What a treat it was for me.
Last week, Michael Card performed a concert in Paignton, on his only stop in the South West. Michael is for me, as I know he is for so many others, a shaper and discipler in the Christian faith.
Meeting Michael Card
Come and worship him with your wounds, for he is wounded too
A Communion Liturgy
The Communion Table is a drama.
Jesus tells us that he was broken for us and died for us.
The bread, like his body, is broken.
The wine, like his blood, is poured out.
Jesus has said a great Divine ‘YES’ to everyone, everywhere.
And when we eat this bread, and drink this wine, we say ‘YES’ to Jesus.
The Way of Mercy and Reinstatement
“The Church is not interested in spiritual mediocrity. It’s calling people to sainthood, to be a saint means to be heroically virtuous. The family is a school of virtue, a school of sanctity, it’s meant to make us saints. We’re not interested in a dumbed down or a dialled down ideal. … And as anyone in the pastoral life know, people struggle to attain this level.
A Season with Donald Capps
This autumn I am wading into the intriguing work of the late Professor Donald Capps, starting with the following three works, reviews to follow in due course:
Pastoral Care and Hermeneutics
The basic idea of this book derives from Paul Ricoeur’s view that since texts and meaningful human actions are sufficiently similar, methods and theories developed for interpreting texts may also be used for interpreting human actions. Donald Capps applies this view to the broad range of pastoral actions and, in the process, formulates a unique and helpful hermeneutical model of pastoral care. Capps maintains that such a model can be extremely useful for understanding what a particular pastoral action means to those involved in it, and for evaluating its effects on these persons.Visit Coventry because I was born there!
Every human being is born with such a narrow view of the world and we all have to learn to broaden our horizon. This is equally true for people when they become Christians. A Christian is a person-becoming-an-adult, a “child of God” with ‘L-Plates’ front and back. We are serially myopic in our vision of the world and we need help.
Abandon Us Not – a prayer for a sick friend
In his book ‘The Aramaic Sayings of Jesus’ Basil Fletcher draws out what he calls the “sublime simplicity, poetic perfection and deep human quality of the words of Jesus…” that somehow become hazy when translated into Greek, and from which come the English translations.
For this post, I want to draw out just one element of Fletcher’s insights from ‘The Lord’s Prayer’ – the line: “Lead us not into temptation.”
A Magnificent Flaw
“It is not the gift- and skill-sets – the intelligence and imagination, the range of reading, the elegance and wit – that separate the great theologian from the good one. The difference lies not in the brilliance but the defects. It takes a magnificent flaw to make a great theologian.”
