One of the most confusing things to someone investigating Christianity is the range of different churches that are out there. Many of them have ‘brand names’ that surely have some technical meaning that new believers don’t understand (like Baptist, Presbyterian, and Anglican). If you were to visit these different types of churches, you would see …
Have you ever heard someone say that they had prayed about an issue they were facing, and they had “a sense of peace” that a particular decision was the way to go? This internal peace is seen as confirmation that God approves of the decision being made. It sounds like a holy, Christian way to …
I just finished a fascinating book called ‘Everybody Lies: What the Internet can tell us about who we really are’ by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz. The author is an economist who specialises in what is known as ‘Big Data’, information collected from Google searches and large databases. In our world where everything is online, it is much …
No-one likes to be told that what they are doing is wrong. Most of us actively flee from conversations like this, whether we need to do the telling or we need to be told. We’d like to believe that whatever we are doing, whatever lifestyle choices we have made, they are fine. The problem is …
I forget a lot of conversations I have had in the past. I’m sure you do as well. So many interactions are critical at the time but don’t stick with you months or years afterwards. There are two exceptions to this. Conversations where someone has been harshly critical of you, and conversations where you have …
The weekly Sunday worship service at my church starts at 10am. Often about 30% of the congregation is actually there by 10am, rising to about 80% by 10:20. Some stragglers turn up as late as 10:45 on most Sunday mornings. Speaking to friends from other churches, I learnt that this kind of tardiness is not …
The Old Testament of the Bible is generally far less understood by Christians compared to the New Testament. After all, the New Testament is the climax, and we have letters which give direct teaching to us. Do this, think like this, avoid this. We know what to do with this kind of thing, while the …
Most Christian churches would claim to deliver sermons that are based on the Bible. Yet even a cursory listen of sermons from different places based on the same Bible are markedly different! Clearly what people mean by ‘Bible-based’ varies from place to place. Here are some ways you can work out if a sermon is …
In a world where ‘science’ is trusted implicitly, where actors in white coats sell us shampoo or convince us of the improvements in the latest vacuum cleaner, it can seem odd for someone to say that the Bible is true. Many just assume that science is reliable and true, and the Bible falls into some …
One foundational truth that the Bible teaches is that all people are made in the image of God. It’s right there in the first chapter of the Bible, in Genesis 1:26-27. This means that all people in some way are like God. An image of something in the ancient world could mean a statue that …