“What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.”

— Samuel Johnson

Dear Lectio Letter Readers,

If you happen to be new here, there’s a whole 102 other issues you can explore here! And I’d be over the moon if you’d consider supporting our work in deepening discipleship for those engaged in cross cultural ministry.

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As you’ll have read in the last Lectio, I’m experimenting with a new approach to this newsletter. If you’re a longtime reader, you might be wondering if it has failed due to the dearth of publishing activity.

Well, old habits die hard. ; )

I’ve cyber-surrounded myself with unfinished digital drafts, which together represent a word count that could become a hefty booklet.

I began a piece on the ascension which ended up at nearly 3000 words. Bloated and slow…

So instead of leaving you in the dark while this, not-exactly-writers-block, but maybe writers bloat (?) passes I thought I’d concoct some miscellany for your enjoyment.

I leapt about the thematic world that makes up the Lectio letter with a few cooking/kitchen tips (The perfect roast potato, the best knife setup..), a few notes from books, and some travel hacks.

So here goes.. this is not a long term vision but I do feel indebted to you kind folks out there continuing to pay attention to my small corner of the Internet.

Watching

We watched Truffle Hunters after a recommendation from a guest. It was beautifully shot sequences of vignettes around a fading culture and its relationship toward the dogs that make the hunt possible. Beautiful, fascinating but somewhat lacking the clearer narrative thread that satisfies those curious for the details.

I also watched “Don’t lets go to the Dogs tonight” which was beautifully shot, incredibly acted and heartbreakingly broken. A insight into the dysfunctional world of late Rhodesia and the lives and narratives that sought to stay.

Finally, this trailer sent to me made me keen to watch My Father’s Shadow. Released this year, it tracks a Father’s relationship through tumultuous times in Nigeria.

Book Reviews

A little late, but Im a sucker for short line book reviews like this from Andrew Wilson. Makes me wish I was more succinct. I’ll say no more.

Sometimes I feel like Judas

Joshua Luke Smith is deservedly having “a moment”. His poetry is worth your pondering;

Joshua Luke Smith

Sometimes I feel like Judas

Sometimes I feel like Moses…

Read more

9 months ago · 143 likes · 6 comments · Joshua Luke Smith

A closer look at ADHD

The conventional medical model treats attention as a resource—something you have in limited supply, like willpower or glucose. People with ADHD, in this view, have depleted tanks. They can’t sustain focus because they lack the necessary cognitive capacity.

But the attention paradox suggests a different model: attention is better understood as a relationship between a person and a task, shaped by meaning, structure, reward, and context.

We attend to what feels consequential. We attend to what we understand. We attend to what offers feedback and progression. We attend to what connects to our identity, interests, or social world. When those conditions are met, even people diagnosed with severe ADHD can demonstrate remarkable focus.

Steven Mintz

What ADHD Reveals About School, Status, and the Attention Economy

Cap, a high school student from an affluent East Coast suburb, hated taking Ritalin. “Honestly, I pretty much hated taking it,” he told researcher Paul Tough. But he took it anyway—for SAT prep, for baseball practice, for getting through school…

Read more

5 months ago · 14 likes · 2 comments · Steven Mintz

Imitating me as I imitate Christ — Four laws on Saints

I’ve been reading through Chris E.W. Green’s book of sermons entitled “All life comes from tenderness”. Growing up in classical pentecostalism, publishing books on (Barthian-ish?) theologian Robert Jenson, and blogging on patristics makes him a fascinating preacher. On a sermon given on All saints day, he pulls up Jenson’s (who is a also protestant) rules about saints and then adds some of his own. I thought they were great;

1. “the saints are not our way to Christ: He is our way to them”

2. Our communion with departed saints is not fundamentally difference from our communion with living saints

Chris Green then enthusiastically adds two more

3. the Saints aren’t our betters; they show us how good it is to be bested by God

4. the Saints know how not to get in God’s way, but they also never let God get away with anything

p. 192, All life comes from tenderness, Green

A journey of carry on bags

One of the ways to make the 6000+ mile, 17-20 hour flights we take between South Africa and Europe around 6x (3x roundtrip) a year tolerable is to be somewhat organised.

One of the ways I’ve sought to do that is to overthink about how the whole process can be maximised (while of course remaining right where I belong on a discounted economy ticket). I don’t mean maximised in the sense of getting things, but made efficient. One of the truest ways to make air travel and travel in general less arduous is not to bring those big cases that you have to check in.

As crazy as that might sound if you’re accustomed to stuffing large case full, it’s actually a growing trend called “One Bagging”. It certainly does take an adjusted approach to travel but here are a few tips I’ve picked up thought trial and error in the last few years;

1) Remember, you get a carry and a personal item

When leaving behind the “big” bag, you have to change your mindset. You’re taking clothes for a week maximum and then you are making a plan to do laundry. Beyond that, you have to get sub 100ml containers to decant toiletries or you can cheaper things on arrival. These are the biggest hurdles to get over and honestly they’re mostly psychological.

Once you don’t have your check in luggage what you can bring on board with you comes into much sharper focus. On most flights you get a carry on bag and a personal item. A Carry on can be a backpack or roller luggage that measures 56 x 36 x 23 cm and can fit into the overhead locker, while a personal item can be something that fits underneath the seat in front of you.

The key is to pack your carry on like the check in luggage and put everything you might need to pull out during travel into the personal item. So, passport, laptop, books, even a few clothing items should go in this small bag. If you are taking a backpack, consider a tote or large sling as a personal item. If you are taking a roller bag then a personal item (like a tote or small duffel bag with a “pass through strap” that can sit on top of the roller luggage is ideal.

2) Backpacks get gate checked less but can be a hassle

If you are flying on a smaller plane or on a budget airline you can get flagged to gate check or pay more for a larger carry on. It’s not worth protesting too much at this stage, after all the gate agent is just doing their job (if not a little over enthusiastically!). Repacking a bag at the gate is the kind of stress you are trying to avoid by travelling with one bag in the first place, so you want to avoid it.

There’s lots of evidence to say that gate agents looks for larger roller bags to gate check and pretty much ignore backpacks. The only exception is when someone decides their ‘gap year’ 70L hiking backpack is an appropriate carry on.

On most large planes you don’t have to worry too much about gate checking luggage and when you fill a 30-35L backpack you are looking at more than 10kg, which, after a while can feel pretty uncomfortable. After spending a couple of years carrying a large bag and sling, I’m strongly considering moving back to roller luggage for this very reason.

3) Premium cases actually make sense if you travel regularly

If you go on a plane every other year then whatever you can borrow or pick up at T K /J Maxx will be fine. But if you’re travelling a few times a year the value of a well made and easy to use bag becomes much more justifiable.

Lighter, easier to move, more straightforward to pack bags and cases make an exponential difference to travel feeling like it’s working. Especially when you consider what the average person is willing to spend on a Phone, Clothes or daily take away food, it’s time to invest in bags that actually work.

Chasing the Best Roast Potato

The only discernible evidence of my half Irish DNA is my love for potatoes.

In my (not so humble) opinion, it is inarguable that the very best thing you can do to a potato is to roast it.

Over the last few months I’ve combined insights from some cookbooks (Trullo) and YouTube guides (Fallow) and landed on a process that makes reliably excellent roast potatoes.

1. Find the right potato (this could be a long point all on its own!): We don’t have many varieties available in South Africa and although I began using new potatoes unpeeled, half boiled and then lightly crushed, the varietal of new potatoes available here are too waxy.

2. So take a medium size potato; peel cut them into equal sized parts. Ideally around 3-4cm, so that might mean halved or quarters depending on the size of potato you have. You want them to be as close in size as possible because otherwise you end up with some over and under done.

3. Rinse them and place them in a pot full of cold clean water and begin heating the pot. You are effectively par-boiling by slowly heating them instead of placing them into already boiling water. If you have some good quality chicken or vegetable stock you can add as a part of the water. For example I used good quality stock concentrate which would make 500ml into about 3litres of water (look out here, the quality is everything, cheap stuff is just salty and falsely flavoured). You can also add a handful of fresh woody washed herbs like rosemary or thyme for an additional layer of infused flavour. The goal here is to build layers of subtle flavours into the body of the potato.

4. Pre-heat your oven to 200C

5. Once the pot has come to the boil (around 15-20mins) and a fork can pierce the potato but does not lead it to fall apart (a par boil), then pour the potatoes out into a large colander and allow them to ‘steam dry’ for about 5-7 minutes at least.

6. Then tip the potatoes back into the pot, return the lid and give a few vigorous shakes. You don’t want to break the potatoes apart but give them some rough edges. Then take white or yellow semolina and shake enough to give a light dusting over them all. This will all add to the potatoes gaining those crunchy edges.

7. A quick mention of a key factor here, the oil. I’ve had delicious roast potatoes using olive oil and canola/rapeseed oil but I wouldn’t recommend them. Both have quite a low smoke point, which means they start scalding or souring when cooking extensively at high temperatures. I would recommend trying to find beef tallow or goose/duck fat as they tolerate much higher temperatures. People often scoff at the decadence of these fats but let’s be honest, are you roasting potatoes to be healthier? Maybe cut something else out, praise God and enjoy the decadence of an amazing roast potato!

8. When the oven is at, or close to temperature, put a tray that will comfortably fit all your potatoes into the oven. While most people are prone to overcrowd the tray, what happens is that the potatoes steam each other and the edge potatoes crispen but leave the centre ones that overlap still soft. So some space is key.

9. After 5mins in the oven bring the tray out and add your oil/fat/tallow and allow it to melt. It should cover the entire tray by a couple of millimetres. All the potatoes should be sitting in oil. If it’s pooling somewhere add enough so that the whole tray has a clear layer (see note above on being health conscious). Pre-heating the oil helps the oil sear the layer of potatoes whereas cold oil gets drawn into the potato more making them, in my estimation, less healthy if you are still concerned about that.

10. Once the oil is heated up (shimmering not smoking), add the potatoes (careful here, splashing and spitting is part of the mortal danger you are enduring for the sake of the best roast potato of your life).

11. Give it 20-30mins, then turn the potatoes or if you are less worried about even browning give a vigourous shake of the tray to turn as many as you can.

12. Depending on your oven your should be looking at 50-75mins. Most people pull potatoes out in a rush and they were only 10mins away from being incredible crispy and brown. Slightly over is better than slightly under.

13. Finally, leave the potatoes on the tray right up until you serve them. They will still be releasing heat and steam. If you pile them up in a bowl or server, they begin to soften themselves again thanks to the steam.

14. If you have a large bowl, then break up about 10% more finishing salt (like maldon flakes) than you are comfortable with over them. If you want to make things a little more mediterranean then a little smoked paprika, oregano, cumin and cayenne with the salt can make things interesting.

Only 3 knives

I imagine I picked this up in some Marie kondo-esque advice column, but it has stuck with me.

Think about when you open the drawer to pick a knife, or other kitchen implement. You tend to pick the same two knives, yet you have 10.

Take the rest and give them away right now! I’ve come to realise that I constantly use three knives and only really would like one other. Here’s what I think every kitchen should have;

A Chefs Knife

This is the knife you pick up when chopping pretty much anything. Raw meat, veg (although I’ll make a counter suggestion on that soon). The Chef’s knife is the one size fits all, thing you pick up each time. I got this Wusthoff as a gift a few years ago and It’s still my favourite and most regularly used knife.

Serrated Bread / Carving Knife

Once you use a good serrated / slicing knife you realise what you’ve been missing. I was very grateful to receive this as a 40th gift from my friends Matt and Cam and it has served me almost daily. Slicing up a loaf of crusty sour dough, thinly slicing a deboned leg of lamb, cutting through an overstocked bagel without pulling back and forth. This knife is a delight and it’s power is going forward and back, in contrast to the chef’s knife where the power is in chopping down.

Short serrated knife

These cheap and cheerful Victorinox knifes are commonly used for tomatoes and bread rolls but they have proven themselves to be endlessly useful. They have yet to go blunt and when I was packing for a cooking weekend away I had to throw one into my knife roll.

A Nakiri Knife?

Although this looks like a cleaver it is actually a Japanese designed Nakiri knife designed for chopping vegetables and allows lots of direct pressure and stability for chopping harder items. It’s on my Wishlist and I think if you had these four knives you’d be almost covered for every circumstance.

Some Music I’ve been listening to

I don’t quite understand how the recording of this worked so perfectly, but it’s an interesting approach

This might be the perfectly understated guitar playing of all time

This will not be for everyone, Dijon at Coachella. I’ve been fascinated how Dijon has pulled off a lo-fi less is more approach. On another note, this is the video from Coachella’s live stream. They managed to process it very cinematically which made watching it more captivating.

Momo Boyd has a pretty incredible voice and I couldn’t figure out how to put this in a box. Impressive.

The End of this ‘one time’ Miscellany

I hope you’ve this unedited miscellany. Feel free to comment with requests for anything you’d like to see included next time,

That’s all for now…

“What are you giving up for Lent?” While the question alludes to historic Christian practices of fasting and self-denial associated with the penitential season of Lent, the syntax of the question also points out a crucial shift: even our self-denial is an act of self-expression. Our submission to discipline is converted to act of will power.

— James K. A. Smith, An American Lent

Dear Lectio Letter Readers,

I’m sending this to reassure you that I still live! Apologies for the delay in getting something out to you. The good news is that I have been very busy with the very thing that this newsletter was started to support which is creating Spiritual Formation and Theology curriculum for people engaged in cross cultural mission environments. So of course, I want to thank you very much for continuing to back me despite the embracing irregularity of these emails, I am still very much committed to offering you the overflow of my research and reading.

In addition I have 2 perks I’m releasing for supporting members of the newsletter! The first is a full searchable index of all the recipes I’ve ever posted on the lectio letter. The second is that, as a paid subscriber you can ask an anonymous question about theology / discipleship and I promise to write at least 500 words answering it in an upcoming lectio letter! Scroll to the bottom of the email to find out how.

If you happen to be new here, there’s a whole 101 other issues you can explore here! And I’d be over the moon if you’d consider supporting our work in deepening discipleship for those engaged in cross cultural ministry. You can become a paying subscriber by using the button below or read more about our work here.

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A Different Format?

For a little while, I’ve been suspecting the regular format of the Lectio maybe not be sustainable. Both editing an article, collecting miscellany, sharing life updates, music and recipes. I can do a few of those at once, but getting them altogether is simply taking too long. The likelihood is that I may post more regularly but only do 1 or 2 of the things I’ve normally included in all the newsletters at a time. We’ll see how that goes.

For now, I’ve got about 3 unfinished articles that I hope to polish up slightly more before they are sent out, but not wanting to leave you without a Lectio much longer I thought I’d experiment by sending out a collection of a few shorter unpolished thoughts that have arisen over the last month of work or so..

The Weight of Lent

I was having a conversation recently with someone who, while describing how busy they were with many good things, lamented that they hadn’t had time to prepare for Lent—and were now stuck in a vague, background hum of guilt about it.

A few years ago, I experienced a revival of enthusiasm for the Church Calendar. I’ve come to believe that, just as our individual, one-time retellings of the Gospel are important, the Christian Calendar, repeating the story of salvation year after year, shapes our lives by immersing us in the Gospel again and again.

But what is most significant about the Christian Calendar is not that I, individually, choose to rehearse the story of the Gospel, but that I enter into the Church’s rhythm of remembering the Story.

There are seasons when I have the capacity to engage with intention, and others when I don’t. The formative power of the Calendar is not that it sets up another threshold of individual achievement, a kind of A.P. class for discipleship. Its power is that you do not choose the timing, and the world does not dictate the seasons, the Church has chosen, and you are joined to something beyond yourself.

The good news is that, in the seasons when you cannot give your full effort to a liturgical season, you are still part of a countless multitude, alive now, stretching back through history and forward to Christ’s return, an army with banners, whose Lord, the Lamb, carries your life among theirs, remembering that Christ has come, Christ has risen, and Christ will come again. Liturgical seasons are not about performance anxiety; they are about letting your life, your story, be baptised and lifted up in the Story of God’s People, to be saved, not by your might or power, but by His great love.

Me and My Jesus; The evolution of Faith from Public Power to Personal Privilege

At the end of last year, in the midst of an unusually stressful week, I recorded a series of podcast episodes with Matt Lewis of “We are Follower”. In this first one he asked me to share how throughout history faith has retreated to ‘personal choice’ from the very structure that upheld our western world. I hope you enjoy it and stay subscribed to his podcast where I’ll share on a few different but connected topics for the next 2 or 3 episodes after this one.

In this episode, we explore how Western Christianity has shifted from a belief system deeply embedded in societal and political structures to one that is increasingly privatised and fragile.

Drawing on the insights of philosopher Charles Taylor, we examine the historical revolutions that have shaped our current secular landscape and how these changes impact Christian witness today. Join Matthew Lewis and Liam Byrnes as they walk carefully through these profound cultural transformations, seeking biblical truth in an age of confusion.

Key Topics:

• The historical development of secularism from the Reformation to today

• How the church’s relationship with power and influence has shifted over centuries

• The impact of individualism, privatisation, and the marketplace of ideas on faith

• The decline of a shared public faith and the rise of faith as a personal choice

• The role of fear, pain, and cultural shifts in shaping modern belief environments

• How Christians can embody winsome love and faithful presence amidst secular fragility

Some New Books I’m excited about

I suppose it wouldn’t be fair to only ask you to support me to buy books without telling you which one’s I’m excited about. Well here goes;

Pauline Theology as a Way of Life: A Vision of Human Flourishing in Christ – by Joshua W. Jipp

This book was recommended to me by Lucy Peppiatt on a recent call where she said that if she was teaching a course on the theological foundations of Spiritual Formation this would be the book she would use. Although I haven’t read it in detail, from paging through it I can see why.

In recent years there has been a shift in how popular theologians explain what Jesus accomplished that more clearly connects the beginning of the bible to the end. While many have participated in this, the lineage is in many ways as simple as NT Wright’s consistent insistence that the summary of the gospel is no less but much more than Jesus’ saving us from our sin. The arc of the story is, yes to save us from our sin, but also to recover what was lost and broken. God had an intention to partner with humans for their flourishing and his glory in Eden and this is how Jesus is the second Adam and the firstborn of the new creation.

Jipp in this book aims at unpacking Paul’s writings to reveal how Paul was actually seeing Jesus as that redemption, the one through whom we learn what it means to be truly and fully human as God intended. Rather than anachronistically approach Paul as a systematic theologian concerned only with justification or salvation in a narrow sense, Jipp presents Paul as offering a robust account of the transformed life; one shaped by union with Christ, empowered by the Spirit, and oriented toward embodied holiness as a loving community.

Jipp contends that Paul’s letters aim to form communities into a distinctive way of life. For Paul our relational knowledge of Jesus reshapes desires, habits, relationships, and social practices. In short, unlike in our modern world, belief and behavior are inseparable.

Where Prayer Becomes Real: How Honesty with God Transforms Your Soul – by Kyle Strobel and John Coe

Where Prayer Becomes Real is part of a popular level series that Strobel and Coe, who have been colleagues at the Institute for Spiritual Formation at Talbot, have been releasing.

This book, with depth and simplicity unpacks what prayer is and what it isn’t. Primarily the call is to move beyond distraction, performance, and guilt into a prayer life marked by authenticity and intimacy with God. This is the core message of the book, that getting stuck in prayer as performance is the very thing that keeps people from a rich prayer life.

If the Psalms are the church’s prayer book then the invitation is honesty and authenticity. That only when we bring the themes we think are most ‘out of bounds’ in prayer will we discover a God who is sees all of us, and is offering relationship and the transformative power of His presence.

In the Name of Jesus: Reflections on Christian Leadership – by Henri J. M. Nouwen

Although this book was written almost 40 years, it would be hard to think of a book more relevant to the current crisis in Christian Leadership. Henri Nouwen as a Dutch Catholic Priest transitioned from the competitive heights of academia into chaplaincy in a L’Arche communities for intellectually disabled adults. Nouwen is a master at pointing out the temptations of ego that follow Christian life and leadership and how simple humble other-oriented loving leadership is key. To remain “unimpressive” or “irrelevant” may in fact allow us to set aside concern of what others think of us in order to be truly service oriented to others.

