Once again news is coming out of Plateau State in Nigeria of horrendous inter-ethnic clashes. The simple analysis is that the violence is a religious conflict between Christians and Muslims. Certainly, religion plays a huge part in the situation, but the fact that the fighting is between settled, indigenous farmers (who happen to be Christian) [...]

Alan Hirsch, co-author of one of my favourite books The Shaping of Things to Come: Innovation and Mission for the 21st Century Church gave an excellent seminar on the mission of the church at a recent conference. You can watch it on video here (choose the Hirsch video, when you follow the link) . It [...]

At first glance, it seems as though Antioch marks just another step in the process of the Jesus movement becoming more open, but in fact, Antioch marks a paradigm shift: a complete break with the past. In this short passage we see two very significant things happening.

The first is that the Greek believers who started [...]

The Story of the Bible has an interesting shape. It starts talking about the relationship between God and all of humanity, tracing creation and then the fall. Then for a long, long section The Story only concentrates on one nation, one people group. And then in Acts it starts to broaden out again and by [...]

Lawson Stone has just published four superb, short essays on the hows and whys of Bible translation in the early days of the Christian era. The style is informative and also very entertaining:

So as the world increasingly spoke Latin, the Greek versions of the Bible that had become sacrosanct for most Christians became as obscure [...]