Every so often, The Good Book Company make available digital versions of one of their books at no charge. At the moment (April 2026) it’s Compared to Her: How to Experience True Contentment by Sophie de Witt – exploring our struggles with ‘Compulsive Comparison Syndrome’ and applying gospel truths to help us find true contentment.
The book is available in exchange for an email address here.
‘Resilient Faith’ explores findings ‘from a 2-year project exploring the shape and impact of their religious faith on millennial Christians living in Northeast England’.
Ruth Perrin builds on her earlier (2020) research on the faith lives of millennials ‘by examining the ongoing faith journey of that demographic group through the next decade’.
Six themes emerged from their accounts:
1. Maturing Millennial Faith: The desire to follow Jesus
2. How Faith Helps: The desire for hope and a future
3. Faith and Parenthood (or not): The desire for family
4. Faith and Friendship: The desire for deep connection
5. Millennials and Church: The desire for community
6. Faith and Purpose: The desire to bring about change
The report contains materials to facilitate discussion with millennials and consider practical implications from the findings.
See here for more details.
Every month, The Good Book Company make available digital versions of one of their books at no charge. This month (June 2025) it’s Beautifully Distinct: Conversations with Friends on Faith, Life, and Culture, edited by Trillia Newbell, which is available in exchange for an email address here.
Every month, The Good Book Company make available digital versions of one of their books at no charge. This month (February 2025) it’s Being the Bad Guys: How to Live for Jesus in a World That Says You Shouldn’t, by Stephen McAlpine, which is available in exchange for an email address here.
Every month, The Good Book Company make available digital versions of one of their books at no charge. This month (January 2025) it’s Life with Jesus: A Discipleship Course for Every Christian, by Tim Chester, which is available in exchange for an email address here.
Last year, our church bought each adult (100 or so) a copy of this book and we worked through its Bible passages in a Sunday morning preaching series, using the questions in the book in small groups during the week. It worked really well for us. It served as a great primer for newer Christians and a good ‘reset’ button for others who have already been round the block a few times.
Among other items, the Centre for Public Christianity has posted a ‘Life and Faith’ interview (here) with Elizabeth Oldfield on her book, Fully Alive: Tending to the Soul in Turbulent Times.
‘In this interview with Life & Faith, Elizabeth talks about “steadiness of soul” in an increasingly chaotic world and what it means to live in a small, intentional community or “micro monastery” that can fit 18 people around the dinner table. The conversation also covers how Elizabeth has managed to cultivate a space for profound chats across social divides in the podcast The Sacred, and what it meant for Elizabeth to flout careerist dogma and quit her stable, secure job to rest and lean into a different way of life.’
Every month, The Good Book Company make available digital versions of one of their books at no charge. This month (June 2024) it’s Be True to Yourself: Why It Doesn’t Mean What You Think It Does (And How That Can Make You Happy) by Matt Fuller, which is available in exchange for an email address here.
Every month, The Good Book Company make available digital versions of one of their books at no charge. This month (July 2023) it’s Dream Small: The Secret Power of the Ordinary Christian Life by Seth Lewis, which is available in exchange for an email address here.
Every month, The Good Book Company make available digital versions of one of their books at no charge. This month (January 2023) it’s Is This It? by Rachel Jones – a funny, honest, hopeful book which reveals the difference Jesus makes to the challenges of adulting – which is available in exchange for an email address here.
The latest Evangelical Review of Theology, published by The World Evangelical Alliance, is now online and available in its entirety as a pdf here.
Johannes Reimer
The Erosion of Church Growth through Patriarchal Leadership in Russia
Authoritarian patriarchal leadership has spawned abuse, scandal and controversy caused tragedies in churches and Christian ministries all over the world. This article highlights the pervasive problem of autocratic leadership among Russian evangelicals – explaining the historical reasons for the development of this pattern, analysing its components and urging a healthier way forward.
Elmer John Thiessen
In Pursuit of Intellectual Virtue
This article rigorously and insightfully examines three intellectual virtues – love of knowledge and truth, intellectual humility, and open-mindedness – that are essential to Christian maturity and powerful in overcoming strife, contention and polarization.
Richard L. Smith
Such a Heart as This: The Intellectual Implications of Deuteronomy 5:29
Contrary to the frequent Christian tendency to devalue intellectual pursuits, Richard L. Smith finds an emphasis on loving God with the mind throughout the Old Testament. This excerpt from his new book shows how God communicates this message through Deuteronomy.
Dennis P. Petri and Ronald R. Boyd-MacMillan
What Persecution To Endure, To Resist, or To Flee?
How to respond to persecution is a complex decision involving both principled and strategic considerations. In this article, two of the world’s leading experts on religious persecution draw on both Scripture and their considerable experience to discuss the options comprehensively.
Francis Jr. S. Samdao
On the Idea of Contextualization: Cultural Sensitivity and Catholic Sensibility
How do we present the Christian faith so as to be sensitive and accommodating to local cultures while not obscuring the non-negotiable truths of the gospel? This article, authored in an Asian context but with worldwide relevance, offers guidance on fulfilling both of those imperatives.