Read more

“Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.”

― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn’t happen much, though.”

― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“′Classic′ - a book which people praise and don’t read.”

― Mark Twain

“You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”

― Ray Bradbury

Welcome to Issue #101 of the Lectio Letter. This members-only newsletter is (normally) filled with music, film and food suggestions, links, and an article written by yours truly. But this time it’s my yearly review of (almost) every book I read in 2025 (you can read the previous years; 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024 here).

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On the Significance of Reading Words

In the founding story of the Bible in Genesis the world comes to be, not through a cosmic war or great constructive effort, but through a word.

Words create creation, and then this creative wording task is, in part, entrusted to humans, made, as they are, to image God who makes realities with words.

Of course, as the story of the Bible goes on, we see the lack of faithful fulfilment on the part of the humans who are entrusted to represent God. A failure to be, in one sense, a word from God to His creation, and so God comes Himself into the flesh, as the Very Word (Logos) of God.

While some religious systems and spiritualities delight in mystery, Christianity at its heart delights instead in a mystery revealed. That is to say, that something previously inaccessible and opaque has become something said and seen (at least, in part).

I am always amazed at the power of words as they make their entrepreneurial way through the world.

From when I was young I developed a quick tongue, sometimes too quick for its own good. This came partly out of self-protection but also, at times, at the joy of causing others to laugh. But I’ve found out, often enough the truth held in the book of James chapter 3 about the danger of an overactive tongue:

the tongue is a small part of the body, but it makes great boasts. Consider what a great forest is set on fire by a small spark. The tongue also is a fire, a world of evil among the parts of the body.

When I was young one of the only pieces of scripture I somehow committed to memory and eventually prayed often was;

“Set a guard over my mouth O Lord, keep watch over the doors of my lips”

— Psalm 141

it seems now to have been a strangely perceptive necessity.

Words can reach to the deepest parts of our humanity. They can serve to reveal hidden realities of goodness and spaces of belonging and connection.

Just as powerfully, words can also open up wounds of disconnection and pain.

Of course, the spoken word seems most suited to this, but words in books are no small thing. Indeed the miracle of the modern publishing and distribution industry can pass us by. For a moment consider that you and I can readily access books, which quite literally are the thoughts of a person that we, in all likelihood would otherwise never have known.

While in our post-enlightenment imaginations we think of words as toothless ideas to be considered through the well policed gateway of our rationality, the biblical imagination offers a much more lively interpretation of how words work.

Words create realities. They can open up hope or despair, they can heal or they can bind and so while we are rich with access to words, how those words shape us deserve attention.

We live in a world where words are increasingly used with impunity to corrupt and obscure realities, to create fear and preserve power, and maybe we always have. But in the midst of such temptations to dissolution and despair we shouldn’t lose sight of the great gift of living in our age, rich as we are with access to the words of others.

In fact, one of the greatest forms of resistance in an age as contested as ours is to nurture a simple yet unnaïve gratitude that can stir an unsentimental and resilient hope.

As I have remarked in previous years of these reviews, the ability to access and receive perspectives from another person through the words of a book can be a fantastic source of humility as we come to terms with what we don’t know and how much we have left to learn.

In a world so quick to speak and so slow to listen, the patient reception of another’s words, whether it be in a book or in person may be one of the most faithful and transformative acts we have left. And as we seek to read well we just might participate in the same Word-shaped humility through which God has drawn close to redeem and renew us.

Support the Lectio Letter

We are now heading into the 7th Year of the Lectio Letter. I started this newsletter as a creative way to help fund my buying of books that contribute toward the teaching and training we do as a part of the College of Christian Formation within the University of the Nations.

It’s a University with over 200 campus locations around the world which helps equip those engaged in missions and discipleship. In each newsletter is one article written by me, a recipe and music recommendation as well as what I am reading currently alongside a short life update. The first 10 people who sign up with the button below with 50% for the whole year.

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Becoming a member supports the work we do, and in return, you get two(ish) articles a month, alongside book, movie, music and recipe recommendations and access to all 100 of the previous issues.

Whether you become a paid subscriber or not, I’m very grateful to each of you who read and respond to this newsletter.

Introduction to the 2025 Book Reviews

Well, This is the sixth annual book review of “(almost) every book I read” (read 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024 here). I’ve always been quite traditional and stringent about what I consider reading a book.

Reading it from front to back, marking it, and reflecting on it. In contrast, I own many books that are simply not designed to be read this way, reference books, poetry books, devotionals and the like.

But it seems crazy to claim that the 100’s of books I have flicked through somehow over this year count as books I have actually read. So for now, I’ll stick with my “front to back” criteria and trust I’ll find other ways to share and foreground other just as worthwhile tomes.

Did you read something that you loved this year? Now’s your chance to share it! Let me know in the comments, I love receiving recommendations!

Leave a comment

Also, if you are reading in Gmail, this email will likely be clipped due to its length. If you want to read it all, scroll to the bottom and then click “View entire message” or read it online at LectioLetter.com to see it all. You are not getting it all if you don’t see my signature at the bottom.

Top 3 books of 2024

1. Everything is Never Enough by Bobby Jamieson

Everything Is Never Enough by Bobby Jamieson was one of the last books I read in 2025. It’s a book that unpacks the biblical book of Ecclesiastes.

I don’t know if you’ve ever chosen to read Ecclesiastes by your own volition? Maybe as part of one of those “Bible in a year” approaches, but few people turn to it when they’re seeking their garden-variety biblical inspiration.

Bobby Jamieson begins the book asking the question, unusually pointed and unreligious; Given the comparable objective goodness in your life, “Shouldn’t you be Happier?”. It’s the kind of gnawing inarticulate knot that exists somewhere in most peoples sleepless nights, but Jamieson reveals how it is in fact a deeply Christian feeling according to Ecclesiastes.

The problem with stuffing the vastness of eternity into the cramped compartment of the human heart is that it doesn’t fit. What God has put inside us guarantees an enduring mismatch between what we want and what this world can give…. The human heart is pierced with a hole that lets in the infinite. That is why all the finite goods that our toil gains fail to satisfy.

The first chapters cover the variety of human experience, as he calls it the ‘first floor’ of the universe; work, sex, food, drink, wealth and power. These, now widely accessible to most of us, at a level reserved for royalty in Qoholet’s (the state author of Ecclesiastes) time. Qoholet does have an abundance of these things are his conclusion is that they don’t satisfy, he has it all and yet it remains absurd, vacuous, empty. But as the author of Ecclesiates ascends to the ‘second floor’ of perspective on these things, he observes that each of these things are very good gifts. They are not empty, they fulfil very important needs in human life and they should be enjoyed. Finally, Qoholet ascends briefly to the ‘top floor’ of reality and his only remark is to simply fear God. Somehow in the abundance of provision that Qoholet has is to be enjoyed but not clung to.

This book is lyrically written, remaining clear and contemporary in the best way. Jamieson begins by giving readers a way to approach what, to modern ears, can sound like a series of strange and seemingly counterintuitive phrases that make up Ecclesiastes. But Jamieson concludes taking up Rosa’s work on resonance, that somehow the longing for infinity that exists in the heart of humans is found through an engagement with the created matter that God has put on in Jesus and that we can receive as a gift. This final point is landed with more precision and poetry that I can do justice to here and I heartily recommend this book to you for just. that reason.

2. The Surprising Genius of Jesus: What the Gospels reveal about the greatest teacher by Peter J Williams

The Surprising Genius of Jesus is a short book, but it is densely packed with insight. Written by Peter J. Williams, my former New Testament professor in Aberdeen and now the principal of Tyndale House in Cambridge, it offers a compelling vision of the intellectual brilliance of Jesus.

Williams’ claim is that through a close reading of the parables attributed to Jesus we see powerful evidence of his extraordinary, integrated intellect.

Jesus was not merely a spiritual teacher who spoke in memorable stories; he was a master communicator whose teaching reveals remarkable depth, coherence, and theological sophistication.

Much of the book focuses on what is commonly called the Parable of the Prodigal Son, though Williams more accurately calls it the Parable of the Two Sons. With careful attention and literary sensitivity, he shows just how much genius is packed into this single story. Far from being a simple moral tale, the parable is a tightly woven narrative filled with echoes, reversals, and scriptural allusions that span the breadth of the Old Testament.

What makes Williams’ explanations even more compelling is that he reveals how Jesus speaks to multiple audiences at once. The parable both comforts and confronts, drawing in the broken while simultaneously unsettling the self-righteous. Different groups in Jesus’ audience, including sinners, Pharisees, and ordinary hearers, would all have found themselves located within the story, challenged by it, and invited to rethink their assumptions about God, grace, and belonging.

Williams shows that Jesus was exquisitely attuned to his listeners. The parable is not only emotionally powerful; it is also theologically rich, summarising Israel’s story of exile, rebellion, and restoration, and bringing it to its climax in Jesus himself.

Williams is a highly esteemed evangelical new testament scholar, yet he writes with clarity and this book is very readable.

3. The Possibility of Prayer: Finding Stillness with God in a Restless World by John Starke

This book has been staring at me from my shelf for a couple of years now and I’m so glad I finally read it because “The Possibility of Prayer” has quickly risen to my “go-to” for an introduction to prayer.

Many of books on a topic as broad and as crucial as prayer gravitate to one of three points in my experience. 1. A Practical how-to that lacks theological reflection or depth, 2. Obscure theological arguments about the mechanics or efficacy of prayer or 3. Mysterious and subjective contemplative reflections on the experience of prayer. But John Starke covers almost all of this ground without being bogged down in any of the usual pitfalls. This book manages to catch up the practical, existential and theological in a way that remains accessible.

Here is an introductory paragraph from the opening of part one.

“A vibrant prayer life as possible for you. I know it may not seem this way, but the whole thing is rigged for triumph. That doesn’t mean prayer will be easy or comfortable. It won’t. In fact, we should prepare for the long, slow haul of discomfort, confusion, and frustration, laced with joy, love, stability and harness. There aren’t a few techniques nearly to pick up so that next week the struggle for prayer will be over. Instead, there are realities that we need to grasp that lead to pathways (rather than techniques) towards intimacy with God. These realities—like the incarnation of Christ, our participation in Christ exalted status, and his participation in our troubled and lowly place—rearrange how we think about ourselves, God, and the world around us. This often means on learning lies about ourselves, God, and the world that have driven how we’ve lived and made decisions so far in our lives. That will take time because it’s not mainly changing our minds or our perspectives but growing up into who we are in Christ and embodying the truth.”

— The Possibility of Prayer, John Starke | p.9-10

This recognition of the need to move from simple techniques to reimagining the context within which we pray, for me, seems like what represents the hardest but most foundational transformation in understanding the role of prayer in the Christian life. The worst undertone in prayer books is offering a ‘new technology’ of prayer as if the practise or form itself is the point.

Across perspectives theological and confessional, we are tempted to view prayer as a finding the lever on the side of a “slot machine named god” and yet the invitation is far more relational. To participate with and come to know the One who has loved and found us in the messy broken world we live in and live out His love in every circumstance.

Starke unfolds the inner changes that take place in us through prayer and make prayer even enjoyable by overcoming our deeply utilitarian, outcomes-focused approach to prayer.

The second part of the book is interesting in that it actually isn’t unpacking what most people expect as prayer but instead has a list of disciplines such as communion, meditation, solitude, fasting and feasting, Sabbath resting and corporate worship. The very fact that these are listed as the practice of prayer for Starke reveals his intention that our lives are made to become a prayer rather than solely focusing on the practice of sitting down folding our hands and shutting our eyes, as important as that is as he unpacks in chapter 2 of part one.

What pleasantly surprised me about this book are the places that John Starke goes to unpack the significance of prayer. The book was initially promoted within what I understand to be the fairly conservative “The Gospel Coalition” and adjacent world and yet his end notes reveal extensive references to Henry Nouwen, Annie Dillard, Ignatius of Antioch, Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Eugene Peterson, David Benner, Athanasius, Ronald Rolheiser, and Robert Farrar Capon. I heartily encourage you to read it.

And the rest of the Books (in no particular order)

Love, Henri: Letters on the Spiritual Life by Henri Nouwen

Over the course of his life, Henri Nouwen wrote thousands of letters to friends, acquaintances, parishioners, students, and readers of his work all around the world. He corresponded in English, Dutch, German, French, and Spanish, and took great care to store and archive the letters decade after decade. He believed that a thoughtful letter written in love could truly change someone’s life.

This compiled collection of letters from Henri Nouwen is a real treasure. Nouwen is widely beloved as a writer but in many ways struggled through his life as gifted, broken and limited which these letters well attest to.

A few things strike me from his letters;

1. He was deeply committed to community and understood he deep reliance on the faithfulness of friends to keep him faithful.

2. He wrestled deeply with his own faithfulness and offered wisdom from his own trials

3. He continually guides people away from the periphery of faith and towards the flesh and blood reality of who Jesus is for us.

One of other reoccurring themes is his continual pursuit of a deepening prayer life and reading these letters for me, had the effect of catching up and motivating that desire in a new way.

The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection by Robert Farrar Capon

For a number of years, many people have told me how much I’d love this next book and they weren’t wrong. While his discussion of eating trends is dated, the best of the book has a much deeper heartbeat that arises from Capon’s life as a committed cook, anglican priest and iconoclastic New Yorker.

“Why do we marry, why take friends and lovers? Why give ourselves to music, painting, chemistry or cooking? Out of simple delight in the resident goodness of creation, of course; but out of more than that, too. Half earth’s gorgeousness lies hidden in the glimpsed city it longs to become.”

― Robert Farrar Capon, The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection

It presents itself as a cookbook, but in actuality, it is 1/3rd cookbook, 1/3rd Theology of Food and 1/3rd humorous pontification of how and how not to cook and what tools to use.

It’s a primer of the goodness of creation and an anti-gnostic treatise. I’ve struggled to not just keep reading sections of it aloud! Capon manages to write a discourse on delight in the common graces of God’s good creation. Don’t come expecting theology or recipes (at least not in their usual form), but come ready to delight and be delighted.

Jesus changes everything: a new world made possible by Stanley Hauerwas

Stanley Hauerwas has been formative for a whole generation of theological thinkers and was once named by Time Magazine as “America’s Best Theologian”, to which he replied in a chracteristically plain spoken and caustic manner “Best is not a theological category”.

Stanley Hauerwas is known for being bombastic but always remains so likeable. What makes this selection of his writing so accessible is that they are focussed on what he understands discipleship to entail. Put in something close to his own language; How do we live in such a way that if Jesus isn’t who he said he is, our lives would make no sense. That at its heart is Hauerwas’ concern, that the Church would so distinctively be the Church in order that the World would know itself to be the world.

No middle ground, no grey, a clear battle for a world claimed by Jesus or otherwise certain to be damned. In the world he grew up in (Texas Methodism), cultural nominal Christian was the ‘done thing’ and yet his life long grapple has been with the radical implications of Jesus as King. The book opens with this quote;

“The theologian’s task is to make it difficult to be a Christian. It is also to make it equally difficult to be a non-Christian, that is, to present an account of Christianity that shows the difference that being a Christian makes and how that difference may intrigue and challenge those who are not Christian.”

—Stanley Hauerwas

Confessions by Saint Augustine (trans. Sarah Ruden)

This year, I was accepted into a Catherine Project reading group that met on Wednesday afternoons via Zoom to discuss Augustine’s Confessions chapter by chapter (though to the modern mind-confusingly, Augustine organises the book by “books” rather than chapters).

While my appreciation of the text itself deepened through the process, what struck me most was the value of discussion. This may seem obvious to anyone familiar with educational theory, but even in a group composed as it was, not of experts but of fellow interested lay readers, the act of talking through the text—debating, clarifying, and sometimes disagreeing—significantly enhanced my understanding.

In some cases, I found that my appreciation and understanding of a chapter I had read multiple times alone was often transformed and clarified through the group conversation. The experience convinced me that reading groups offer exponential returns on comprehension and critical reflection, especially for works like the Confessions.

So, what can be said about Augustine’s Confessions that hasn’t already been said (by scholars far more qualified than me!) ? The book is a classic of Western literature and, in many ways, invented the genre of psychological autobiography, a genre that is now so common that we take it for granted.

Augustine combines philosophical depth with poetic sensibility, all while recounting his life with a remarkable openess. He spares little effort to reveal his inner struggles, his ambitions, and his failures, guiding the reader through his journey toward the moment he commits fully to following Jesus. At the time, biographies existed to aggrandise their subjects, and by the time Confessions was read, Augustine was a highly esteemed bishop. The same temptation must have been present, and yet Augustine offers what, at the time, must have constituted quite a ‘tell all’ account of his moral foibles and temptations.

Even read simply as a work of religious devotion, the Confessions is engaging. Yet what makes it truly remarkable lies beneath the surface: it is a profound meditation on the transformation of self-understanding and identity formation that runs from an almost modern sense of being “self-made” to claiming an utter dependence on God for a sense of self.

Although the circumstances of Augustine’s life, as a North African in the fourth-century Roman Empire, may feel distant; his impulses, desires, inner conflicts, and relationships have continued to resonate with readers throughout the centuries that followed.

A recurring tension throughout the Confessions is Augustine’s struggle to know himself apart from God’s knowledge of him. As he recounts his development, he often lingers obsessively on small details while spanning vast periods of time in a single paragraph, leaving the reader eager for clarification or a follow-up. What grounds his movement is a personal devotional transformation but also an adaption of his philosophical framing of the world from abstraction to personalism.

Towards the end of the book, Augustine engages with profound reflections on the nature of time, which became foundational for later theological thought. Yet even in the midst of these intellectual focuses, what remains timeless is Augustine’s story and it’s telling: his honesty, his restless searching, and the transformation of his character.

If one were to imagine a modern retelling, a fitting title might be From Hustle to Humility, capturing the arc of a restless, searching soul learning to move beyond self-preoccupation toward being grounded in the grace/gift of existing and existing before the face of God.

A Theology in Outline: Can These Bones Live? by Robert Jenson

A few months ago, I delivered a series of lectures to some young Christians titled “The Nature and Character of God.” Throughout Christian history, there have been extended philosophical and abstract reflections on a series of attributes considered important for defining God (the “omnis,” and so on). Yet this is not how God has chosen to reveal himself in Scripture or in the person of Jesus.

So I designed the talks to survey the biblical story in such a way that God’s character is revealed within the context of a narrative—one that repeatedly challenges many of our assumptions about what is true and, in turn, claims our very lives as the place where these truths are worked out.

As I was reflecting on this approach with a friend over WhatsApp, he said, “That sounds very much like what Jenson was doing in his book “Can These Bones Live?”

I had heard of Jenson and knew he was influenced by Karl Barth, but I hadn’t read anything further. He passed away in 2008, and this book was published a couple of years before that. It is a lightly edited transcription of an undergraduate introductory course in theology given at Princeton Theological Seminary, and I devoured half of it in one sitting. It is extremely readable, and you really get a sense that he is playfully engaging in summarising vast amounts of learning in an accessible way. Indeed, in the introduction, the teaching assistant who compiled the lectures remarks that Jenson worked from minimal notes and spoke largely extemporaneously.

The essential motif, taken from the title of the course, is the question spoken to the prophet Ezekiel: “Son of man, can these bones live?” Jenson uses this question to frame a journey through the classic themes of Christian theology, centring on what it means to live, and what it means to be a people liberated from death through the—unique among religions—centrepiece of Christian conviction: the resurrection. This question of whether God’s life can inhabit and resurrect human life runs throughout Israel’s story and into our contemporary context, shaping both the life of the church and the task of Christian theology.

Face to Face Volume 1: Missing Love by Marty Folsom

Marty Folsom is a Theologian and Scholar who has produced work related to Karl Barth and is involved in the TF Torrance Fellowship. In addition he is also a therapist. If you know anything about Torrance or Barth, you’ll know their systems of theology are intricate and philosophical, but what Folsom embodies is a person who has seen the beating heart of personalism embedded in both of their theological approaches. In Face to Face, he attempts a layman’s introduction to a relational theology. This would be a great series to develop a catechesis (discipleship) course around. It’s a theological education that engages personal life, brokenness and wholeness.

