Latest Ideas

• Paul Grimmond
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• 1 December 2009

I have a friend who has an adolescent daughter. Surprisingly, there are moments when the relationship is more rocky road than dairy milk, if you follow me. As he described his current set of frustrations, it suddenly occurred to me that adolescence is the new black. Here are the two

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• 1 December 2009

Most of us evangelicals know that we’re not brought into God’s presence by singing songs over and over again until our eyes roll into the backs of our heads. And we know we’re not brought into God’s presence by sitting in a stone building with colourful windows. Instead, most of

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• 1 December 2009

Theodicy is the defence of God’s justice and goodness. It is something we naturally think about, and more often than not, it drives our preaching. You reach a difficult teaching of Jesus about hell, or a confronting passage of Paul’s about the role of men and women in the church, or

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• Andrew Lansdown
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• 1 December 2009

When thinking about euthanasia recently, I found myself also thinking about the samurai of ancient Japan. In particular, my thoughts turned to a book titled Hagakure (‘hidden leaves’) written in 1716 by a samurai called Yamamoto Tsunetomo.[1. Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai, translated by William Scott Wilson,

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• Simon Flinders
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• 11 November 2009

People leave churches all the time. They may do so gradually or suddenly, they may do so thoughtfully or on a whim, and they may do so with godliness or with great unholiness, but the reality is that people do leave. Pastors may not like it, but some of us

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• Kel Richards
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• 11 November 2009

Today, we think of an ‘ivory tower’ as a place where you are separated from the flow of ordinary life. We are most likely to use ‘ivory tower’ when speaking of academics—on the rather quaint notion that they only need to understand the philosophy of the later Middle Ages, or

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• Paul Grimmond
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• 1 November 2009

When Dave Cunynghame was asked to join a church planting team that was aiming to reach the disadvantaged suburb of Berkeley, little did he know what God had in store. It’s one o’clock on a 2007 February Saturday afternoon in Berkeley, one of the southern suburbs of Wollongong on

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• 1 November 2009

Briefing partner Overseas Council Australia (OCA) recently hosted Ashkenaz Asif, the Principal of Zarephath Bible Institute (ZBI) in Pakistan. In this article, Stuart Brooking, Executive Director of OCA, explains the significance of ZBI in its context. Life in Pakistan is a stark contrast to life in the western world. The

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• Phillip Jensen
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• 1 November 2009

I love puzzling over difficult parts of the Bible. I love it, for the difficulty is in my head, not on the page, and puzzling over these difficulties gives me an opportunity to change the way I think. Some years ago, a Rabbi pointed out to me that the footnotes

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• Alan Radloff
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• 1 November 2009

If I hadn’t been asked to review this book, I may not have read it. So I’m glad I was asked. Finally Alive by John Piper is simply terrific, and I suggest you grab a copy today. Piper looks at new birth (regeneration), which is when the Holy Spirit supernaturally

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