with me.