Alienation and Acceleration: Towards a Critical Theory of Late-Modern Temporality by Hartmut Rosa

Hartmut Rosa is a critical theorist influenced by the Frankfurt School. Some conservatives pejoratively label thinkers like him “Cultural Marxists.” While critical theory often gets a bad reputation, I see it as a secular way of naming what Christians call “the world.”

In Christian thought, sin, the world, and the devil are forces opposed to God’s kingdom. While we often focus on individual sin, the Bible also describes systemic forces — structures that dehumanise people and prevent them from living fully as God’s image-bearers.

Critical theorists, in my view, provide a lens for understanding these systemic realities. They rarely offer a “Christian cure,” yet in this book, Rosa comes surprisingly close to what might be considered a transcendent solution, at least from a secular perspective.

Rosa is a phenomenologist, meaning he studies lived experience, and in this book, he seeks to describe what it feels like to live in an age of “social acceleration.” S

ocial acceleration is not just the feeling that time moves faster; it is the sense that the demands on our time are ever increasing.

“Modern life is speeding up incessantly, and while new technologies theoretically save time, we nevertheless feel as if we are running out of time — not to get somewhere, but simply to stay where we are.”

Consider communication: letters once took days to arrive, but email is instantaneous, creating a constant demand for immediate response. Technology has become more efficient while simultaneously overburdening those who use it. This relentless pace produces what Rosa calls alienation.

“Modern acceleration is driven by the cultural promise that a richer, fuller life comes from ever-greater experiences — yet this acceleration ultimately traps us in a cycle where our hunger for life is continually frustrated.”

Rosa’s diagnosis mirrors the Christian understanding of sin as disconnection. The modern world’s pace undermines our ability to form meaningful relationships. As a Marxist, Rosa might identify market forces that profit from this alienation, selling countless commodities that promise connection but deliver little.

The remedy, Rosa argues, is what he calls resonance. Resonance is not simply appreciating a beautiful sunset or forcing oneself to slow down. It is relational: a two-way engagement in which both parties are affected, transformed, and experienced as a gift. Andrew Root, in The Congregation and the Secular Age, illustrates this with a child at play who looks up and exclaims, “That was great.” The joy is mutual and unmanufactured, a true encounter of gift and presence.

As Christians we often have an account of disconnection, but our descriptions of how that disconnection weighs on us can tend to be simplified in a way that doesn’t map onto the complexities of the systems and rhythms that make our world. Rosa paints an important picture to name some of the forces that dehumanise in our world and how they' have inhabited the very way we name, experience and inhabit time. This is cultural critique worth reflecting on.

Easter: The Season of the Resurrection of Jesus

Wesley Hill is a New Testament Scholar who has written one of the latest installments in the “Fullness of Time” series which is overseen by Wheaton Professor Esau MacCaulley.

The intention of the series is to re-introduce the Christian calendar to those who may have grown up in low church traditions. The other lesser known festivals and fasts (such as Epiphany or Pentecost) have enjoyed a more historical-liturgical focus, but given that all stripes of Christian pay attention to Easter gave Hill a different opportunity; to present the Gospel story once more.

Hill unpacks the story once again, the significance of resurrection, importance of ascension and the richness of an Easter liturgical service he attends bringing to life the Story in a high church worship setting. It was an enjoyable short book that brought focus to this season for me this year.

The Church: A Guide to the People of God by Brad East

Brad East’s other work has clearly influenced his writing of this one, as he mentions in the opening that there are not many of the classic ecclesiology subtitles included here. Instead, East’s main burden in the book is to write in such a way that God’s love for His people shines through.

At the beginning of the book, he reflects on Mary (which has become more common in protestant circles in the last decade) as a carrier of the gospel and its mission. Rather than beginning in Acts, where a great deal of reflection on the Church tends to begin, he moves through the story of Abraham and the people of Israel for at least half of the book. In this way, he gets to the birth of the Church in such a way that, in a compelling way, shows how the church, although grafted in as Gentiles, are also the promise and fulfilment of God’s call to Abraham and later Israel.

The last chapter, “Entrusted”, changes format and turns to a series of numbered points. They are clear and compelling, but I wondered if the change of format was due to reaching a word limit for these small books, or just a way to summarise his final thoughts. The numbered points were a useful way of considering the nature of the Church, and I’ve considered summarising and reflecting on them in future lectio issues. Brad East’s other works have drawn on Robert Jenson, Karl Barth and John Webster, and one of his previous books included a foreword by Katherine Sonderegger. All of these are ‘heavy hitter’ systematic theologians, and his work and voice are clearly influenced by the (post-liberal reformed) traditions these theologians represent. This book is well worth engaging in and is beautifully written with enough food for thought for even the most well-read on this area.

Letters to a future Saint: foundations of faith for the spiritually hungry by Brad East

Another book from Brad East, who as you may have surmised from his multiple inclusions here in the reading list, I think is one of the best and most readable young theologians working today. In this book, He published a series of letters which began as letters to his young relatives as they prepared to be baptised.

These have been developed into short-form catechesis. Catechesis is still practised in some traditions but historically it is the teaching period that runs up to baptism and helps the person who is about to be baptised take in the whole story of God and come to an understanding of what it is they are doing when they put off their old life and put on the new.

Brad East does this in an easy to understand way and would deepen mature and early Christians to the nature of our faith and the life that flows from it.

Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible’s unfolding story makes sense of modern life and culture by Christopher Watkins

Christopher Watkin has attempted something that can only be described as magisterial in scope: an evangelical account of worldview for a postmodern age. Although Watkin is a committed Christian, he is also a serious scholar of French and German postmodern philosophy, and this dual identity shapes the distinctive approach of the book.

Rather than dismissing critical theory as merely ideological or politically captured, Watkin seeks to reclaim and redeem it. At its heart, critical theory is an attempt to view the world through a lens that names what is wrong and gestures toward how it might be made right. At this most basic level, Watkin argues that the biblical story is itself the ultimate form of critical theory. It offers not only diagnosis but also a coherent vision of redemption.

Watkin explicitly grounds his method in Augustine’s *City of God*. Like Augustine, he does not seek to defeat the dominant culture by arguing on its own terms, which today might look like adopting a purely scientific or secular framework for apologetics. Instead, he aims to describe the world using the categories and story of Scripture, allowing the Bible to set the terms of the conversation rather than merely reacting to those set by modern culture.

There is much in this book that is praiseworthy. Above all, it is written in a gracious and winsome tone that resists the rigid either-or thinking so common in Christian cultural commentary. Instead, Watkin argues that many of the perspectives offered by the Bible are what he calls “diagonalisations”, connections between things that secular thinking tends to force apart. A clear example is the false opposition between justice and love, which Scripture holds together rather than choosing between.

What is particularly refreshing is that Watkin does not reject non-Christian critiques of the world out of hand. Instead, he seeks to gather what is true and perceptive in them and then filter them through a biblical framework. Throughout the book, he models a way of thinking that takes opposing viewpoints seriously, recognising that a coherent Christian position often emerges through careful engagement with real and powerful counterarguments.

The sheer length and ambition of the book mean that some of the more complex or controversial issues are necessarily treated quickly. Even so, it provides a valuable reorientation of the idea of “worldview,” an idea that has become increasingly politicised and tribalised. One of the book’s great strengths is its ability to introduce readers to areas of philosophy and theology they might otherwise never encounter. In this sense, Watkin proves himself to be not only a thoughtful guide but also a trustworthy and illuminating one.

Paul; a biography by Tom Wright

The enjoyment of reading books was only multiplied by reading along with others. This book formed the basis of our conversations in the Life of Paul seminar and it is excellent.

Tom Wright is a world renowned pauline scholar and in this book he unpacks a biography of Paul using the biblically available details and then, from his incomparable career in the study of Paul, offers some possibilities for the gaps which scripture doesn’t speak to.

A few things that came alive to me through this book and the conversations we had in the class in Lausanne;

1. We only ever hear of evidence of Paul’s sister (in Acts 23:16), but after the Damascus road experience he returns to Tarsus, where he grew up, for around 10 years before Barnabus goes to find him in Acts 11. As we know Paul’s family is jewish, affords him an excellent jewish education in the tradition of the pharisees, his father was a pharisee and has a business in tent making. But we don’t hear any evidence that his family (apart from his nephew, and presumably his sister) become Jesus followers. This is interesting to consider when we put it alongside the family metaphors that Paul then employs extensively in his explanation of what the Church should be. We often think of Paul as a stand-alone super hero, but his possible estrangement from his family, his conflicts with barnabus and the tension with the Jerusalem church created a deep need in him, which he refers to consistently through his letters to various churches, for a familial sense of connection.

2. After being encountered by Jesus on the Damascus road Paul ‘withdraws to Arabia’. Some traditions theorise that he went to the location of Mount Sinai where YHWH established his covenant with the people of Israel as the beginning of a wholesale recalibration of the jewish story for him as he considered God’s salvation purposes now made known in the person of Jesus.

Those who are aware of some of the contentious discussions within the interpretation of Paul should be prepared that this is of course a Wright-ian view (with his particular NPP approach). What is so often the case with Tom Wright books is that they are just technical enough to intimidate the lay reader and yet when read carefully among others can initiate entirely fresh perspectives on people and stories in the Scriptures that have become too familiar.

The book sings when Wright allows himself to imagine the emotional and biographical realities that sit behind Paul's letters as someone who has spent his entire life reading and researching them. His reflections on the Damascus road encounter and a potential breakdown following imprisonment are worth the price of the book itself. These humanising moments allow the Paul behind theology and biblical interpretation to become a real person who gave everything in his life, re-thought everything as a ‘jew of jews’ as a response to an encounter with Jesus of Nazareth.

I, Julian by Claire Gilbert

Claire Gilbert has crafted a fascinating fictional autobiography of Julian of Norwich, the famous catholic mystic and anchoress, famous for her work “revelations of divine love”.

The book weaves together a fictionalised but humanising troubled life before becoming a hermit and includes accurate historical details of medieval england in that period that I was unaware of.

What made the book particularly luminous though was the reflections on the experience of solitude, contemplative prayer and spiritual direction which evidence Gilbert’s own awareness and sensitivity to the often-times inarticulable character of those experiences.

The Life You Save May Be Your Own, The: An American Pilgrimage by Paul Elie

I finally finished Paul Elie’s biography of the catholic authors, Thomas Merton, Flannery O Connor, Dorothy Day and Walker Percy. It is clearly a masterpiece of literary journalism and is extremely attentive and sympathetic to the complex nature of faith each of them had. While it is ornately written, I couldn’t help by feel by page 480 that it could have achieved its feat with more concision

The New Yorker published this short review in 2003;

This long, unusual book consists of interleaved biographies of four mid-century American writers—Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Walker Percy, and Flannery O’Connor—who, though they rarely, if ever, met, are connected by the fact that they were all serious Roman Catholics and therefore alone: isolated both from literary circles (anti-religious) and from the Church (anti-literary). Except for O’Connor, they were converts; they “read their way” to religious experience, and then became writers, so that others could pick up the trail. They were very different—Day was devoted to social service, Percy to philosophy, O’Connor to literature, Merton to the inner journey—and Elie doesn’t love them all equally. O’Connor is his favorite. Merton is the one he struggles with, but, by virtue of his warm, clear writing (better than Merton’s), he makes us care about the self-involved friar, too.

The review was interesting to me because, unsurprisingly, I was drawn to the interlaced sections in my own order of interest, awareness and sympathy; Merton, then Day, Then O’Connor and finally Walker Percy who I knew almost nothing of.

The Shape of Joy: The Transformative Power of Moving Beyond Yourself

In a world increasingly exhausted by the demand to “be yourself” (as I note in my review of Rosa’s Acceleration and Alienation), Richard Beck offers a welcome alternative by weaving together a Christian theory of transformation with a critique of the Freudian impulse to turn inward.

Beck’s central claim is simple: joy becomes available only when we open ourselves to the world and to others beyond ourselves. Rather than treating joy as something we can locate through introspection or emotional self-management, psychology now increasingly supports what Christianity has long taught—that love, self-forgetfulness, and outward-directed attention are the true pathways to a joyful life.

Like happiness, joy is a secondary phenomenon. You cannot grasp it by aiming straight at it. It emerges instead as a byproduct of self-giving, meaningful engagement, and sacrificial love. Readers familiar with thinkers like Hartmut Rosa, James K. A. Smith, or Martin Buber will recognize this pattern: resonance, desire, and meaning arise not from inward obsession but from relational openness.

What sets Beck apart, however, is not just the ideas themselves but how he communicates them. His enduring readership exists for good reason; he has a rare gift for integrating psychological research with a Christian vision of change in a way that is clear, likeable and deeply accessible.

The Next Evangelicalism: Freeing the Church from Western Cultural Captivity by Soong Chan Rah

Soong Chan Rah is a Korean-American theologian and in the introduction to this book he unpacks his indebtedness to what he describes as, US white evangelicalism. But in this book he quickly moves on to critique the individualism and materialism that has infected evangelicalism and leaves us culturally bound.

His critique unpacks why mega church and the now defunct “emergent” church is simply a continuation of this pragmatic indiviudualism inherent in the cultural forms of evangelicals. He goes on to present, what he sees as a salve in the form of learning from non-western immigrant churches in humility for what evangelicals have lost.

I am sympathetic to this suggestion and have argued myself for a greater cultural humility in mission as a two way street of formation.

Essentially what Rah offers is a kind of cultural version of Richard Foster’s Stream of living water, where disparate fragmented aspects of the Jesus way need to be reunited.

The critique alone would serve most leaders who struggled to diagnose their consistently mono-cultural church environments but as I read, I was less assured that the salve will heal us fully.

I am concerned that since the writing of the book (2013, I think), there is increased cross-cultural hostility and distrust especially in the US as simple requests for humble learning from other perspective gets crushed as ‘woke’ but I am also less naive that ‘exposure and humility’ will reunite an increasingly polarised church.

Finally, Rah’s North American context inevitably overwhelms the books references and part of what the church will wrestle with (as you can see in the recent GAFCON split) is the global church, not just the church in North America. We are increasingly unintelligible to one another and bridge building will be the work of serious spiritual warfare.

Liturgical Mission – The Work of the People for the Life of the World by Winfield Bevins

I need to begin this review with something of a confession; I was very excited at the possibility of this book. The endorsements, the chapter structure, and the book being dedicated to Robert Weber and Thomas Oden gave me extremely high expectations.

Therefore, it was potentially inevitable that I was going to be disappointed by this book. Having read reasonably extensively in the areas that Bevin’s touches on in this book I was hoping for something of a "one ring to rule them all" book for the types of courses we help run. The promise of this book was to draw together the nature of liturgy, connected to the significance of God’s Trinitarian nature and mission in the world.

For me, it didn’t quite fulfil that due to a lack of coherence. It is not that the book doesn’t make sense strictly speaking, but I imagine it was written for a lay/undergraduate audience and so many of the connections which I excitedly anticipated never appeared. If you are looking for an updated introduction to the development of themes made popular through Robert Weber's work and the connection to Church planting then it is worth your time.

How to walk into a Room: The Art of Knowing when to stay and when to walk away by Emily P Freeman

This book was popular, and it’s easy to see why. Freeman writes thoughtfully and empathetically about one of the most difficult situations people, and especially Christians, face: discerning when and how to leave communities, roles, and relationships that once gave deep meaning but no longer feel like home. What could have been a bitter, self-referential guide to church-leaving becomes something far more nuanced.

That said, I’ve struggled to recommend it. The main reason is the personal narrative that frames the book. Freeman centres her story on a church she attended for years, where she raised her children and invested deeply. After she invites a same-sex couple, they experience exclusion, and her discernment leads her to conclude the church is no longer her home. Given how divisive this issue remains, this storyline can distract and alienate some readers, despite her generally gentle tone.

Second, although the book aims to cultivate self-awareness for authentic discernment, it sometimes feels overly inward-focused. Much of its wisdom draws from Ignatian spirituality, yet the book seems edited to appeal to a broader, non-Christian audience.

While Freeman does not hide her Christian commitments, the voice of the book often feels positioned in a way meant to work either way, which can make its spiritual grounding feel muted.

I Cheerfully Refuse by Leif Enger

I started last year delving into Leif Enger’s bleakly beautiful novel “I Cheerfully Refuse”. It’s a lightly dystopian novel set in the not too distant future. Illiteracy is championed, Despair is in the drinking water and the wealth gap has widened leaving the majority in poverty. Rainy, Enger’s protagonist loses his partner in a senseless act of cruelty by a billionaires thug and goes on a somber escape journey that unfolds into acts of beligerant hope. The Washington Post comparison of McCarthy’s “The Road” meets Huckleberry Finn is on point.

There are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak

I just finished my second novel by Turkish-British author Elif Shafak, There Are Rivers in the Sky. Shafak is an excellent writer, and this novel shifts between three characters in three different time periods whose lives ultimately connect. Two of the characters are in London—one in the Victorian era, the other in 2018—and the third is a Yazidi girl in Turkey who travels to Iraq in 2018.

“Remember, my heart. Story-time is different from clock-time.’ Clock-time, however punctual it may purport to be, is distorted and deceptive. It runs under the illusion that everything is moving steadily forward, and the future, therefore, will always be better than the past. Story-time understands the fragility of peace, the fickleness of circumstances, the dangers lurking in the night but also appreciates small acts of kindness. That is why minorities do not live in clock-time. They live in story-time.”

― Elif Shafak, There Are Rivers in the Sky

This work, along with another novel, The Island of Missing Trees, about the conflict in Cyprus, weaves a fascinating focus on the natural world as a character in the stories.

If you’ve made it this far, then Well done!

As I said when I began the first 10 people who sign up with the button below with 50% for the whole year.

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Becoming a member supports the work we do, and in return, you get two(ish) articles a month, alongside book, movie, music and recipe recommendations and access to all 100 of the previous issues.

The next Lectio will be out in a couple of weeks, full of music, food, reading and link suggestions along with an article from me, and should be slightly shorter than this one..

Grace and Peace,

That’s all for now,

Liam

Sitting down, Jesus called the Twelve and said, “Anyone who wants to be first must be the very last, and the servant of all.”

He took a little child whom he placed among them. Taking the child in his arms, he said to them, 37 “Whoever welcomes one of these little children in my name welcomes me; and whoever welcomes me does not welcome me but the one who sent me.”

— Mark 9: 35-36

Welcome to Issue #100 of the Lectio Letter. This members-only newsletter is filled with music, film and food suggestions, links, and an article written by yours truly. If you happen to be new here, there’s a whole 99 other issues you can explore here!

In this 100th issue, I’m reflecting on what I’ve learnt giving “Bible talks” to groups of children. As I reflect on in the article, I am constantly hamstrung by the nuances of theology and talking about those realities in ways that are simple and faithful. Whether or not you end up giving children talks, I hope there is something that reminds you of how important your role can be in a Child’s life is.

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Reading

Everything is Never Enough by Bobbie Jamieson

I began reading Everything Is Never Enough by Bobby Jamieson recently, and I was hooked. It’s a book that unpacks the biblical book of Ecclesiastes. I don’t know if you’ve ever chosen to read that book? Maybe as part of one of those “Bible in a year” approaches, but few people turn to it when they’re seeking their garden-variety biblical inspiration. And yet, if you’ve ever received a prophetic word that included a verse from Ecclesiastes, tell your story in the comments.

This book is lyrically written, remaining clear and contemporary in the best way. Jamieson begins by giving readers a way to approach what, to modern ears, can sound like a series of strange and seemingly counterintuitive phrases that make up Ecclesiastes. That alone would have been enough, but when I realised that Jamieson was going to include Hartmut Rosa as a modern interlocutor, I was sold.

I had been led to Rosa through Andrew Root’s The Congregation in a Secular Age, and I’ve found Rosa’s self-aware, atheistic critical theory, particularly his work on busyness, alienation, emptiness, and resonance to be about as compelling a contemporary hamartiology as there is outside the Bible.

Once I wrap it up, I’ll hopefully get the chance to reflect a little more in the upcoming “All the Books I Read in 2025” Lectio coming soon.

