What’s Tony Payne up to?

“I know I’ve already asked you this… but what’s your PhD topic again?”

“Do you work for Moore College now?”

“Are you still involved at Matthias Media?”

These are the three questions I’ve been asked repeatedly over the past seven months of study here at Moore College. And, in case any of you in the GoThereFor and Matthias Media communities have been wondering where I’ve been, and why my name has stopped appearing on posts in the GoThereFor feed, here are some quick answers. 

“I’m researching the theological basis of the ‘one-another edifying speech’ that the New Testament expects will be a normal part of life in the Christian community.” 

“Yes, I do work for Moore College but only very part-time—I run the Centre for Christian Living (CCL) at Moore one day a week.”

“I’m on study leave to pursue the PhD full-time, but yes I’m still involved at Matthias Media in various ways—just not day-to-day.”

So far, the study leave experiment has been enjoyable and fruitful. I’m catching up on about 20 years of reading, thinking some new thoughts (some of them hopefully useful), and making good progress on the thesis. (About the only downside has been not seeing my friends at MM every day.)

One interesting snippet from the research so far: it’s fascinating how frequently the one-another speech of Christians is spoken about in the same terms as the more authoritative speech of the apostles or other church leaders. For example, in 1 Thessalonians, the believers are told that they should ‘exhort’ or ‘encourage’ one another (4:18, 5:11) and ‘admonish’ and ‘comfort’ one another (5:14). Using the same vocabulary, Paul says that his own ministry among them involved ‘encouraging’ and ‘comforting’ them like a father (2:11-12), and that the role of the leaders of the congregation is also to ‘admonish’ (5:12). So whatever differences there are between the more authoritative, proclamatory word ministries of church leaders and the more informal, one-another word ministries of Christians generally, it seems there are also some strong similarities. Just how we should understand those similarities and differences is one of the subjects I’m digging into.

The other new thing about this year has been the chance to launch a podcast, as part of my work at the Centre for Christian Living. The very cleverly named ‘Centre for Christian Living Podcast’ comes out every 2-3 weeks, and features an interview about a topic relevant to Christian living—which means we’ve so far dealt with everything from domestic violence to the theme of ‘exile’ to the place and usefulness of the Psalms in shaping the Christian life.

If you’ve already joined the podcast revolution, you’ll know how hard it is to find well-produced, good quality, Bible-based podcasts. The CCL podcast is trying to fill that gap. And if you haven’t yet discovered what an enjoyable and time-efficient medium podcasts are for input and encouragement, give the CCL podcast a try! 

I’m very grateful for the support of Matthias Media in releasing me for this period of study leave. My only fear is that, given how impressively the team is powering on in my absence, I may well have done myself out of a job!