This is a half-baked response to someone who got in touch with some questions after reading Why the missional church must also be prophetic:

One thing I’ve noticed, not only in your writing but across much of the missional literature I read, is that the insights can often feel quite abstract or technical. They’re biblically and theologically grounded, but sometimes hard to translate into tangible action. Two questions came to mind as I read: What are some concrete examples of how your missiological model is being/can be lived out today? And how might a small group of people longing to embody this vision begin in their own local context?

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Given the importance that the Shema would acquire for Jewish religious practice in the rabbinic period and has had for christology among Pauline scholars in the last thirty years, it is remarkable that it is so rarely quoted or discussed, on its own terms, in the literature of second temple Judaism… ()
The publication of a reconstructed “Hymn of Babylon” has been in the news. The text of the hymn has been assembled from a number of cuneiform tablets from the Sippar library with the help of AI. The hymn is incomplete; it would have been about 250 lines in length, roughly two-thirds has been… ()
This is rewrite of a post from last year just to update the details, with some changes of perspective and emphasis. I’ll be honest. It’s in part a sneaky—but not unprincipled—way to get people to consider signing up for one or other of the programmes and projects that I’m involved in. Other… ()
There seems to be a lot of talk these days about reversing the decline of the West as a formerly Christian civilisation. Here’s an example that I happened to come across. The aim of the UK-based Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) is “to draw on our moral, cultural, economic, and spiritual… ( | 1 comment)
We don’t talk a lot about the “second death” in church, I know. At least, not in our church. I ended up down this rabbit hole—really, a small dead-end off the sprawling warren of New Testament apocalyptic thought—thanks to some helpful comments about the use of the expression in the Aramaic… ( | 3 comments)
When Paul says that God put forward the death of Jesus as—in whatever sense—an “atonement” (Rom. 3:25), he has in mind specifically the salvation of the Jews. ()
The Christ encomium in Philippians 2:6-11 is usually divided into two parts: humbling in 2:6-8 and exaltation in 2:9-11. But here I want to suggest that once it has become apparent to onlooking Greeks that Christ Jesus, for all his god-like wisdom and powers, was human, no more remarkable than a… ()