Can these Bones Live by Robert Jenson

A few months ago, I delivered a series of lectures to some young Christians titled “The Nature and Character of God.” Throughout Christian history, there have been extended philosophical and abstract reflections on a series of attributes considered important for defining God (the “omnis,” and so on). Yet this is not how God has chosen to reveal himself in Scripture or in the person of Jesus.

So I designed the talks to survey the biblical story in such a way that God’s character is revealed within the context of a narrative—one that repeatedly challenges many of our assumptions about what is true and, in turn, claims our very lives as the place where these truths are worked out.

As I was reflecting on this approach with a friend over WhatsApp, he said, “That sounds very much like what Jenson was doing in his book “Can These Bones Live?”

I had heard of Jenson and knew he was influenced by Karl Barth, but I hadn’t read anything further. He passed away in 2008, and this book was published a couple of years before that. It is a lightly edited transcription of an undergraduate introductory course in theology given at Princeton Theological Seminary, and I devoured half of it in one sitting. It is extremely readable, and you really get a sense that he is playfully engaging in summarising vast amounts of learning in an accessible way. Indeed, in the introduction, the teaching assistant who compiled the lectures remarks that Jenson worked from minimal notes and spoke largely extemporaneously.

The essential motif, taken from the title of the course, is the question spoken to the prophet Ezekiel: “Son of man, can these bones live?” Jenson uses this question to frame a journey through the classic themes of Christian theology, centring on what it means to live, and what it means to be a people liberated from death through the—unique among religions—centrepiece of Christian conviction: the resurrection. This question of whether God’s life can inhabit and resurrect human life runs throughout Israel’s story and into our contemporary context, shaping both the life of the church and the task of Christian theology.

Eating

Chicken Tinga

We were tasked with preparing a Mexican meal for about 12 people attending our house group last week. Rather than barbecuing Mexican dry-rubbed chicken breasts, I decided to try making the chicken go further by creating an adobo-based sauce. I used this recipe on Serious Eats as the basis for the idea and quadrupled it.

Unlike the adapted recipe that I’ve put below, I transferred the shredded chicken and sauce into a slow cooker, as I had made it earlier in the day and thought it would allow the flavors to meld together.

While it turned out delicious, it was probably more saucey than is good for placing in wraps. I have therefore, removed the slow cooker from the process, as its lid simply retains all the moisture; good for the chicken, but not ideal for reducing the sauce. Next time, as mentioned below, I would simmer off the liquid until the sauce is much thicker.

Ingredients

• 2kg chicken breasts

• Salt and freshly ground black pepper

• 8 tbsp Oil

• 1kg Beef tomatoes + 2–3 tbsp lime juice or cider vinegar (this is to include the acidity which would be present if I could use 50% tomatillos)

• 1 Bulb of garlic cloves, peeled

• 3 small white onions, finely chopped

• 8 tsp dried oregano

• 8 bay leaves

• 120 ml cider vinegar

• 1.9 L chicken stock

• 2 chipotle chiles and 1tbsp of adobo sauce

Process

1. Brown the chicken

   Season chicken generously with salt and pepper. Heat the oil in a large heavy pot or Dutch oven over medium-high heat. Add chicken and cook without moving until deeply browned, 6–8 minutes. Flip and cook 2 minutes more. Remove chicken and set aside.

2. Char the vegetables

   Add tomatoes, and whole peeled garlic cloves to the same pot. Cook, turning occasionally, until blistered and lightly charred in spots, about 5 minutes.

3. Build the sauce base

   Add chopped onions and cook until softened, about 2 minutes. Stir in oregano and bay leaves and cook until fragrant, about 30 seconds. Add cider vinegar and chicken stock, scraping up any browned bits.

4. Simmer the chicken

   Return chicken to the pot. Bring to a boil, then reduce to a gentle simmer. Cover and cook, turning chicken occasionally, until cooked through (about 20–30 minutes).

5. Shred the chicken

   Remove chicken from the pot. Discard skin and bones, then shred the meat with two forks.

6. Reduce and blend the sauce

   Increase heat and simmer the sauce until reduced by about half, 5–10 minutes. Remove and discard bay leaves. Add chipotle chiles and some adobo sauce, then blend until smooth using an stick blender or countertop blender.

7. Finish the tinga

   Return shredded chicken to the pot and stir to coat. Simmer uncovered until the sauce thickens and clings to the chicken. Season with salt, pepper, and additional vinegar or lime juice to taste.

Listening

Some lovely acoustic guitar sounds in the wild.

Soulish Jazz sounds from Les Dunes

Sudan Archives Strings and Africa

A Journey into the past with Lauryn Hill’s Unplugged Performance

The Children’s Talk That Took Me 23 Years to Write

Last week I wrote a pre-Christmas talk for about 110 children who live in the township of Masiphumelele.

Communicating the deep truths of the Christian faith to children between 6-11 is, in my opinion, one of the hardest public speaking gigs you can find. I’m communicating to them in their second language, I’m trying to get their attention after hours of hyper activity at a Christmas party and they are falling into a food coma after we fed them an amount of hotdogs that were, per person, equal to the weight of their overstuffed school bags.

But I have an even bigger problem. I’m kind of a theology nerd.

In the pre-modern world people who were educated in theology were considered “doctors”. They were educated not just so that they could thread a theological camel through the eye of an abstract philosophical needle. They were educated to serve and heal the church. Because ever since Genesis 3 there has been a broken way of approaching knowing and learning lurking around like a poisonous gas that has gotten inside of us.

If you ever have the chance to study the heresies that rose up within the early church you’ll be surprised. Heresies were not made up out of an explicitly evil desire to corrupt the church.

Most of the heresies existed through well intentioned people ministering to congregations and they were attempting to make simple and understandable the foundational realities of Christian faith. The heresies arose because they made them too simple.

They were trying to reach for explanations of how Jesus was fully human and fully divine. How is God as three persons, the Trinity was also the One God of the Hebrew bible?

One thing you learn when studying heresies is that anybody who simply proceeds with their human logic to make these realities simple will end up in some form of heresy.

Instead the church often developed what, at face value, seem like positions that are logical contradictions. They went on to make the explanations as coherent as they could while remaining true to the testimony of the scriptures.

Then they simply demanded that we would fall to our knees in worship. Caught up, as we are, by the spirit into Christ and wonder at the mystery that is greater than we are.

So how does all of this relate to a children’s talk?

Well, I have found myself over the years in, what I now suspect to be, a divinely-engineered tension. I study theology and I get to give Childrens talks.

In the diverse and wonderfully gifted team that we do our children’s and youth work with here, when it comes time to “give a talk” eyes often turn to me (I should mention here that a couple of my coworkers have made valiant and brave attempts to do what I’ve already described as the most terrifying public speaking gig of all time-- to hold the attention of primary school children!).

So I sit down to write something simple. But all the while the development of doctrines and the ditches of heresies along the orthodox road crop up in my mind as I search for simple Christian phrases that shorthand the tapestry of Christian belief.

When I’m teaching theology to adults I’m often trying to explain the ditches and why you often need to clarify something like an explanation of what Jesus’ death accomplished by guarding against heresies.

Those tortured phrases come across something like; “but not that, and not, not that but that.” . This kind of convoluted response, maps on beautifully to the common expectation that theologians are simply making something most people listening have known all their lives more complicated than they think it needs to be.

A theologians response might have the virtue of nuance but it also has the vice of containing so many caveats that the attention span of listeners inevitably fail to perceive any discernible answer to their initial question. And I empathise.

So you can imagine my dilemma as I sit down to try and write something faithful, engaging and simple for 6 to 12-year-olds who are listening in their second language!

Over the years of trying to do this I have come across a few principles that have grounded how I’ve written these talks that you might find useful.

Hopefully from reading so far, you have picked up that anyone who knows me, knows that I am probably one of the last people someone would nominate or expect to be a “children’s worker”. So I am not claiming the expertise of a natural but rather some of the hard-won perspectives from a person who will in all likely remain a beginner and yet sincere amateur at communicating with children.

1. Kids are made for love

The chief qualifications for someone working with children is that you are present, engaged, safe and interested. Which is a longer way of saying, you are committed to loving them in the moment in a clear and obvious way.

This is probably true of any child on earth and yet it’s particularly true for where we work. The vast majority of the children we work with are perpetually traumatised.

Many of their parents are addicts and the children raise themselves. Those who have functioning parental figures are on their own from the end of school until their parent return home from, often exploitative, working conditions.

Kids love safe, loving boundaried attention. You don’t have to be a clown, you just have to be there, affirming their worth with your attention. Calling them by name, looking them in the eye, and assuring them someone cares for them.

2. Understanding develops over time and development stages are significant

Studies in neuroscience reveal that our concept of God is mapped onto mental architecture that begins to be formed through our relationship with our primary caregiver.

When a small brain can’t yet see, feel or attest to the presence of God, God has designed them to know, for an interim time, the care of a loving parent as the placeholder for what in adult life can develop into trust in God. This is technically understood in psychology as secure attachment.

Of course, for a variety of reasons, people develop a disordered relationship with their primary caregiver. In fact, post-Genesis 3, we know through experience that even the best intentioined care givers fail to image God faithfully to us.

But what is crucial about this developmental period is that unhealthy attachment patterns of relating can be re-wired through positive, healthy relationships with other consistent present adults. These redemptive people as a consistent faithful presence in the lives of children help create reinforce pathways of trust and goodness.

I say all of that to say, that much children’s ministry talks focus on morality rather than theology. We look at Jonah and see a lesson that we should listen to God or bad things might happen rather than seeing a God who is relentless in loving pursuit of even the worst of humanity.

But the way the child’s brain develops needs information and experience of what God is like in order for christianity to be more than a behaviour management system.

I understand the motivations here. Children are literal and moral actions like, “be grateful, or generous or love people” are easy things for them to compute, while painting a picture of God in Jesus can feel convoluted, complicated, and abstract.

But If we only preach a children’s gospel about living up to a moral standard we either create ‘good’ people who have no sense of a need for Jesus (see Pelagius), or ‘bad’ people who know they have fallen short and so are assured that God will have nothing to do with them (See the Woman caught in Adultery).

What we need to do in these early stages of childhood, especially for those in troubled and traumatised contexts is to assure them that whatever they have heard about God; he is good, he is loving and he is relentless in coming close to those who have failed, fallen short, felt lost, broken or ashamed. That is the good news.

So while we have rules in our club about how to treat one another, what is and what is not acceptable, we make sure to communicate that we don’t do that in order to qualify for belonging, but we do it as an expression of what God is like and what he does for each of us.

Childrens talks should be theology; ie. about God before they are about morality.

3. Repetition, engagement and attention spans

Those who know me will know that being concise is not my strong suit. But a as a general rule, I try to imagine what I think the attention span of the children I’m going to speak to is and then half it. Then I’m still likely to be pushing their limits by the end.

The second thing that has become clear to me is the power of repetition. While the classic sermon outline training encourages 3 main points, childrens talks need only one. Anytime I’ve naively deviated from this, it has fallen flat.

Next you have to craft that point into a repeatable statement that crops up again and again through the story which reinforces the point you want them to remember.

Finally, I’ve learnt that you don’t have to do it all in one go. One of great privileges of our work is that at least once a week we get to look into the face of over 100 children, say their name and tell them that we are glad they are here.

Then each week, we try to add one simple thread in the tapestry of their understanding of God’s story. Trusting that over time, it might form a fabric of faith that surrounds them in the midst of their troubled childhood and carries them into adulthood.

Theology may require precision, but Christian teaching and ministry requires presence--a heart willing to sit in mystery while offering the simplest truths with clarity and compassion.

It’s taken me 23 years of Christian Faith to figure out to begin to do this and I’m still a beginner. But as I keep stumbling my way through these talks, I’m learning that the task isn’t to compress the infinite into something small, but to open a small window through which the infinite beauty of God in Christ can shine. This happens in words, but at least as powerfully it happens through faithful presence. And somehow, that has become one of the holiest parts of our work.

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So here’s the Talk

The hastily written childrens talk that took me 23 years to be able to write and a video of me attempting to keep their attention is available below to paid subscribers

I tried to link the core disconnection in the garden of Eden, the story of Israel and the way that Jesus’ makes visible and real the God who has pursued broken humanity from the beginning. You’ll see I reference many aspects of the birth and childhood narrative to make connections that God is close to their lived experience. The experience of poverty (Shepherds), unexpected pregnancy (Mary), Xenophobic relations in South Africa (3 Wise men), Violence and Riots (Murder of the Innocents), Schooling (Luke 2:52), Unemployment (transition from carpentry to ministry), Sickness (healings), False Accusation (Trial) and Death (crucifixion and resurrection) are all realities that surround their lives that Jesus’ coming, life, death and resurrection speak to powerfully.

Read more

Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God.

— Colossians 3:16

“Singing together bears compelling witness to the truth. It says to those watching on and listening in that, just as we sing the same melody together, we share the same faith, the Faith; not a self-made creed for a solo journey toward nowhere, but commitment to our one Lord of all, who transforms the life we live together and will bring us home to eternity.”

― Keith Getty, Sing!

The more you think about the qualities of music, the more mysterious they seem. The more you consider music, the more divine it seems, but divine in a peculiar, Trinitarian, way. God is an eternal communion of Father, Son, and Spirit. God is one eternal choir in three voices. God’s life is a perfect harmony of Father, Son, and Spirit. The Trinity sings, is song.

— Peter Leithart

Welcome to Issue #99 of the Lectio Letter. This members-only newsletter is filled with music, film and food suggestions, links, and an article written by yours truly. If you happen to be new here, there’s a whole 98 other issues you can explore here!

Although I am not keeping up my two week schedule, these lectio letters are becoming increasingly "bumper additions" so I hope you can make time to read the article, enjoy the book recommendations and the various miscellaneous at the bottom of the email. (see the PSA, for why you might want to click through to read it online, as some email programs clip the email half way through.)

PSA: This email is LONG and due to some obscure technical reasons on Gmail it gets ‘clipped’, which means you are not seeing the whole thing.

You can see at the bottom of the email if it says “message clipped”, then click “View entire message” to see it all.

You are not getting it all if you don’t see my signature at the bottom

Don’t you recognise the blond hair of the boy in the middle? Yes, that me. A proto-anglican choir boy. While my interests are fairly varied, I have to admit that this 99th edition is an unexpected indulgence into my anglican past.

What began as an introduction to a few pieces of choral music that I have been listening to over the last few weeks unfolded into a longer reflection on the nature of our corporate worship and the virtues of congregational low-church singing versus traditional high-church choral music.

Status Board

Life

Life has been full, which of course is the marketing term for busy. But the rhythms of dog walks and in the case of the photo above, taking the dog to pee before bed, are anchoring in the midst of the ‘muchness’ and ‘manyness’ of life.

Siya is studying hard for IGCSE1 exams, we’ve been spending time with our friend Aya who has had some trips to hospital. We’ve found a new Sunday coffee spot. We’ve joined our weekly community ‘fun run’. We hosted a friend who works in Ukraine for a time of rest and reflection. Aaand, We’ve been running our weekly kids clubs. All good things as we race towards the (hopefully) slower pace of the Christmas break when many of our friends in Masi make the yearly pilgrimage back to they tribal homelands in the Eastern Cape of South Africa.

Reading

Liturgical Mission by Winfield Bevins

I am continuing to move through Bevan's liturgical mission. The real promise and opportunity of this book is connecting the churches worship to its missional life for the sake of the world. The best book I've previously read and recommended around that has been Dwell by Barry Jones.

The introduction is excellent in giving. brief overview of the ways these subjects have developed in recently history. I've been enjoying the book as I am now about 2/3rds through it, although there have been a few small places where I have gotten snagged.

For example Bevin's connects the Trinitarian understanding of “perichoresis” as connected to dance which in my understanding is not the etymological source of that very important word. Something like mutual indwelling/hospitality that affirms the significance of the other through space-making, seems like a more accurate connection. With that being said, it is a very good book and I am more than likely nitpicking due to my own aspirations for it too become the silver bullet of this connection between liturgy and mission.

How to Think by Alan Jacobs

I picked up this book again (after having read it in 2019) to revisit the idea of cognitive bias’, which is a way of talking about how our thinking is almost always going awry.

One of the realisations that came to me through beginning to read it again, was how inherently relational all of our thinking and opinion Holding truly is. We like to think of ourselves as rational independent thinkers when an actual fact the only way we change our mind is by imaginatively moving to another group on the other side of the room of our relational connections. But simply there is simply no one who holds an opinion that somehow doesn't put them in company with a group of imagined others. Therefore relational belonging under depends the conviction level to which we hold are so-called rational opinions. It's a short book and well worth your time.

The Possibility of Prayer by John Starke

This book has been staring at me from my shelf for a couple of years now and I’m so glad I finally read it.

The possibility of prayer has quickly risen to my “go-to” for an introduction to prayer which is an interesting thing given that I've read many books on prayer.

Many of those books in one sense are more practical, have more depth and yet what John Starke has done in this book is to frame things, in my opinion, just right.

Here is an introductory paragraph from the opening to part one.

"A vibrant prayer life as possible for you. I know it may not seem this way, but the whole thing is rigged for triumph. That doesn't mean prayer will be easy or comfortable. It won't. In fact, we should prepare for the long, slow haul of discomfort, confusion, and frustration, laced with joy, love, stability and harness. There aren't a few techniques nearly to pick up so that next week the struggle for prayer will be over. Instead, there are realities that we need to grasp that lead to pathways (rather than techniques) towards intimacy with God. These realities—like the incarnation of Christ, our participation in Christ exalted status, and his participation in our troubled and lowly place—rearrange how we think about ourselves, God, and the world around us. This often means on learning lies about ourselves, God, and the world that have driven how we've lived and made decisions so far in our lives. That will take time because it's not mainly changing our minds or our perspectives but growing up into who we are in Christ and embodying the truth.”

— The Possibility of Prayer, John Starke | p.9-10

This recognition of the need to move from simple techniques to reimagining the context within which we pray, for me, seems like what represents the hardest but most foundational transformation in understanding the role of prayer in the Christian life.

We are tempted to view prayer as a simple lever on the side of a slot machine named God and yet the invitation is far more relational. To participate with and come to know the One who has loved and found us in the messy broken world we live in and live out His love in every circumstance.

Starke unfolds the inner changes that take place in us through prayer and make prayer even enjoyable by overcoming our deeply utilitarian, outcomes-focused approach to prayer.

The second part of the book is interesting in that it actually isn't unpacking what most people expect as prayer but instead has a list of disciplines such as communion, meditation, solitude, fasting and feasting, Sabbath resting and corporate worship. The very fact that these are listed as the practice of prayer for Starke reveals his intention that our lives are made to become a prayer rather than solely focusing on the practice of sitting down folding our hands and shutting our eyes, as important as that is as he unpacks in chapter 2 of part one.

What pleasantly surprised me about this book are the places that John Starke goes to unpack the significance of prayer. The book was initially promoted within what I understand to be the fairly conservative Gospel Coalition and yet his end notes reveal extensive references to Henry Nouwen, Annie Dillard, Ignatius of Antioch, Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Eugene Peterson, David Benner, Athanasius, Ronald Rolheiser, and Robert Farrar Capon.

I heartily encourage you to read it.

Eating

Overnight Oats

Rachel has a few times made these overnight oats made famous in our small world from my wonderful sister Bethany’s project - Community Eats. She is right

Ingredients

3 cups Rolled Oats

2 tsp Baking Power

1 tsp Sea Salt

1 tsp Cinnamon

1/4 cup Honey, Brown Sugar or Maple Syrup

1/4 cup Butter

1 1/2 cup Coconut Milk

1 tsp Vanilla

2 Eggs

Rachel adds frozen Blueberries which are delicious, but as you can see from Beth’s receipt there are multiple ways to ‘mix it up’.

Process

1. In an ovenproof serving dish mix together rolled oats, baking powder, sea salt and cinnamon.

2. Then in a saucepan, melt together honey, brown sugar or maple syrup and butter.

3. Into that whisk in coconut milk, vanilla and two eggs.

4. Pour the wet ingredients over the oat mixture and mix very well together.

5. Add in 2 cups of blueberries!

6. At this point you can place it the fridge overnight.

7. Bake 180C for 30-40 minutes.

This is great served with a spoonful of Thick Yoghurt spooned on top with a drizzle of honey and fresh berries.

