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Travels, Part 1
I was born in the city of Leicester, in the English Midlands, on a street that looked a bit like Coronation Street. My family came from working class or artisan roots; my grandfather on my mother’s side was a skilled mechanic and general fix-it man, and my grandmother worked for one of the local shoe… Continue reading
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Secure Leadership can be Flexible
For the past couple of weeks the daily readings in the BRF ‘New Daylight’ notes have been written by my friend David runcorn, and they’ve been a real joy to read and ponder. This morning, though, I was struck by something in the passage that wasn’t in David’s notes. In 1 Samuel 11.13, after the… Continue reading
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Inherit the Earth
This song was inspired by the hymn ‘When a Knight Won His Spurs’ by Jan Struther (lyrics here). I was reading the lyrics recently and reflecting that most of these knights would have been rich aristocrats, and that got me thinking… Inherit the Earth (tune ‘Stowey’ [‘When a Knight Won His Spurs’]) When a man… Continue reading
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It’s September, but December is Coming Fast
On December 31, I will step down as rector of St. Margaret’s Anglican Church in Edmonton, and I will also retire from full time ministry in the Anglican Church of Canada. Both of those roles have been long term commitments for me. I started work in this parish on Feb 1, 2000, so I will… Continue reading
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‘God is Nice, and He Likes Me’
I first read Adrian Plass’ book The Sacred Diary of Adrian Plass aged 37¾ in 1987, and I loved it. The humour was wicked in the best sense of the word, and the implied criticism of a certain segment of British evangelicalism was very applicable to some aspects of the religious subculture I was inhabiting… Continue reading
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From Rejection to Affirmation: My Personal Journey
Cross-posted to Inclusive Evangelicals. I came to faith in my early teens in a church celebrating a charismatic awakening. It was very exciting and life-giving. A few years later we moved to Canada and there, aged 17, I entered the Church Army Training College in Toronto, Ontario and trained as evangelist. It was a very… Continue reading
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Evangelical and Inclusive
Cross-posted to ‘Inclusive Evangelicals‘. This is a revised and expanded edition of a piece I wrote some years ago. Before this website went live, we had a conversation about what we should call it. Several alternatives were proposed and discussed; words like ‘affirming’ and ‘generous’ and ‘blessing’ were floating around for a while, but eventually… Continue reading
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What I Learned from Ted Lasso
We’re in the UK right now, enjoying some time with family and friends after a four and a half year Covid break. We haven’t actually done a lot of TV watching, but last night we did manage to take in the last episode of ‘Ted Lasso‘. I have to admit, I shed a tear or… Continue reading