Israel Oluwole Olofinjana
Jesus’ Discipleship Model of Suffering and Sacrifice: Discipleship and Racial Justice
How to pursue racial justice has been a contentious issue in many places, particularly because of the allegedly radical views of some pro-justice organizations. This article takes a different approach, depicting racial justice as an implication of whole-life discipleship and proposing practical actions for Christians.
David A. Clark
Evangelical Identity Formation in Post-colonial Britain
Modern cultural changes have divided evangelicals in many parts of the world, with some urging progressive agendas and other resisting what they consider radical ideas. Using racial justice issues as an example, this article warns against both extremes and charts a course of sensitivity toward the aggrieved as part of building a more unified church.
Leah Farish
The ‘Sins of Equals’ and Racial Justice
Evangelicals believe that Scripture and the great confessions of faith remain relevant to our modern lives. This short essay demonstrates that relevance by applying a little- known passage from the Westminster Larger Catechism of 1648 to race relations.
Book Reviews
‘Everyday Faith’ is a recently-launched portal from the Church of England.
According to its website:
‘Everyday Faith offers bitesize, yet in-depth, resources on topics relevant to you, that will help you help find and follow God in everyday life. These resources will inspire, equip and encourage you in your everyday faith. whoever you are and wherever this is.’
Journeys – featuring reflections, prayers, and guidance – are designed to help users work out and express their faith in everyday life.
This forms part of the Church of England’s ‘Setting God’s People Free’ initiative, seeking to facilitate a shift in church culture to ‘enable the whole people of God to live out the Good News of Jesus confidently in all of life, Sunday to Saturday’.
You can sign up from here.
What kind of follower?, produced by the Evangelical Alliance UK, is ‘a reflective, easy-to-follow study guide to inspire every believer to have the space for honest conversations about walking with Jesus and help navigate the main challenges we face as we try and live as followers of Jesus in this generation’.
The four-session study guide can be downloaded as a pdf here, and the four accompanying films can be viewed here.
The latest issue of Word & World, a quarterly journal of theology published by the faculty of Luther Seminary, contains a set of essays on ‘Holiness and Discipleship’.
The contents and downloadable articles are available here.
The below is an excerpt from an email written for the congregation where I am one of the pastors.
A few weeks back, the BBC’s ‘Rethink’ programme asked people who they describe as ‘six great minds’ – from chef Nisha Katona to philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah – ‘to share the qualities they believe will help us weather the pandemic and thrive in the world beyond’. You can check out the feature here.
Before you read on, you might like to pause to ask yourself the question: what qualities do we need in order to live well at this time? How would you respond if they asked you?
Their answers? Compassion. Gratitude (for healthy bodies). Consistency of small actions. Engagement. Empathy. Hospitality.
I don’t know anything about the faith commitment or otherwise of those who were asked, but it strikes me that those qualities are not at all out of place with the sorts of qualities Christians would be happy to endorse.
It got me thinking about what lies behind the moral judgments of people in society. All of us, Christians and non-Christians alike, approach ethical issues from a particular way of viewing the world, or what we sometimes call our ‘worldview’. (We were thinking about this as a church on Sunday evenings before lockdown started.)
Given this, I’d like to propose that qualities such as compassion, gratitude, empathy, and hospitality make best sense from a perspective that, at the very least, resembles a biblical worldview, grounded in a God who is himself good.
Of course, it’s not true to say that non-believers don’t recognise moral values or live good lives. They clearly do. But that’s not the same as having a consistent basis for doing so.
That’s perhaps especially the case for dedicated atheists. It’s very difficult to make sense of a commitment to values in the absence of God. Where atheists hold to a view that there is nothing in the universe other than matter and energy, that we are a random collection of atoms and molecules, and that moral beliefs are pressed upon us by our evolutionary history, then nothing and no-one has any rightful claim on us and we can live as we please. One of the most famous atheists, Friedrich Nietzsche, recognised this: if there is no God there can be ‘no moral facts whatsoever’.
As Justin Brierley puts it in his book, Unbelievable?, ‘Most atheists I meet are passionate about equality and justice, so of course you don’t need to believe in God to be a moral person. The problem is that you can’t make sense of those moral beliefs without there being a God.’ The question is not whether there might be people who are good without God, but whether they have a strong-enough framework – or a coherent-enough story – in order to hold those views consistently.
The good news for our non-believing friends is that there is a story which is not only consistent with the world they long for and the values to which they aspire, but which undergirds them, and a Saviour who stands at the heart of it for when we fail.
The challenge for us as as Christians is to live as if we ourselves believe that to be case, bearing the fruit of the Spirit, living lives that point to Christ. As the writer to the Hebrews prays (13:20-21), ‘may the God of peace... equip you with everything good for doing his will, and may he work in us what is pleasing to him, through Jesus Christ, to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen.’