Browning vs Cooking

Recently, I found a workaround to gain cheap access to YouTube premium. I was forced to do this after using a VPN which placed our network technically inside the UK, which then led to a vast array of adverts that were completely irrelevant to our lives. In South Africa!

I simply couldn't manage it anymore… but to justify this minor expense I have spent more time being led by the always creepily accurate algorithms of YouTube to some excellent cooking tutorials.

While a lot of cooking influencers rehearse the same ideas without really talking about why they work I've enjoyed the America Test kitchen's videos for both their length (normally within 20 minutes) and the explanation of some of the science behind why certain methods work.

Listening

A Short, pleasing guitar instrumental from Richard Houghten

Some nice sounds by Yuuf here (video starts at the song Alfa Cove);

Some more good jazzy sounds from South Africa;

A Haunting Hymnal

Since I was 16 years old, when I learned my first contemporary worship song on the guitar, I’ve led worship in Church and small groups. In fact, I got to know Rachel, my wife, through playing a worship band together in a church. So, if you play some late 90’s early 2000’s contemporary worship songs, I’ll likely stare off into the distance with a sentimental gaze.

But a number of years ago, I had an unnerving experience. An experience that reminded me of worship I experienced even longer ago than the 1990’s. We were in a church service led by our Xhosa friends in the township where we have worked for the last 16 years. We would sing songs in Xhosa, Chichewa (from Malawi) and Shona (from Zimbabwe). We knew most of the songs and they were sung in ragtag acapella.

There are maybe 100 such gatherings in this small community which, while holding at least 60,000 people, is confined by surrounding wetlands, settlements, and a major road to a space measuring around 5 miles square. That means on a Sunday, you are never more than 100 meters from a Sunday church gathering. Many of these churches sing the same songs despite ranging from, on one side, so syncretistic with Animism they are barely Christian, to the Baptist and Latter Day Saints whose gatherings are more reminiscent of their North American f(o)unders.

Haunted by a Choir in my memories

Without really noticing though, an Anglican church had begun gathering in a small building that shared a wall with our gathering. They have since built an impressive, if not blandly functional, building, but back then, they were gathered in what was essentially a lightly converted garage space.

When the singing on our side of the wall subsided, theirs continued, muffled through the double brick, but clear enough to make out. Something akin to the sound you can hear through a teenager’s bedroom door. Music just loud enough to make out but loud enough that anything short of bursting into the room would be unheard by the one inside.

In the quiet of our prayer and Bible reading, my subconscious started to be provoked. While the neighbouring congregation were singing in Xhosa, the melodies they were singing were reaching into the very depths of my memories with an arresting familiarity. You seen, my very earliest years were spent at the back of a 12th Century church building (which was the site of an earlier 7th century building) called St Winnow.

While I never held the memory of the words of these songs, sung as they were, over me and despite of my childhood disinterest, the melodies had worked their way somewhere deep within me. I was moved—haunted in fact, to a level that I had to restrain in order to remain present to the gathering I was attending. But in the years that followed, I have developed a less embarrassed affection for the choral music of traditional churches.

It could easily be argued that the melodies repeated approximately 35 years after I first heard them are testimony to an awkwardly post-colonial lack of contextualised mission. Blame it, as you may, on my rose-coloured and watery-eyed sentimentality, but in that moment I felt as if there was something holy happening. These simple melodies, repeated across decades and a nearly 6000 mile distance, were a sign and symbol of the unity of God’s people scattered, as they are, across tribes, tongues, and nation states. A Church which shares in the communion of the saints stretching back 2000 years and forward into as many generations as it takes before Jesus appears in Glory.

The Choral Medium as a Vision of the Church

Though many experience choral music as relic of the past in style, its very form embodies a sign and symbol of the Church’s true calling and identity. The amplification of much modern church music, which unintentionally elevates the professional musicians to the place of priests, who sing and play “on our behalf”, results in the congregation’s own wavering voices often being lost under the rehearsed cacophony of a P.A. System. While in theory affirming a ‘priesthood of all believers’, the mode of worship betrays a different message.

In contrast, Choirs in classical liturgical environments carry the congregation but don’t suppress their timbered offerings. Choirs, as a rule, don’t consistently fixate on the gift of a single singer. Instead their music is made beautiful exactly because the many parted harmonies incarnate the beauty in diversity inherent in God’s people. These many differently octave-abled image bearers bring their gifts together as one in praise of the God who made and sustains their lives.

In a way difficult to articulate, in that morning I spent overhearing Anglican hymns through a wall, I recognised that the melodies that had flowed unthinkingly over me as a disinterested primary school age child roughly colouring in cartoon bible stories papers, tied a thread. A Thread of God’s faithful salvation work in and through me to the day in which I was helping to plant a Church gathering in that Xhosa township in South Africa. A thread of the great gift of faith, glimpsing the faithfulness of God in catching up my childhood indifference and transforming it into a captivating love that has arrested and directed my adult life.

I’m sure, for some of you reading this, there is an adequate ‘flattened’ account of what happened in that haunting moment. But for me, the concertina of linear time was pushed together in much the same way as I anticipate the folding of time in the Eschaton. The collapsing and liberation of these long years into a moment by the One for whom a thousand years is as one day and who knows the Beginning from the End.

Of course all of this begs a series of more analytical questions: Is the symbol and sign embedded in the form of choral music enough to warrant it as inherently ‘better’ than contemporary praise and worship? The answer to that has to be No.

Would I be a follower of Jesus today if I had remained in that traditional liturgical setting? It’s hard to tell, but I am strongly inclined to say, almost certainly not.

Did my subsequent deeply significant times of being discipled in a Church focussed on expository explanations of the Bible make my adult faith possible? In my reflections, Certainly so.

Did my faltering yet sincere and heart felt attempts to play worship songs of my young adulthood form something liturgical worship could not do in that phase of my life? Again Yes (and I’ve written about that here).

But the points of resonance in this experience for me, was not comparing contemporary and traditional forms of worship and claiming one is better or than everyone should take the road back to Canterbury (as Robert Webber observed).

The latest developments in the Anglican communion are evidence enough that there is no greener grass across the traditional/contemporary denominational divides. The point I am reflecting is the great formative power in the styles and forms we worship in.

Roots, Repetition, and the Counter-Cultural Power of Tradition

As Marshall McLuhan is famous for saying “The Medium is the Message”. The forms of contemporary worship are marked by a desire to be resonant and accessible to a surrounding culture. Attractional churches are built on the idea of presenting an old message in a modern mode. The motivation here, generously thought of, is faultless.

But the practical challenge with incarnating forms of worship into culture is that you are always following the lead of the culture. The second and more insidious is that you end up following a culture drowning in consumption which requires novelty.

An endless fixation on new-ness keeps the systems of production alive and are justified with bumper stickers versions with out-of-context bible phrases like; “God is doing a new thing, don’t you perceive it” or “New wine into new wineskins”. I think these bible verses means something, but I don’t think they are a blanket endorsement for endless novelty. I think that the spirit of capitalist consumerism.

With all that said, I’m not arguing that choral music, in some way, fell from the sky. Many of the hymns choirs sing are drawn from the medieval period all the way through to the 19th Century. Not all old hymns are good, just as not all new contemporary songs are bad. But a good deal of the hymns choirs continue to sing have stood the test of time.

There is something more than familiarity and nostalgia which move people to sing songs they have sung all through their lives. In contrast to the endless consumption of surrounding culture, they have roots and represent stability. These two features are the most counter-cultural forms possible in a culture that is fixated on novelty.

Something about the medium of consistency and repetition over decades resonates deeply to a modern world which changes its phones, jobs and cars more often than most people in history changed their clothes. Newness, after all, can be exhausting, it becomes a cult of anticipation that never gets fulfilled. In a world of newness, roots and repetition can be rest.

Worship, Individualism, and the Story That Forms Us

Our modern western culture owes a lot to the enlightenment. While it is often referred to as the birth of rationalism, a counter movement arose shortly after which pulled on the other end of that rope, it was called romanticism.

Some of the earliest thinkers Voltaire and Rousseau affirmed the significance of ‘looking within’ for an ‘authentic truth’ based in ‘intuition and emotive responses’ and to not let those around you make any claim to what is true or desirable. Sound familiar?

Contemporary worship music in its content and form can play into this wider cultural inheritance from ‘romanticism’ which encourages introspection, individualism and a concern for interior emotional states. The lyrics are self-referential, individual and emotive while the trend in the worship spaces are to be plain and dark emphasising the congregants feelings of being solitary.

Jesus encouraged us when we pray to go and be alone and shut the door. I don’t think he imagined us creating corporate worship spaces where feel alone when we are together.

In contrast to this self-referential ‘authentic’ mode much choral music is drawn directly from scripture; places like the Psalms, the Song of Zechariah, and the Magnificat.

Here our emotional lives and all the other very relevant parts of who we are, are not turned towards a self-referential inner life, but for us to join ourselves to emotional contours of the people of God through the ages.

We learn how to feel our many emotions and turn to God through rehearsing the psalms. The Song of Zechariah teaches us what hope in God looks like and the Magnificat, how to be fully devoted to God’s counter-cultural coming Kingdom rather than our comfort and preferences.

So what does it all mean?

As I reflect on that profound moment overhearing choral melodies from my childhood I don’t it’s an either/or decision around abandoning contemporary forms of worship or nostalgically clinging to liturgical choral forms. Much of my life, contemporary worship has taught me to love Jesus with songs of devotion that connected to my lived experience. But at some point the well of authentic feelings offered to Jesus isn’t enough.

We all long to be grounded in the life of God that transcends our own small worlds, on a rock that is firmer and has stood the test of time and connects me to the people of God around, before and beyond me. If the medium truly is the message, then the Worshipping Church must take seriously the messages our worship forms communicate—about novelty or permanence, individualism or communion, introspection or shared hope.

And perhaps in rediscovering the harmonies that have carried generations before us we can be reminded that we belong to something stable, communal, and deeply rooted. Whatever worship forms we engaged in, may we do so with wisdom—seeking God with full hearts, alive minds and ready hands and not just be drawn to what is newest or most nostalgic, but instead, what trains us to love God and one another more fully, as one diverse people learning to sing the same story until He comes.

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Miscellaneous Links

Christians need to be Weird

I’ve been really enjoying reading Jason Clark sharing in plain, accessible language things I’ve struggled to articulate as clearly. He begins by picking up the much referenced historian Tom Holland who unequivocally identified that the roots of the West are undeniably indebted to Christianity.

SpEx

The Real Reason Christians Are Weird

Historian Tom Holland has a provocative message for the Church today…

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6 months ago · 8 likes · Jason Swan Clark

Holland via Jason Clark claims that

Christianity was “weird” because it claimed that:

• God became human, and the crucified One rules the world.

• The poor and powerless bear divine dignity.

• Enemies are to be loved, not eliminated.

• Forgiveness outranks revenge.

• Reality is sacramental, not secular.

• Every human—from womb to grave—is precious to God.

• Resurrection is the true horizon of human hope.

Christian Cultural Engagement

With the increase of a kind of crude politicisation of Christianity, it’s worth having something of a simple map. While this Mere Orthodoxy maps things in a North American frame, it’s worth having some ‘options’ explained.

Mere Orthodoxy | On Substack

Four Types of Christian Cultural Engagement

As the fracturing dynamics that roiled within American evangelicalism between 2015 and 2024 begin to finally exhaust themselves, it is worth pausing to consider where we now find ourselves at the beginning of what may feel like a new era in the life of the American church. Old alliances and coalitions have fragmented and many institutions have fallen, either through moral failure or through actually closing their doors and ceasing to exist. Yet alongside these threats one can also see many signs of hope–there seems to be a new openness to Christianity amongst many people who once seemed quite closed off. This openness can be seen in everything from the response to the Asbury outpouring, to Canadian apologist Wesley Huff’s appearance on the Joe Rogan Show, to surprising conversions like those of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, to soaring Bible sales numbers in 2024…

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6 months ago · 75 likes · 14 comments · Mere Orthodoxy and Jake Meador

A Christological Anthology

Chris Green is running a mind blowing series on a Christological Anthology which is a great way to enter into a whole host of sources most are unfamiliar with.

Speakeasy Theology

Whoever is Close to Me is Close to the Fire

God Glorifies Himself in the Human: A Christological Anthology…

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6 months ago · 62 likes · 6 comments · Chris EW Green

He makes some really interesting points throughout this after quote Metz at length. But this section on ‘The Fear of the Lord’ was particularly interesting to me;

Years ago, at a conference where I had been speaking, someone observed that in all my talks I had made no mention of the fear of the Lord. I’m not sure he and I would agree on what is meant by that term, but I am sure he was right to ask why I had not addressed it, for we must live in that fear—exactly as Jesus did and does.

To be sure, it is that fear, Jesus’s fear, that we must live in—not another, not another’s. That fear is, as Isaiah declares, a gift of the Spirit (Isa. 11.1-3), perfected in Jesus by how he lived and died. As Aquinas recognized, the fear the Spirit gives us is not servile or even merely human—not the fear sons have of their fathers but the engodded and engodding fear the Son has for the Father, which has no terror in it. Aquinas makes thecrucial distinction: it is not fear of God in himself, not a fear of God’s nature or essence, but a fear from God that keeps us attached to him, an alertness to and readiness for him—our conductivity, we might say, to the Spirit’s electric current. Or, in Thomas’s own words, it is amenability to the motion of God (ST II.II.19.9). So, despite what we have sometimes imagined, the-fear-of-the-Lord (as Eugene Peterson helpfully rendered it) is the magnetic gift of God that makes it so that we can, if we want, stay with God no matter what happens—not losing contact or falling out of sync, but keeping step, keeping rhythm. Though it is not itself a virtue, it is integral to the virtue of hope, and both perfects it and is perfected by it (ST II.II.19.9).

What should we do ‘against the Machine’?

Paul Kingsnorth a writer and recent convert to Christian who I’ve mentioned before has compiled his thinking in to what is now a bestselling book; “Against the Machine”. I, like Miller and Bob, am very sympathetic to his concerns. The review below gives some reasons to wonder if there is a cure for the ills he so deftly describes.

MILLER’S BOOK REVIEW 📚

Against Paul Kingsnorth’s ‘Against the Machine’

Toward the end of Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine, he paints an attractive picture of people free to pursue value and meaning in small pockets of community and industry. He highlights “a politics which embraces family and home and place, loving the particular without excluding the outsider, and which looks on all great agglomerations of power with suspicion…

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6 months ago · 217 likes · 119 comments · Joel J Miller

The First Christian Martyrs

The Christian Story is a fantastic project which (a la Bible Project) is creating excellent animated videos which explain aspects of Christian History. It is backed by solid research and a heart for the church to catch a vision of the past for the sake of the future.

Can you drive west to lengthen the sunset

These random scientific explanation are just interesting enough to keep me engaged ;)

Fascinating Interview on Photographing Erupting Volcanoes

What was it like to stand that close when it actually erupted?

You feel it in your chest—a deep rumble, then an explosion that makes your ears ring. It’s dangerous and completely mesmerizing. Everyone edges closer even though your brain’s screaming don’t. It’s pure moth-to-flame energy.

A Time of Gifts

How to Photograph an Active Volcano Without Getting Vaporized

Welcome to A Time of Gifts, a newsletter that’s loosely about travel and living well, written by me, Shona Sanzgiri, an editor, journalist, and photographer based in L.A…

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6 months ago · 15 likes · Shona Sanzgiri

“a religious event which eternally recurs every time it is accepted”

Alan Jacobs often finds ornate pieces of obscure (to me) writing by literary greats. This section from Auden writing to his father about his mediocre take on the Oratorio’s which were his literary presentations of the Gospel has a wonderful line in it.

Sorry you are puzzled by the oratorio. Perhaps you were expecting a purely historical account as one might give of the battle of Waterloo, whereas I was trying to treat it as a religious event which eternally recurs every time it is accepted.

Read the rest

I’m confident this is why observing the Christian calendar in some way can be so formative.

Stillness as Resistance

Experimental Theology with Richard Beck

Stillness as Resistance

During times of great anxiety and uncertainty, when it seems like the fate of the world is hanging in the balance, there wells up within us a great desire to "do something." And so we thrash around, giving our inner agitation an outlet. You see a lot of this happening on social media…

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a year ago · 35 likes · 11 comments · Richard Beck

Finally, Richard Beck’s encouragement to aver ‘hot takes’ and simply refuse to be pulled in by the need to ‘do something’ is well needed advice.

He begins with

During times of great anxiety and uncertainty, when it seems like the fate of the world is hanging in the balance, there wells up within us a great desire to “do something.” And so we thrash around, giving our inner agitation an outlet. You see a lot of this happening on social media.

and closes;

Being still can be a profound act of resistance. We are surrounded by the crazed, anxious activity of others. Their panic is contagious, their fear infectious. Worse, they will shame you for staying still, denigrating your calm as wickedness and damning you for not “doing something” as the world burns.

But on the banks of the Red Sea, God fights for the still.

Worth the full read using the link above

That’s all for now…

“This is why we believe in Jesus Christ—to help us see that we are not what we ought to be and to help us become what we ought to be.”

― Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace

“Whatever a Christian understanding of Vocation is, it is shaped by the first command to lay down our nets”

— (overheard somewhere ;)

“I no longer call you servants but friends”

— Jesus of Nazareth

“Sabbath, in the first instance, is not about worship. It is about work stoppage. It is about withdrawal from the anxiety system of Pharaoh, the refusal to let one’s life be defined by production and consumption and the endless pursuit of private well-being.”

― Walter Brueggemann

Welcome to Issue #98 of the Lectio Letter. This members-only newsletter is filled with music, film and food suggestions, links, and an article written by yours truly. If you happen to be new here, there’s a whole 97 other issues you can explore here!

Whether you become a paid subscriber or not, I’m very grateful to each of you who read and respond to this newsletter.

PSA: This email is LONG and due to some obscure technical reasons on Gmail it gets ‘clipped’, which means you are not seeing the whole thing.

You can see at the bottom of the email if it says “message clipped”, then click “View entire message” to see it all.

You are not getting it all if you don’t see my signature at the bottom.

Alternatively, if you don’t want to read this in your email, you can use the Substack app (where you can listen to the article read out) or read it online at LectioLetter.com

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Life

This month I had planned a slight uptick in my writing cacapity which was summarily squashed by a few events seen and unforeseen. The most dramatic was Rachel getting quite sick with food poisoning. So severe that in normal circumstances she may have ended up in hospital, but our local doctor was able to ‘rig up’ an IV and get her recovering.

Rachel was sick over our 17th Wedding Anniversary, we lived out our “in sickness and in health” vows with some chicken soup and some flowers.

It didn’t hold up back from reminiscing over the last 17 years, which all in all have been very good to us both. Here’s one of our favourite photos of us (looking like children!) at our wedding ceilidh (traditional Scottish dance party).

Rachel was thankfully back on her feet within a week or so and I went to teach in a YWAM DTS on the Character and Nature of God. It was an enjoyable week, helping young enthusiastic Christians in their 20’s who were starting out in missions. They were a bright bunch and my favourite moment is always the “Question and Response” times.

Despite being engaged in the core areas I was teaching, the questions (as was invited) were broad; bringing up stick theological issues like;

• Once saved always saved?

• Can women be pastors?

• Could we fall again after Jesus comes back?

• Do we really have free will?

Which made things easy, because all the answers are “Yes” (For those who can’t hear my tone of voice, that is (kind of) a joke).

But I realise the older I get, my felt need is less to untie the ‘big’ abstract philosophical questions, but to root big realities in the specifics of my everyday life. The “big” theological questions can too often be strategies of avoidance in my experience.

In this last week, we’ve been joined by Rachels family and were able to take a trip back to our beloved Tulbagh valley which is about 2 hours away from our home here in Cape Town.

Reading

Yesterday I looked through the oft-quoted The Next Evangelicalism: Freeing the Church from Western Cultural Captivity by Soong Chan Rah.

His introduction unpacks his indebtedness to US white evangelicalism and he goes on to critique the individualism and materialism that has infected evangelicalism and leaves us culturally bound.

This critique is on point and he unpacks why mega church and the now defunct “emergent” church is simply a continuation of this pragmatic indiviudualism. He goes on to present a salve in the form of learning from non-western immigrant churches in humility for what we have lost. I am sympathetic to this suggestion and have argued myself for a greater cultural humility in mission.

It is essentially a cultural version of Richard Foster’s Stream of living water, where disparate fragmented aspects of the Jesus way need to be reunited. The critique alone would serve most leaders who struggled to diagnose their consistently mono-cultural church environments but I am less assured that the salve will heal us fully.

I am concerned that since the writing of the book (2013, I think), there is increased cross-cultural hostility and distrust especially in the US as simple requests for humble learning from other perspective gets crushed as ‘woke’ but I am also less naive that ‘exposure and humility’ will reunite an increasingly polarised church.

Finally, Rah’s North American context inevitably overwhelms the books references and part of what the church will wrestle with (as you can see in the recent GAFCON split) is the global church, not just the church in North America. We are increasingly unintelligible to one another and bridge building will be the work of serious spiritual warfare.

Other than that there’s not been much time to read in the last few weeks, but instead I’d thought I’d share some reviews of books that I’d like to read soon!

Liturgical Mission by Winfield Bevins

I’ve actually begun this book already and so far it is eminently readable and I’m looking forward to getting to the chapters in the second half as the beginning is something of a a reappraisal of Robert Webber for the 21st century liturgical renewal.

Mission, therefore, is central to who we are as Christians and what we are called to do as the church and body of Christ. According to missiologist Ed Smither, “Mission has been central to the identity of the Christian movement since its inception—Christianity is a missionary faith.” We are called to participate in God’s holistic mission in word (evangelism, making disciples), deed (caring for human needs, bringing justice, and seeking reconciliation), and stewardship of the earth (creation care).

Rather than seeing mission as something the church does apart from its liturgy, we must realize that mission begins in worship. Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann encourages us to understand that mission flows from the liturgical and sacramental life of the church, “for it alone makes possible the liturgy of mission.” His phrase “the liturgy of mission” is a reminder that liturgy should always lead to the sending activity of the church. Both worship and mission are at the very heart of the church’s calling.

A Review here

Living in Union with Christ: Paul’s Gospel and Christian Moral Identity by Grant Macaskill

Macaskill wrote that the “core claim of this book is that all talk of Christian moral life must begin and end with Paul’s statement, ‘It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me’ (Gal 2:20), and must understand the work of the Holy Spirit rightly in relation to Christ’s presence” (p. 1). Macaskill explained this claim to mean “that we can never talk about the moral activity of a Christian without always, in the same breath, talking about Jesus, because the goal of our salvation is not that we become morally better versions of ourselves but that we come to inhabit and to manifest his moral identity” (p. 1) (emphasis original). Thus, as Macaskill would later note, the sinner’s need for “an alien righteousness” extends beyond justification to include sanctification as well. We need the righteousness of Christ to “inhabit our limbs, lips, and neuron if we are to live and think in a way that honors God, if we are to confess him rightly” (p. 3).

A Review here

Listening

Parcels has continued to be in our heavy rotation

Rachel has been enjoying this song from Cageless Birds and I used it in a response time with the DTS

Our nieces have been singing and playing Olivia Deans new album which has some catchy tunes

London based Jazz artist Alfa Mist just released a new album and this title track from his album is great

The Work we Worship that makes us Slaves

Our modern world is built on work. Work is how wealth is made and how we define success. It’s the primary identity marker we ask for upon meeting someone, and the way we name ambition and direction for our own lives by seeking a career path.

Work, of course, was part of God’s intention for human beings from the very beginning. The first humans were given the command to work and keep creation on behalf of, and in relationship with, the Creator.

The failure of God’s first partners in creation was not merely a moral rule-break, but a failure to do the work God had given. The humans God created were made to act on His behalf — ruling, subduing, and stewarding the creatures they had named. Yet in the end, they were ruled and subdued by the craftiest of creatures, the serpent, who invited them to become like gods themselves.

The implications of this failure were the distortion of every good thing God had given. In Genesis 3:16-19, we discover the goods of human life would become diseased; their work, their relationships with God and one another, along with their call to steward the earth and fill it through childbearing — all became troubled instead of the gift they were always meant to be.

The Long Labor of Redemption

In the labour of God to redeem humanity as His partners, God eventually draws near to the family of Abram. Their simple response of trust in God’s call to redeem their own lives and their hope for children changed both their lives and their names. A people born from their blessing would, in turn, be a blessing for all peoples and all creation, just as those first humans were made to be.

Through the twists and turns of Abraham’s descendants — forgetful of their call and instead jealous of surrounding people — they became a blessed bloodline caught in the vice of Egypt’s cursed and work-crazed world.

Four hundred years of slavery ensued as God’s promise gestated in their suffering songs, as they cried out to Yahweh for deliverance. The ancients knew well the forty weeks of gestation required for human life to come to full term, and those four hundred years — and the forty years that followed in the wilderness — were as pregnant as Sarah’s womb that initiated God’s redemption plan.

A Baby in a Basket

This chapter of the story begins again with another baby — Moses — cast out into a makeshift ark upon the Nile, carried by God’s redemption just as Noah and his family had been before, straight into the arms of the serpent-king Pharaoh’s household. Moses grows older and gains God’s heart for the redemption of His people as he sees their suffering. Yet he acts in his own strength and anger, killing an Egyptian slave master.

Like his Edenic forebears, he reaches to accomplish the very deliverance in the heart of God through means, timing, and ways far from God. As he escapes into the wilderness, foreshadowing the journey he would lead his people in later, he is humbled by his transition from a palace to a life herding sheep. He is drawn once again — turning aside to a burning bush — and hears the call to announce to Pharaoh: “Let my people go, so that they may worship me.”

Work — meant to be the blessing of a relational partnership with God, to bring forth beauty, order, and abundance as a living revelation of God’s character — has devolved into the hell-pit of Egyptian slavery. No rest. No freedom. Work poisoned to its very core.

Rest Before Work

But it is rest and not work that humans are most foundationally made for. As we turn the pages back from Exodus to Genesis, we see that God exuberantly creates the world in six days, and on the sixth day, the image-bearers — the first humans — are made. On the seventh day, the inaugural Sabbath commences.

Consider this for a moment; The first full day of human life is spent sharing in the rest of all that God had done.

From that place of resting in God’s accomplishments, the humans were then led into their own vocations — but not before recognizing that all their work was simply response and participation in the greater work that only God could do, and had done.

Many centuries later — though many centuries before us — an African, half-Berber bishop named Augustine penned words opening his world-famous autobiography, the Confessions, which have resonated with countless human hearts in the centuries that have followed:

“You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they finds their rest in you.”

— Augustine

Restless Hearts and Working Hands

We were made for rest. But our sin-confused relationship with work always obscures the deeper call of relationship with God. As we ignore God’s invitation to know Him — in the wonder and glory of all He has done and all that He is — our relationship to what we do and where we do it cannot help but become deeply disordered.

We find ourselves yearning for a clear sense of who we are, whose we are, and where we are — and we do this by taking the temperature of our work and its connected successes or failures. We end up searching for orientation outside of God, frantically drawing our sense of worth from what we do, what we have, or what we have accomplished — or not.

While most of us don’t have a literal Pharaoh cracking a serpentine whip demanding our slavery, we nonetheless act as slaves — giving our everything to the accomplishment of work for the sake of gaining our worth. But on that first day of the original humans’ lives — before work — they were immersed in the Sabbath delight of God’s accomplishments. Their worth to God was clear. He didn’t need them; He wanted them.

Remember the Rest

Returning to the Exodus story, we see Moses leading God’s people out of slavery, and into that fray flies the wisdom and redemption of God: to institute a Sabbath remembrance at the heart of His commandments. Like a rehabilitation program for a people flogged to an inch of their lives, the commandments offer a renewed way of being in the world — a reshaping of their souls and sense of self.

The earliest reflections on these commands — which became central to the identity of Abraham’s people — noted that the Sabbath commandment begins differently from all the others. While the familiar rhythm of most commands begins, “You shall not…,” this one begins, “Remember.”

Maybe this points to humanity’s disordered relationship with work — that we are called to remember something we are so prone to forget. But certainly it is to remember that, from the very beginning of His story, God is not looking for obedient worker bees, but for partners and friends.

The Easy Yoke

During Jesus’ earthly ministry he condemned the corruption of the Sabbath practice — seeing that the very rhythm meant to remind people of their value before their work had instead become an unbearable burden. He instead tells those that follow Him, the Exodus Yahweh in the flesh;

“Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls”

— Jesus in Matthew 11:28-30

Jesus confronted a practise that was meant to re-story Abraham’s family line as they remembered they were freed from slavery back into partnership with God. He did not intend to abolish it.

Near the end of His life, in the Gospel of John, He tells His followers, “I no longer call you slaves, but friends.” Finally, as he heads to jerusalem to fulfill his earthly mission culminating in giving His life on a cross he arrives during the passover. The festival at which Abraham’s people remembered they had been freed from slavery. His bodily resurrection was the final promise that YHWH would deliver us from the slavery of the fear of death into the sabbath rest of his rule and reign.

A weekly sabbath practised by Abraham’s people until today can seem impossible to modern Christians. We live in a hyper connected age when creating any distance from work and productivity through an intentional sabbath practise seems like a fantasy. The challenge is made even harder in our instantaneous society by the fact that Sabbath doesn’t “work” as a one-off but only in cumulative, continuous practise.

With that being said, as Travis West notes in his book “The Sabbath Way”, learning to live in Sabbath has to grow to maturity through the inevitable ‘adolescence’ of imperfect attempts.

The point is to keep going, to trust the slow quiet work of God’s Spirit reminding us that work is good but we were made for the rest of loving relationship first. If we can allow the Spirit of God to work through the consistent, even while faltering, practise of Sabbath rest, we might be rehabilitated from slavery into the kingdom of the beloved son.

Living increasingly in the light of that Kingdom would remind us that, as Henri Nouwen said;

“We are not what we do, we are not what we have, we are not what others think of us. Coming home is claiming the truth. We are the beloved children of a loving creator.”

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Miscellaneous Links

Paul and the Language of Faith

Nijay Gupta, NT Scholar at Northern has been doing a retrospective summarising his books. This summary of his Paul and the language of Faith, is a good primer for anyone who has a non-academic interest in picking up how academic reflections on the context of the use of the word faith and how it isn’t just, as Mark Twain once quipped “Having faith is believing in something you just know ain’t true.”

“…non-Jewish Greek texts as well as Jewish texts the term pistis (often translated “faith”) had a wide range of meaning, including cognitive processing (belief), embodied loyalty (allegiance), and the operation of the will (trust). Commentaries rarely took this into consideration.”

Engaging Scripture (with Dr. Nijay K. Gupta)

The Story Behind My Books: Paul and the Language of Faith (Book #10)

The Story Behind My Books…

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9 months ago · 14 likes · 6 comments · Nijay K. Gupta

I only got 5 minutes into this 50+ min documentary about the set up of one of the logistics locations for Antarctica but it’s the type of documentary that sucks me in… Now I just have to find uninterrupted time to enjoy this Anderson-esque film;

I’ve been very intrigued about Paul Kingsnorth’s perspective and He was recently interviewed by Russell Moore about how AI is demonic! I imagine many of you’d find interesting. Kingnorth’s own journey to Christianity, connection to nature, and recognition of the de-humanising forces at work in our world is worth ‘salting’ our own engagement in the increasingly technologically dominated reality we live alongside.

Yupp, all these historical figures that had such a lasting impact on the 20th Century (and beyond) lived in the City of Vienna at the same time during 1913-1914. The idea that Stalin could have, with real probability, walked past a homeless Hitler trying to sell his mediocre watercolor paintings on the street is an interesting one to consider.

from Earthly Mission

Finally, I’ve been thinking about how we approach what we call theology for a long time. I’m convinced that the enlightenment rationality approach leaves us with a broken set of pieces that are fragments of God who is, by the earliest Judeo-Christian confession “One”. What I like about Brad Jersey’s response to a question about his approach to theology is the integration of encounter. Inter-personal encounters with the God we come to know fully in Jesus are the bed rock of the biblical narrative. We lose something crucial when theology is done in such a way that the significance of personal encounter is lost and yet we can’t simply extrapolate up from our experiences. We must come to know them in the context of a story that, yes includes our own lives, the life of the Church in our time, but also in the context of a story that existed far before us and will continue beyond us.

Bradley Jersak

My Theological Method - Bradley Jersak

QUESTION…

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8 months ago · 46 likes · 3 comments · Bradley Jersak

That’s all for now…

“A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none. A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.”

— Martin Luther, The Freedom of a Christian (1520)

“True liberty is not the power to live as we please, but to live as we ought.”

— John Wesley

“Freedom is not something a man has for himself but something he has for others. A free man is a man who lives for others.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Act and Being

Welcome to Issue #97 of the Lectio Letter. This members-only newsletter is filled with music, film and food suggestions, links, and an article written by yours truly. If you happen to be new here, there’s a whole 96 other issues you can explore here!

I started out writing this post 3 weeks ago, and it began in my mind as an article on keeping the Sabbath. Well, it seems that might have to re-emerge at a different time because as I wrote the introduction on what freedom is for, what you read below emerged. I’ve wrestled with the article below, because the whole time I was writing it I expected to turn towards a conversation about spiritual disciplines like sabbath being acts of self-restraint. A use of freedom for something not just being free from something. It’s far too easy for us, as I discuss below, to fill our sense of what freedom is from sources outside of the christian tradition. As they say, the best lies are the ones with just enough truth mixed in. Our understanding of freedom needs to be enlarged, not only as freedom from but freedom for.

Since I wrote the article a few weeks ago, there has been a significant increase in political temperature in response to the heinous murder of Charlie Kirk. I make some comments related to politics in the article but I want to be explicit that what I’ve written below was written before that occurred and does not have any coded message about my perspective on that.

Anticipating a follow on to this article, I encourage you to hear me behind this article aiming for our relationship with the practises of sabbath, prayer and bible reading.

Do we need to practise sabbath, prayer and bible reading to be loved by God, certainly not! They do not qualify us, but they will deepen our ability to participate more fully in the loving life God has shared with us. As the quotes I’ve chosen at the top of this indicate, our freedom is for something, it’s for following Jesus and loving others.

Whether you become a paid subscriber or not, I’m very grateful to each of you who read and respond to this newsletter.

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Reading

I’ve been delighted to join a Catherine Project Reading group on Augustine’s Confessions. I have read far more about Augustine than I have read of him which is always an interesting position to be in. Maybe I’ll share more on this, as I’ll be reading it until December.

“And men go abroad to admire the heights of mountains, the mighty waves of the sea, the broad tides of rivers, the compass of the ocean, and the circuits of the stars, yet pass over the mystery of themselves without a thought.”

― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

I just finished my second novel by Turkish-British author Elif Shafak, There Are Rivers in the Sky. Shafak is an excellent writer, and this novel shifts between three characters in three different time periods whose lives ultimately connect. Two of the characters are in London—one in the Victorian era, the other in 2018—and the third is a Yazidi girl in Turkey who travels to Iraq in 2018.

“Remember, my heart. Story-time is different from clock-time.’ Clock-time, however punctual it may purport to be, is distorted and deceptive. It runs under the illusion that everything is moving steadily forward, and the future, therefore, will always be better than the past. Story-time understands the fragility of peace, the fickleness of circumstances, the dangers lurking in the night but also appreciates small acts of kindness. That is why minorities do not live in clock-time. They live in story-time.”

― Elif Shafak, There Are Rivers in the Sky

This work, along with another novel, The Island of Missing Trees, about the conflict in Cyprus, weaves a fascinating focus on the natural world as a character in the stories.

I finally finished Paul Elie’s biography of the catholic authors, Thomas Merton, Flannery O Connor, Dorothy Day and Walker Percy. It is clearly a masterpiece of literary journalism and is extremely attentive and sympathetic to the complex nature of faith each of them had. While it is ornately written, I couldn’t help by feel by page 480 that it could have achieved its feat with more concision (rich coming from me I know!).

The New Yorker published this short review in 2003;

This long, unusual book consists of interleaved biographies of four mid-century American writers—Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Walker Percy, and Flannery O’Connor—who, though they rarely, if ever, met, are connected by the fact that they were all serious Roman Catholics and therefore alone: isolated both from literary circles (anti-religious) and from the Church (anti-literary). Except for O’Connor, they were converts; they “read their way” to religious experience, and then became writers, so that others could pick up the trail. They were very different—Day was devoted to social service, Percy to philosophy, O’Connor to literature, Merton to the inner journey—and Elie doesn’t love them all equally. O’Connor is his favorite. Merton is the one he struggles with, but, by virtue of his warm, clear writing (better than Merton’s), he makes us care about the self-involved friar, too.

The review was interesting to me because, unsurprisingly, I was drawn to the interlaced sections in my own order of interest, awareness and sympathy; Merton, then Day, Then O’Connor and finally Walker Percy who I knew almost nothing of.

Eating

Orange Honey Ginger Glaze Salmon

This has been a firm favourite and I have figured out a few challenges in making it through our numerous attempts.

Ingredients (Serves 2 bowls)

• 2 × salmon fillets (skin on)

• 1 cup dry jasmine rice (or substitute basmati or farro)

• Butter or oil (for searing)

• Sesame seeds (for garnish)

• Salt (to taste)

Honey-Orange Glaze

• Juice of 1 orange

• ¼ cup honey

• 1 tbsp sesame oil

• 1 tbsp soy sauce

• 1 tsp freshly grated ginger

• 1 tsp apple cider vinegar

Cucumber & Avocado Salad (Optional)

• 1 avocado, chopped

• 1 medium cucumber, peeled and chopped

• ½ to ¾ cup cilantro, chopped (optional—can swap parsley or arugula)

• 1 tbsp sesame oil

• Juice of 1 lime

• Salt (to taste)

Instructions

1. If you are making the Cucumber and Avocado salad, you can start with that so it sits in the ingredients in the fridge a little longer. In a bowl, combine chopped avocado, cucumber, cilantro, sesame oil, lime juice, and a pinch of salt. Toss gently (don’t smush the Avo’s) to mix it up and set aside.

2. In a small bowl, whisk together orange juice, honey, sesame oil, soy sauce, ginger, and apple cider vinegar until fully combined. Set aside.

3. Cook Jasmine rice anyway you know how!

4. Use paper towels to pat the salmon fillets as dry as you can and then generously season the skin with salt. Set aside while the pan warms up.

5. set a small pan on medium-low heat. Pour the honey-orange glaze into the pan and let it gently simmer until it thickens slightly while cooking the salmon fillets in the larger pan.

6. Heat butter (or high smoke point oil) in a large (ideally carbon steel or cast iron) pan over medium-high heat until hot.

7. Sear the salmon for 5 minutes on the skin side and 2-3 on the bottom side.

   1. NOTE: Fish in a pan can be a disaster. But think of it like a steak, put the salmon in when the pan reaches a high heat (without burning the oil or butter), skin down. Don’t worry that the skin initially sticks. Leave it alone and it will detach itself. Use tongues to wiggle the fillet until you can tell it’s detached and you’ll have beautifully crispy skin

8. Place cooked rice in your serving bowls. Top with the glazed salmon. Add a portion of the cucumber–avocado salad on the side, then, and this is optional, drizzle with the sriracha mayo and garnish with toasted sesame seeds.

Listening

Everything Is Recorded is the work of British producer Richard Russell, who runs XL Recordings. The label began in the early ’90s as a dance music imprint, initially hosting groups like The Prodigy, before broadening its roster to include artists such as The White Stripes, Radiohead, and Adele. Notably, Adele’s album 21 boosted the label’s bank balance from £3 million to £32 million in under 12 months. This eclectic track may not be to everyone’s taste, but its production and arrangement have had me so captivated that I’ve been listening to it on repeat for the past few weeks.