The below is an excerpt from an email written for the congregation where I am one of the pastors.
Last Saturday, news broke over my social media feeds that J.I. Packer was, as some in his generation might well say, ‘promoted to glory’ on 17 July 2020, a few days shy of his 94th birthday.
One of the most influential evangelical theologians of the last 70 years, tributes have steadily poured forth in the days since, with one describing him as ‘saintly and sensible, brilliant and practical, faithful and peaceable, courageous and charitable, cheerful and serene, blunt and gentle, humble and bold, submissive to Scripture and sensitive to the Spirit’.
Even those who have never heard of J.I. Packer are arguably indebted to him, along with a few other significant figures in the years following the Second World War, who – in the providence of God – defended the Christian faith during a period when it might otherwise have been overtaken by swirling currents. Packer demonstrated the credibility of evangelical expressions of faith at a time when Christians were being made to feel they were committing intellectual and spiritual suicide because of their beliefs in the sovereignty of God, the authority and trustworthiness of Scripture, and the saving significance of the death of Christ.
I was working in the Christian bookshop in Southport in 1984 when his book, Keep in Step with the Spirit, first came out. It brought some much-needed clarity and charity at a time of confusion and contention, and we sold copies in the thousands. In later years, Packer served as general editor for the English Standard Version of the Bible, which many in our church use, a role he described as ‘the most important thing that I have ever done for the Kingdom’.
But the book for which he is most well-known, and which is rightly hailed as a ‘classic’ is Knowing God, first published in 1973. I pulled my copy off the shelf earlier today and a card fell out, reminding me that it was a gift from a friend on the date of my baptism (12 September 1982).
I confess I didn’t understand all of it when I first read it, but it was rich, and there was no escaping its central message – knowledge about God is no substitute for knowing God himself. As Packer says early on in the book: ‘if we pursue theological knowledge for its own sake, it is bound to go bad on us [...] Our aim in studying the Godhead must be to know God himself better. Our concern must be to enlarge our acquaintance, not simply with the doctrine of God’s attributes, but with the living God whose attributes they are.’
I needed that prompt at the start of my Christian life, and I need it still. Perhaps you do, too. Perhaps we need it as a church, given that we have just finished a series on ‘What’s so great about God?’, exploring some of the attributes of God. How easy it would be to fall into the trap of thinking that what really matters is knowledge about God, rather than knowledge of God. Packer’s advice, still good today, is that ‘we turn each truth that we learn about God into matter for meditation before God, leading to prayer and praise to God’.
Leaving the last word to him: ‘Godliness means responding to God’s revelation in trust and obedience, faith and worship, prayer and praise, submission and service. Life must be seen and lived in the light of God’s Word. This, and nothing else, is true religion.’
The below is an excerpt from an email written for the congregation where I am one of the pastors.
Like me, you’re probably listening to updates from the government, wondering what we can do this week that we weren’t allowed to do last week. Indeed, there has been some lifting of restrictions in recent days, and we’ll continue to monitor their implications for us as a church, especially in terms of when and how we might be able to gather again. For the most part, though, a return to ‘normal’ (remember that?) still seems a fair way off. In our more honest moments most of us sense that to be the case.
As a result, it’s easy to feel betwixt and between at this time – neither one thing nor another, neither where we were when the year started or where we hope we might be when the year ends.
As unsettled as we might feel during this season, we are not the first to walk this path. And we might be encouraged to know that God has worked through such circumstances in the past.
In the book of Exodus, after their deliverance from Egypt and their escape through the sea, God’s people enter the wilderness. It’ll be another two months before they arrive at Mount Sinai where God will make a covenant with them. Meanwhile, the wilderness is an ‘in-between’ place, a transitional moment where the people stand on the boundary of something new, the next chapter in the story of God’s dealings with them and the world they will be called to serve.
But the wilderness is not a place to mark time or to circle the runway. Nor is it a moment for them to grit their teeth and get by. It’s a place of formation. It’s during this period that they are to trust that the God who rescued them is the God who will provide for their daily needs (literally their ‘daily bread’ in the form of manna). It’s in the wilderness that these former slaves learn the rhythm of work and rest, set in place at creation. Their service to Pharaoh has been replaced by their service to God, and growing into their identity as God’s people will require living a different way. In addition, while they were largely passive in the destruction of the Egyptian army, it’s in the wilderness that they have to fight new enemies, showing that they’ll need to take a more active role in events going forwards.
In short, it’s in the wilderness that the God who delivers his people also trains them, forming them into a ‘holy nation’ (Exodus 19:6) who will obey him and represent him to a watching world.
Perhaps for us, too, this is a time to grow our trust in the Lord’s care and provision, a time to reflect on how he is training us to live differently, a time to grow in loving our neighbour as ourself.
So keep listening to those updates from the government. It’s right for us to want to come through this period, to get to the next chapter! Nevertheless, it’s good to remember that God is still at work meanwhile – in us and through us – conforming us to the image of his Son, our Lord Jesus Christ.