September in Cape Town is the prime season for our famously unpredictable weather. One day we’re basking in the breakthrough of summer, with temperatures climbing into the upper twenties Celsius, and the next we’re met with breezy, overcast skies and a chill just above ten degrees. During this time, we (perhaps late arrivals, judging by the play counts) discovered the Australian–Berlin-based band Parcels. Their upbeat, retro-poppy vibes have created an auditory summer of their own. The track below has been our favorite from their recently released album, but the older live recording in the video highlights the depth of musical skill behind that Berlin-flavored retro aesthetic.

Are you free indeed?

“It is for freedom that Christ has set us free” So begins Galatians 5. Jesus Himself says in John 8: “if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed”. But what did Jesus and Paul have in mind when they spoke about freedom?

Freedom is too easily an accordion word; something that expands and contracts based on how much hot hair is pumped into it. And my friends, the idea of freedom has a lot of hot air pumped into it.

The cry for freedom was the undercurrent that shaped the Western world. It was the cry for freedom from the tyranny of corrupt rulers, the oppression of class-based societies and, more recently, the freedom to choose and define how we use our bodies and even how we define our gender.

In a context of oppression, freedom from can be a very good thing. It may be the only way freedom can be imagined. Yet implicit in the cry for freedom from is the deeper longing to have freedom for, the freedom that allows us to live a free life where we are free to make choices that lead to flourishing. We ultimately desire the freedom to have a good life. But our imagination of what a ‘good life’ is will impact how we understand what ‘freedom’ is.

In History, revolutions, the french and american among others, often secure necessary freedoms, but history shows what happens next. Once freedom from is achieved, factions will ultimately arise. Groups splinter over what that freedom and the ‘good life’ should look like. Once freedom from is achieved, what is this freedom for? It’s a confusion that not only challenges the West, but for the Church.

In the West, an implicit Christian sense of what freedom is for has lingered on, buried in our laws which protect human life, freedoms, rights, and dignities. However, through the movements of the 20th century, especially after World War II, any meaningful society-wide consensus over how to define what freedom is for has dissolved.

For the first time in the past century, vast populations have had freedoms never before seen, yet most political movements of the 20th century remained preoccupied with freedom from. Recognising the power of the cry of “freedom from” to motivate and animate populations, politicians and movements relied on drumming up another enemy or oppressor in order to motivate people with the new rallying cry of freedom from. All this, arguably came from the freest people ever to live.

What does this reflection on Western freedom have to do with spiritual formation? Well first of all, it creates an important backdrop, shaping the cultural "drinking water" of how we perceive freedom. If the Gospel is only freedom from we are left with very little reason to do anything but wait for heaven. But if it’s freedom for, then suddenly we have an opportunity to live a life that flows from what God has done in Christ for us all.

But the attraction to fixate on freedom from remains the ‘drinking water’ in the church, especially those of us protestants, a church born out of the Reformation. Indeed, many still carry the momentum of a desire for freedom from Roman Catholic abuses of the 16th Century. Stanley Hauerwas once observed that Protestants have forgotten what they were protesting. Sadly, we have become people defined by protest itself, splintering into factions over secondary issues. With the assumption that freedom is always freedom from, we may read the gospel merely as an account of Jews seeking freedom from Pharisaical and Roman oversight. While true, this is less than half the story.

Jesus came to announce and inaugurate a Kingdom that was not solely about freedom from. This Kingdom would be the fulfilment of God's intentions for humanity from Eden, to Abraham and through Israel to the world. It offered a vision of human flourishing. It was freedom from and freedom for.

In this vision, freedom from slavery in Egypt, freedom from the crushing weight of Pharisaical Judaism, and ultimately freedom from sin, death, and Satan pointed toward something greater. This something greater was a vision of life as God intended, a life of justice, care, holiness, and flourishing. It was a vision of holiness in which our lives, freed from powers that oppress and kill, are filled with God’s very own life. In this, we are empowered to recover humanity’s original calling to be a people for God’s name, imaging the loving kindness of God to a creation that neither knows or trusts Him.

The Old Testament laws pointed towards what freedom, if it ever arrived might be for. The foundational Abram calling and, in later stages the commandments and laws outlined a vision of a life that faithfully represented God’s loving holiness in detail.

These laws, far from being what we assume are the religious rules for how to approach God in a temple, touched on every area of life: hygiene, sexuality, fairness in law, and care for the foreigner. Jesus fulfilled these laws by living, dying, rising again and ascending, therefore opening the way back for human lives to be embedded in the very life of God. Through Him, relationships would be restored to what they were meant to be, marked by holiness, flourishing, and love.

Too few Christians today have a vision of this good life. Too few wrestle with the call of the Sermon on the Mount or with the insights embedded in Old Testament practices. It seems easier to be against than to be for. It is easier to criticize than to work out in practice what genuine flourishing looks like for a community.

As a result, Christianity is often modified and privatised into another tool within the Western project of individual freedom. The gospel becomes a therapeutic means of gaining inner peace or is weaponised into a political vision that serves the interests of “people like me.” This modified Christian vision may inspire kind words about loving neighbours, but in a culture built on "me first," peace with others only seems to matter if it benefits me and mine.

The biblical witness, however, along with most communitarian cultures outside the West, assumes something very different. In this context, my flourishing is bound up in the flourishing of my neighbor and in the life of the sojourner/foreigner. Life is not lived in a vacuum and there is no good life apart from life with God in community with others.

The good life is not defined by personal prosperity and happiness at the expense of others suffering injustice, which is the situation we largely see in the world today. When we fail to see freedom as freedom for, our Christian gatherings tend towards enthusiastic celebrations of what we are free from. But outside those gatherings, Christian lives are too often marked by the same oppressions, fears and idolatries that weigh down our non-Christian neighbours.

In the early chapters of Exodus, God speaks to Moses and tells him to say to Pharaoh, “Let my people go…so that they may worship me.” Many social justice movements have run with the first half of this statement but have left the second half undefined and unattended. However, here in Exodus we have a vision of God’s heart for a broken humanity; to experience freedom from and to be renewed to have freedom for. Throughout the scriptures, worship is defined many times not only as religious ritual but as the way our whole lives are lived for God’s sake (see 1 Sam15:22, Rom12:1). We are designed to live a fully human life as God always intended it until he returns to make all things new.

The incredibly good news of the Gospel is that we are free from; free from fear, judgement, death, and the powers and principalities. But we are also freed for a life that sings the goodness of God in word and deed. Just as Israel had to spend years in the wilderness undoing the deforming work of slavery in their lives, so too do we need to gain a vision for a pathway that undoes the works of slavery in our own lives. This work is done by the Spirit of God as we offer ourselves through the rhythms and repetitions of Christian practices like scripture reading, prayer, gathering in worship, and sabbath. These practices do not earn us points with God but they open us up, once more, to hear the voice of a loving God call our name, welcoming us into a people and a salvation story that is freedom from and freedom for.

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Miscellaneous Links

Cheech and Chong go Birdwatching?

We recently watched Listers, a documentary about two “pot-headed Gen Z filmmakers” who, in a Cheech-and-Chong-like haze, decide to take on a “Big Year”—an attempt to see as many different bird species in the lower 48 states as possible. What begins as a seemingly airheaded adventure takes fascinating twists and turns. The brothers become genuinely likeable, uncover unexpected depths in themselves, and grow increasingly immersed in birdwatching. Thanks to good story telling-oriented editing and spectacular slow-motion footage of the birds, the film strikes a perfect balance: it maintains enough sarcastic distance to acknowledge the “insanity” of extreme birding, while also capturing the genuine draw that makes it so captivating. Pre-warning: Some bad language/taste moments.

Why Le Creuset is so expensive?

LeCreuset are amongst the most storied of brands and this WSJ insight was fascinating to see the production process and history in their ongoing French-based fabrication.

Brad Pitt drives F1 car

As I’ve mentioned in previous Lectio’s, we are amongst the newbie fans of F1 unapologetically drawn through the Netflix series Drive to Survive. Recently I went to see the movie which is equal parts light entertainment and eye rolling story telling. But it was interesting to see Brad Pitt actually drive an F1 car in the video above.

Space Saving in Japan with 59sqm

I’m always interested in architectural decisions, and this postage-stamp plot in Japan was an interesting compact use of space.

Brand New Battery Powered Bakkie (Pick up) for under $20,000 ??

A fascinating attempt to produce an electric pick up truck made in the US for $20,000. The only catch? no paint, no stereo, and no touchscreen. Read the rest.

Some Weird but Weirdly Beautiful Buildings

Wallpaper features new book Weird Buildings… NO AI here. See the rest.

That’s all for now…

Each afternoon...I draw aside my curtain to the world and find a soul waiting to speak...They tell me their news and they seek counsel and I have learned how much to say, which is very little and how much to remain silent, which is mostly needed. I am not wise and I do not solve their troubles. But I learn to listen with my face turned towards the person speaking, with my heart open to them and my smile warm in encouragement. I never repeat their words to others and they grow in trust, and in their vulnerable speech comes the clarity that reveals what is needful. I ask that they speak from their open heart and do not waste words of hiding, unless they need to start to speak and let the words run for a while until truth becomes evident, as much to them as to me."

Claire Gilbert, I Julian, pp. 207

Welcome to Issue #96 of the Lectio Letter. This members-only newsletter is filled with music, film and food suggestions, links, and an article written by yours truly. If you happen to be new here, there’s a whole 95 other issues you can explore here!

Well, welcome back from an unexpected summer (although winter for me) hiatus from the Lectio Letter! As you may have suspected from the updates in my previous letters, the fullness of the last couple of months made writing near impossible. I often have moments of inspiration for something I want to write, but unlike speaking in person, the task of writing requires much more focus and editing for me.

When I was in University I was diagnosed with ADHD, but the educational psychologist who diagnosed me surmised that having learnt how to to live and adapt to it she didn’t recommend medication. There is something about speaking in person that naturally holds all of my attention and something around writing that absolutely doesn’t.

I recently found myself leading some meetings with long term implications and once again I was confronted by how quick and quickly divergent my thinking is. Fortunately, I had just about enough awareness of this to both discipline my own pace of process, as well as lean on some others who are far more linear than me, but all in all it was a tiring experience in communication.

I say all that to say, I’m glad you are still here and I hope to pick up more regular rhythms now we are at home in South Africa for the foreseeable.

Whether you become a paid subscriber or not, I’m very grateful to each of you who read and respond to this newsletter.

PSA: This email is LONG and due to some obscure technical reasons on Gmail it gets ‘clipped’, which means you are not seeing the whole thing.

You can see at the bottom of the email if it says “message clipped”, then click “View entire message” to see it all.

You are not getting it all if you don’t see my signature at the bottom.

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Life

As I gestured to above, this has been a full season for us. Full of goodness, delight, and wonder, but also full of tiredness, pushing past limits and stress. We are tired but not defeated and very much looking forward to catching our breath back here in South Africa.

Winter here in Cape Town is cold and stormy, meaning our built-for-endless-summer drafty houses get cold! We are grateful to have wood burning fires but they require regular labour and our dog walks are blustery and cold. In short, Life feels like it takes much more effort than it does in our balmy summer seasons.

Shortly after our delightful family reunion which I wrote about in the last lectio we ran the children of promise camp. It was hard work but filled with delightful moments.

We were grateful to have someone capture the moments in the video above (and you can see some longer ones from each day on our YouTube page), and as everyone who engages in social media knows, behind these genuinely beautiful moments are blood, sweat and tears, but also lots of joy, relief, and delight.

Work

Four short days after camp we flew to Switzerland to help run a seminar in Lausanne on the life of Paul. It was a rich time in the classroom where we delved into the spiritual and theological development of the Apostle Paul through his letters.

Rachel and I led worship (a mixture of musical and liturgical), staffed some of the logistics in driving, creating social times, snacks and one 3 course meal for 19 guests.

Although I taught a few sessions, the time was really anchored by our friend and leader Maureen who has spent a lifetime considering Paul’s writing and personhood and it was a gift to see her give that away so fruitfully.

During the time I also shared in the YWAM community meeting there on paying attention to the hungers that drew them to join a neo-monastic learning community like that and it was a gift to be with them for a number of reasons. One being that this was the first YWAM base I ever visited in around 2003 or so, then we have also sent two close family members and friends who have spent time there and who many of those on staff know well.

In the prep days and sabbath day we were able to meet up with a dear Swiss friend who took us out to Lake Geneva in her housemates soft top Fiat 500 and we swam in possibly the most glorious vista known to man. Evidence above.

From there we spent a few short days with some co-conspirators dreaming of upcoming training initiatives (that I will undoubtedly share more about here in due time) in the YWAM base in Harpenden, London. The final picture is a sunset view of London urban foxes we spotted on an evening walk before flying home.

Reading

Paul: A Biography by NT Wright

The enjoyment of reading books is only multiplied by reading along with others. This book formed the basis of our conversations in the Life of Paul seminar and it is excellent. Tom Wright is a world renowned pauline scholar and in this book he unpacks a biography of Paul using the biblically available details and then, from a experts opinion offering some possibilities for the gaps which scripture doesn’t speak to.

A few things that came alive to me through this book and the conversations we had in the class in Lausanne;

1. We only ever hear of evidence of Paul’s sister (in Acts 23:16), but after the Damascus road experience he returns to Tarsus, where he grew up, for around 10 years before Barnabus goes to find him in Acts 11. As we know Paul’s family is jewish, affords him an excellent jewish education in the tradition of the pharisees, his father was a pharisee and has a business in tent making. But we don’t hear any evidence that his family (apart from his nephew, and presumably his sister) become Jesus followers. This is interesting to consider when we put it alongside the family metaphors that Paul then employs extensively in his explanation of what the Church should be. We often think of Paul as a stand-alone super hero, but his possible estrangement from his family, his conflicts with barnabus and the tension with the Jerusalem church created a deep need in him, which he refers to consistently through his letters to various churches, for a familial sense of connection.

2. After being encountered by Jesus on the Damascus road Paul ‘withdraws to Arabia’. Some traditions theorise that he went to the location of Mount Sinai where YHWH established his covenant with the people of Israel as the beginning of a wholesale recalibration of the jewish story for him as he considered God’s salvation purposes now made known in the person of Jesus.

The Life you save may be your Own: An American Pilgrimage by Paul Elie

This book is a biography of four renowned catholic authors; Thomas Merton, Flannery O Connor, Dorothy Day and Walker Percy. Through each of their pilgrimages with God through their lives, they expressed themselves in works of writing which became beloved and important. It’s an extensive and compelling journalistic effort to chart the overlap of their stories and the way they related to God and their sense of calling as they emerge as literary giants in post world war America.

I Julian by Claire Gilbert

After stalling in the myriad of details Paul Elie includes in the book above, I devoured this book and enjoyed it far more than I anticipated. Claire Gilbert has crafted a fascinating fictional autobiography of Julian of Norwich, the famous catholic mystic and anchoress, famous for her work “revelations of divine love”. The book weaves together her troubled life both before becoming a hermit and during alongside historical details of medieval england that I was unaware of. What made the book particularly luminous though was the reflections on the experience of solitude, contemplative prayer and spiritual direction which evidence Gilbert’s own awareness and sensitivity to the often-times inarticulable character of those experiences.

Eating

Chicken Pot Pie

A few years ago I picked up a Lodge 12-inch / 30cm cast iron pan. It has been the best ‘bang for buck’ kitchen buy (only £25) and as long as you care for it (don’t leave it wet), it should last a generation. With that being said, I think the recipe below would work in a casserole dish if the first steps were completed in a pan and then transferred into the casserole dish before going in the oven.

This week I adapted a Chicken Pot Pie recipe (original from NYT) which was a real hit!

Ingredients

• 2 Rotisserie Chickens (You could use only 1, but this allowed it to be dense and decadent and we had plenty left over for sandwich meat)

• Salt and freshly ground black pepper

• 3 small carrots, thinly sliced

• 1-2 celery stalks, thinly sliced

• 2 garlic cloves, finely chopped

• 1medium onion, very finely chopped

• 1tablespoon thyme leaves, coarsely chopped

• ⅓cup all-purpose flour

• 2 cups high quality fresh chicken stock

• 1cup frozen peas

• 1 frozen puff pastry, thawed but refrigerated.

• 2 large eggs, beaten

• 100g of butter

Process

1. Pick all meat from chicken after it has cooled but is not cold (this helps picking it immensely) being careful to check and remove all small bones. Make sure you get all the meat from the smaller bones as they hold lots of flavour compared to the large pieces of white meat. Then shred with two forks.

2. Heat Oven to 220C

3. Use a disc blade on a food processor or chop carrots and celery by hand. Chop onion and garlic as finely as possible or use the food processor method above.

4. Melt enough butter to comfortably cover the bottom surface of the skillet and if using chicken stock concentrate add once the butter is melted (for fresh stock add a few tablespoons and let it simmer for less than a minute.

5. Add Onions and garlic, then carrots, thyme and celery and cook until they are softening. (Around 5-7 mins) Season generously with salt and pepper.

6. Add flour bit by bit, moving the vegetables around so the flour coats them and begins to cook (but not burn). You shouldn’t be seeing any white flour but it should thicken the liquid and begin to yellow and then lightly brown.

7. Then add the remaining chicken stock, bit by bit while gently scraping any bits that have begun to get stuck to the bottom of the pan.

8. Add the chicken and peas and gently mix it altogether without mushing the vegetables too much. Continue cooking for a few more minutes, especially if there is too much stock liquid. Finally add a little more salt and pepper.

9. Take the pan off the stove and remove the defrosted pastry sheet out of the fridge. Roll or unfold until it is flat and then place it over the pan. You can cut the excess off but it should hang slightly over the edge of the pan so it doesn’t shrink into a pastry island!

10. Then cut 3 approximately 6cm slits, 3 cm apart in the middle of the pie.

11. Whisk the eggs with 2 tsp of water together and brush them onto the pastry

12. Bake for 15-20mins at 220c until the pastry has risen and is begin to golden. Then turn down to 180c and cook for 12-15 more minutes. As all of the contents are already cooked, the oven time is simply to cook the pastry all the way through and let it rise and brown. I placed the pan on a rack about a third down as many of the NYT comments mentioned that the pastry can burn easily, so keep checking carefully every 5 minutes or so towards the end while being careful not to let too much heat out of the oven.

Listening

Loaded Honey, a duo formed from the trio who usually make up Jungle (Whose excellent ‘back in’74’ is worth a listen here) came out with an album.. Don’t Speak is a good upbeat track from it

Also greek artist Stella has this great retro pop sounding track - “Titanic”

Finally, firm favourite Jordan Rakei released a live video of his Royal Albert Hall performance on YouTube here;

For those on Spotify, here’s some other tracks I collected last month

Spiritual Formation is a “dedication to reality at all costs”

We came back from our recent travels tired. Despite needing rest after these trips we are always confronted with many small tasks, emergencies and responsibilities which require our attention. 

The combination of already being tired goes badly with the complications which are part and parcel of getting seemingly simple tasks done. After this trip it was no different. 

We needed new tyres on our car which cost more than I expected and then when we picked the car up, for some reason it wouldn't go into reverse. So then an unexpected mechanic bill. Within the week, after a number of these situations piled on top of each other, I was far from rested, I was frazzled. 

Within a few days Rachel, in equal parts wisdom and exasperation, told me: "Go and Sit on a bench!". 

Getting ‘in touch’ with Reality

We are fortunate to have a village littered with benches with postcard views that allow me just to sit and come into 'land'. As I was sitting on one of these benches this morning, for a moment I came back to reality.

All the scattered, disconnected tasks, needs and responsibilities, along with my ability to fulfill them is not what is most true of me. What is most true about me is that I'm loved by God. That doesn't make the task list go away, but being rooted in that knowledge can certainly help me move through my days in ways less likely to be capsized by the next thing to go wrong. 

What happens when I sit on the bench, is in the midst of the manyness and muchness of the realities of life, I also come in contact with what is also more deeply 'real'.

My life is hidden in God. 

Of course, my tasks, tiredness and responsibilities don't magically go away, but I get to hold those realities together with the deepest reality. Being able to be 'in contact' with both of these realities and increasingly integrate and reconcile them to one another is the practical journey of Spiritual Formation. It’s the Christianity 101 we never grow beyond.

Reintegration and reconciliation are at the heart of the gospel and its implicit call to be transformed into the likeness of Jesus. The deep call embedded in the outworking of the gospel is for wholeness and holiness to increasingly be recognised as the same thing. 

M Scott Peck, the American psychiatrist, once said:

"Mental health is dedication to reality at all costs."

It has become my conviction that spiritual formation in the way of Jesus is also a dedication to reality at all costs. 

• The reality of the world God has made and placed us to live within,

• The reality of what God has done in Jesus to reconcile us and send His Spirit as His presence with us

• The reality of our goodness and giftedness as God's creation

• The reality of our brokenness, capacity for self-deception and need for transformation

• The reality that, despite all our best efforts and intentions, we need God to save us and make all things new both now and in His future return.

• The reality that we are placed in a specific time, a context and relationships with all the privileges and responsibilities that are embedded there. 

Most, if not all, brokenness we experience is a shrinking back from what is real, into patterns of self-protection, numbing, distraction, fantasy or self-deception.

• We pretend we can separate our presentation of ourselves to the outside world from the inner realities of our lives,

• We compartmentalise important big ideas away from the reality of our emotional lives,

• We disconnect relationships between friends and those who work with or for us,

• We try to protect any present contentment via distraction from past unresolved disappointments.

• We present the aspects of ourselves we are most proud of and neglect to confess and receive forgiveness for those we are ashamed of.

All of these disconnects bear down on the deepest parts of our lives, breaking our lives up into incoherent pieces. Unreconciled aspects of who we are, at war with one another.

Reconciling Reality

Whatever else we might describe salvation as, it is well described in  Colossians as "the reconciling all things to God" (Col 1:2). The path of Spiritual Formation, of growing up into Christ, encourages wholeness and reintegration, but in order for all things to be reconciled, those things need to be presented and surrendered to the work of God's reconciliation. 

And so, the path of spiritual formation requires us to encounter reality. The reality of God and the reality of where we are at.

One of the great enemies of Christian growth is the production of a 'religious persona' or a 'ministry mode' that hides the inevitably complicated real life that lurks behind it. 

Over the years, I've sat with many different people who are looking for mentorship or simply processing, and I ask them a bit about themselves. At the beginning of these conversations, there is often some sorting required on my part. 

Firstly, I'm sorting through the things they are saying and paying attention to the narrative they are presenting. 

Are they too hard on themselves, or are they inflating themselves? 

Which areas of their life are they foregrounding, which are they failing to mention?

In this, I'm not necessarily seeking to judge what they are sharing, but just paying attention to what they are and are not sharing. 

As I do this, I'm trying to pay attention (at my best, I'm actively doing this with the help of the Holy Spirit) to listen for what's 'real'.

It’s not that the other facts they are organising and communicating are not reflections of what they have done or who they are, but I'm listening for something that sounds candid, something that rings with integrity, vulnerability or openness. 

Only when I've heard that do I sense there is a doorway to have a conversation that can touch on what is most real in their lives. 

In the fictional autobiography of Julian of Norwich, she speaks as a hermit who has a window to the world where people come and seek her for spiritual advice. The author mirrors something of a similar dynamic;

Each afternoon...I draw aside my curtain to the world and find a soul waiting to speak...They tell me their news and they seek counsel and I have learned how much to say, which is very little and how much to remain silent, which is mostly needed. I am not wise and I do not solve their troubles. But I learn to listen with my face turned towards the person speaking, with my heart open to them and my smile warm in encouragement. I never repeat their words to others and they grow in trust, and in their vulnerable speech comes the clarity that reveals what is needful. I ask that they speak from their open heart and do not waste words of hiding, unless they need to start to speak and let the words run for a while until truth becomes evident, as much to them as to me."

— Claire Gilbert, I Julian, pp. 207

That phrase, "do not waste words of hiding" is what stands out to me here.

How much of our anxieties, distraction and busyness is simply hiding from naming reality.

• The reality of what we are not,

• the reality of what we wished to become,

• the reality of our relationships,

• the reality of our deep commitment to keep the charade of 'seem to be',

• the reality of God's love for us anyway.

All of those realities are costly ones to come to terms with, maybe the last one is harder to truly receive than all the rest.

Reality is the only place God can meet you

The underlying conviction behind the importance of being 'dedicated to reality', as Peck puts it, is that God can only fruitfully meet us where we actually are. Everything else; where we wish we were, where we want others to think we are, is a fantasy and a projection. 

When we come to the ground zero of our lives, both the good and the bad, we have come to a place of honesty, integrity, truthfulness and vulnerability where the work of 'becoming' more of who God intends us to be can take place. Everything else is, bluntly put, attempting to put make-up on a ghost, trying to improve an apparition, trying to polish a fantasy. But God is not afraid of reality, He is welcoming us back to it.

If you are longing to grow in Jesus, you need a dedication to reality at all costs. Many of our projections and performances have become so familiar to some of us that we are no longer sure there is much left beneath them. 

To that I would say, trust that God who began a work in you, is waiting to catch you underneath the trap door of fantasy and will be faithful to bring it to completion.

God in Jesus is waiting to meet you amid your real life, the only life you truly have; everything else has simply been a distraction and detour from the gift of surrendering your life into the love that is remaking all things. 

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Miscellaneous Links

I really enjoy Richard Beck’s writing. As a Christian, psychology professor and amateur theologian, his recent reflection on Humility Stress Tests was very interesting.

You might think of other situations where humility is put to the test. The point here is that these are the relational locations where humility either shines or fails. Our behavior in these moments becomes either oil or sand in the relational gears of life.

Humble people share power, resolve conflicts, accept praise with modesty, spread credit, welcome critical feedback, admit failures, own their mistakes, quickly apologize, willingly learn from others, and treat people of lower status with dignity, care, and respect. Humble people pass the relational stress tests.

People lacking in humility, by contrast, grasp at power, exacerbate conflict, bask in the limelight, hoard credit, get defensive facing criticism, hide their failures, avoid responsibility, fail to apologize, aren't teachable, and treat those of lower status with dismissive superiority.

Read the rest here.

It is well documented that people are sustaining many less close relationships than before. While Christians do well in studies related to ‘flourshing’ than the overall population in certain areas, leaders tend to do worse than the people that follow them.

Glenn Packiam unpacked his own experience and created a helpful (if, as he admits simplified) explanation of the “Constellation of Relationships” required for health.

In my (perhaps corny) attempt to make it memorable, I use the Lord of the Rings as a framework for thinking about the kinds of relationships we need in our constellation. If you think about it, the apostle Paul had people in each of these categories!

While these 2D frameworks rarely map on well to every person in every season, I thought it was a helpful way to think about the kinds of inputs needed to remain healthy and spot potential gaps.

That’s all for now…

I'm writing a shorter Lectio today as I'm immersed in a wonderful family reunion in the Devonshire Countryside. The family I am joining here is not biological but, in some very real senses, adoptive. It is the family through whom I came to adult faith in Jesus.

Over the years, and again in my time with them now, they beautifully affirm again and again their commitment to my belonging with them and those words are precious to me.

But those words become real to me in actions. Actions of affirmation, loyalty and encouragement, but most concretely in meal times.

I have often reflected on the phrase coined by NT Wright that

"When Jesus wanted to explain what His death was all about, He didn't give... a theory--He gave them a meal."

There are many ways to unpack this, but what is at its core is that following Jesus is, as has been described in the most basic gospel presentations, 'belonging in relationship'. It is not that founding and descriptive ideas in Christianity are unimportant, far from it. But what Jesus has inaugurated in his earthly ministry and empowered in His ongoing heavenly ministry is not just new ideas but a new creation, a new humanity and a new citizenship.

Our life together as the people of God is our strongest (or weakest) proclamation of the gospel.

So back in this family reunion, I am re-storied and restored through encountering belonging in action and not only in words.

One of the fantastic things about mealtimes with deep friends and family is the ability to hear about lives, but also discuss big issues. I am consistently sharpened by the opinions, perspectives and understandings of those around me. This week, we've already traversed large-scale issues facing the church and global politics. Many of the discussions involving the many wars, tragedies and national crises that exist in the world now inevitably lead to a sense of overwhelm.

So much evil, loss and heartbreak, what can I truly do to make any difference? But so much of the trouble and tribulation of the world at large is due to a lack of listening. A lack of the ability to understand what is at stake for the other, and so what happens is a continual shouting past, and in many cases, then shooting at, the other side.

But it occurred to me that despite the horrors of war, evil and pain, Christians are called to become trained in humble listening relationship with one another as a community of difference.

We are called to be those who are trained by eating, listening and belonging together, in better and in worse, gaining the skills and intuitions that allow us to be, a small, but embodied answer to the problems of the world. In short, to be a colony of heaven on earth. To be a foretaste of what will one day be the only reality that remains.

As we develop the ability, in our small communities and families, to love and forgive our neighbours, spouses, and families, we become a seed of the kingdom which can display an other-worldly virtue, love for enemy. This, of course, sounds hopelessly unpragmatic and romantic, that a dinner table in Devon can be a seed of change in the world, but I think that is part of the point. Jesus gave a weak, unpragmatic and idealistic way for us to grow into more loving persons. Just as when challenged by the violent systems of the world in his own life, gave himself and brought a victory through weakness instead of worldly strength. We too are the one’s who are called to this weak witness that will oneday be shown to be real strength.

Here, in ending, I’ll quote Stanley Hauerwas on the task for followers at length;

The church…is not anti-world, but rather an attempt to show what the world is meant to be as God’s good creation.

The world needs the church, but not to help it run more smoothly or make it a better and safer place for Christians to live. Rather, the world needs the church because without the church the world does not know what it is nor who God is. The only way for the world to know that it is being redeemed is for the church to point to the Redeemer by being a redeemed people. The way for the world to know that it needs redeeming, that it is broken and fallen, is for the church to enable the world to strike hard against something that is an alternative to what the world offers.

Without such a “contrast model” the world has no way to know and feel the oddness of its dependence on power for survival. Because there exists a com­munity formed by the story of Christ, the world can know what it means to be a society committed to the growth of individual gifts and differences, where the otherness of the other can be welcomed as a gift rather than a threat.

I can see that the Table meal that Jesus institutes is a small and slow way to grow a new people who listen, love and respect each other inspite of all our differences. In a world where typing in fustration to a faceless username is our training in conflict, a dinner table conversation might just be the revolution we need and it's the one Jesus said would mark the lives of those that follow Him.

“I've learnt to become deeply suspicious of advice which leads Christians to create too much distance between our inner life and some kind of outer performance.”

…

“[Our] calling is not to pretend to be a saint but to actually become one, to become one all the way down.”

…

A great temptation in our Christian lives is to spend much more effort on "seeming to be", rather than "becoming".

…

“But deep discipleship to Jesus cannot be like a low golf handicap; only possible for professionals, the rich and retirees.”

…

“ Jesus meets us where we are, as we are, to draw us into becoming more than we are, to become more like Him.”

— Quotes from this Issue’s article entitled “A Domestic Monastery in a World of Chaos”

Welcome to Issue #94 of the Lectio Letter. This members-only newsletter is filled with music, film and food suggestions, links, and an article written by yours truly.

Greetings from my sick (not quite) bed! I had very much hoped to send this out a week ago, but then I came down with the flu! I’m glad to report, I’m on the mend ;)

The picture above is of Bellapais, an abandoned ancient Christian monastery in the contested quasi-nation state of Northern Cyprus that we visited last year. An abandoned place of worship in a complicated and fraught political situation is a good metaphor for the subject of this Lectio Issue.

When life feels busy, we can daydream about escape. For some, it’s planning a holiday, others a new job, but when the desire to live a life of deep discipleship comes up, I’ve often dreamt of becoming a monk (as long as I can stay married to Rachel, I should add)!

In my admittedly romanticised daydream, the idea of dedicating all of your time to a life with God seems like it would remove all the obstacles to the deeper sense of relationship I long for. But that kind of escape isn’t a real or even appropriate option for most of us, including me. So, in this Issue, I’m reflecting on the great challenge of deepening a life in God in the midst of a busy and chaotic world.

Many of those who teach and encourage deep discipleship, even if they aren’t in a cloister, live lives of relative privilege in the area of time and resources. When faced with a world which has increased the burden of our attention and energies to a place of overwhelm, the invitations to discipleship to Jesus can feel like just another one of the things we don’t have time for. But I’m wondering if it’s possible to live in a domestic monastery. A life in the World but still marked by a deep and abiding life in Jesus. Maybe it’s possible?

Whether you become a paid subscriber or not, I’m very grateful to each of you who read and respond to this newsletter.

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Status Board

The last month or so, we have racked up the miles. We flew back to the UK to see my family in light of my 40th Birthday. It was special to be with family and friends (not pictured) who have made my life possible (to coin the phrase which stood out to me in Hauerwas’ memoir I reviewed here) and the place I grew up in (pictured below).

Work

As I mentioned in our last email, we are excited to be helping to run a seminar in Lausanne, Switzerland, for two weeks in July around the life of the Apostle Paul with our friend Maureen. She has spent decades studying the Pauline texts, drawing on his motivations, practices and theology. I’m confident it’ll be a rich time.

This seminar is designed for those who are in YWAM full time, have completed a DTS and have already completed a foundational course in or are still active in staffing or leading biblical studies programmes in the University of the Nations. If you are interested, please reach out to me, or you can apply online here.

Just before we head to Lausanne, we will also be running another Children of Promise Camp here in South Africa. These have always been so fruitful in connecting with the children we see every week on Fridays in Masi, and create a fantastic environment for their walk towards Jesus to deepen. While many people have already given generously towards the running of the camp, there’s still time to help us reach our goal if you feel led to.

Reading

I just finished Brad East’s instalment of the Lexham’s Essentials series “The Church”. I first read Ben Myers’ work in this series on “The Apostles’ Creed” and was a huge fan of it. I’ve used it in multiple curricula as well as recommended it as a short form of catechesis.

I’ve read two or three of the others in this series and found them similarly excellent, although the editorial oversight seems to be quite free, as each book takes on the character of its author rather than a cohesive tone you might expect from a series like this.

Brad East’s other work has clearly influenced his writing of this one, as he mentions in the opening that there are not many of the classic ecclesiology subtitles included here. Instead, East’s main burden in the book is to write in such a way that God’s love for His people shines through.

At the beginning of the book, he reflects on Mary (which has become more common in protestant circles in the last decade) as a carrier of the gospel and its mission. Rather than beginning in Acts, where a great deal of reflection on the Church tends to begin, he moves through the story of Abraham and the people of Israel for at least half of the book. In this way, he gets to the birth of the Church in such a way that, in a compelling way, shows how the church, although grafted in as Gentiles, are also the promise and fulfilment of God’s call to Abraham and later Israel.

The last chapter, “Entrusted”, changes format and turns to a series of numbered points. They are clear and compelling, but I wondered if the change of format was due to reaching a word limit for these small books, or just a way to summarise his final thoughts. The numbered points were a useful way of considering the nature of the Church, and I’ve considered summarising and reflecting on them in future lectio issues. Brad East’s other works have drawn on Robert Jenson, Karl Barth and John Webster, and one of his previous books included a foreword by Katherine Sonderegger. All of these are ‘heavy hitter’ systematic theologians, and his work and voice are clearly influenced by the (post-liberal reformed) traditions these theologians represent. This book is well worth engaging in and is beautifully written with enough food for thought for even the most well-read on this area.

Eating

With our travel, we didn’t end up cooking all that much, so instead I’m going to share some of the best places we ate.

Cornwall

We spent some of our time in the popular holiday spot of Bude on the North Coast and came across Temple where we had a delicious lunch. They had a fantastically delicious selection of small plates which we shared, great service (not to be take for granted in high tourist traffic areas) and a beautiful ambience.

There were also some very niche South African wines we spotted on the shelf, but it was lunchtime aaaand UK prices for wine are astronomical so we declined. But we seriously recommend this spot if you are in the area.

Our second pick in Bude was Electric Bakery. Tucked away in a small industrial estate, it would have been easy to miss but once we arrived it became clear by this was a Saturday morning mecca for locals and visitors alike. The baking and coffee here are far beyond anything I’ve come across in Cornwall. Well worth looking up if you are here.

After that we headed to London and someone suggested we head to Italo Cafe. The Cafe has serious counter-culture vibes (with “F the Tories” banners hanging inside) set within Bonnington Square which has it’s own interesting history as a cul-de-sac of bygone London in an otherwise modern district. Italo’s website says: "historic Bonnington Square, [is] one of the longest surviving experiments in urban living in Europe. Many of the young idealists who squatted the neighbourhood in the late 1970s and 1980s still live here, and are often to be found hanging around, and shooting the breeze...”

While they seemingly do evening pop-ups, during the day they have two types of sandwiches based on what’s in season. They tasted fantastic and were wrapped in delightful wax paper to boot.

Listening

Xhosa Musician Jabulile Majola released this acoustic hymn during Easter weekend. It’s a song we’ve sung many times in services here but he has brought it to life in a fresh and stripped-down way.

UyiNkosi yamakhosi, uMdali womhlaba (You are Lord of lords, Creator of the earth)

Zonk’ izizwe zibabaza ubukhulu baKho (All nations extol Your greatness)

UyiNkosi yamakhosi, uMdali womhlaba (You are Lord of lords, Creator of the earth)

Zonk’ izizwe zidumisa Wena (All nations magnify You)

Upbeat Jazz combo from Badbadnotgood

Michael Kiwanuka’s effortless retro style and song writing

In a different yet still ‘throwback’ vibe is Dr Dog’s new album. The song I’ve enjoyed most so far is “Talk Is Cheap”. I first came across Dr Dog on a trip to Hawaii, where I borrowed my brother-in-law’s car early one morning in a jet lag fog. The CD he had in (yes, back when there were CDs) was left over from his high school friend, who himself was in a semi-successful touring band. It was the Dr Dog 2008 Album “Fate”. In my light fog, driving around the tropical lanes of backwoods Kailua, I was transfixed by the retro production.

Fast forward about ten years, and I was in another jet lag stupor, having flown from South Africa to Portland in Oregon. We were driving from the airport through Portland city and I glanced up at a billboard which announced Dr Dog were playing that night with ‘tickets still available’. Despite having a 24-hour journey under our belt, I couldn’t pass up the serendipity of having arrived ‘just on time’.

For reasons unknown, that only increased my great love for her, Rachel capitulated to staying up past midnight as we, with muted enthusiasm, blearrily watched their show. Driving home on the ‘wrong’ side of the road, getting lost in rural Oregon, arriving at a host home. So it’s a storied history with this music and so I’ll keep on listening.

A Domestic Monastery in a World of Chaos

At the end of a long meeting, one of the leaders of a ministry I was working with walked me to the door and asked what I was working on right now. After I listed the many things that were on my plate, he told me to remember to be a 'duck'. 

I looked at him, puzzled, not having heard the expression before, and he explained: "Keep kicking furiously along under the surface and glide along serenely on the surface". 

While I took the advice in, something about the disparity of managing the stresses and strains of many things on the inside while presenting a cool, calm exterior didn't sit well with me. 

The Pressure to Perform rather than become

As I reflect on it now, I think it felt like the pressure to put on some kind of 'show' and over the years, I've learnt to become deeply suspicious of advice which leads Christians to create too much distance between our inner life and some kind of outer performance.

The picture of the duck, though, has stayed with me, and I think it's a good descriptor for the kind of performance pressure many people feel when pursuing a life with Jesus in our modern world. 

Our Modern world expects us to be kicking furiously along with the pace of its demands. The expectations of an achievement-driven society result in unprecedented levels of anxiety for many. The pace of life, just in order to ‘keep up’ feels chaotic.

Alongside the demands of a busy world, for a Christian, there is another pressure. To live with Jesus, which includes a call to grow in living a life that looks more and more like His. A life that, instead of Chaos, is marked by a deep and abiding peace.

In between these pressures, we can too often be on one hand left feeling like sinners who have fallen short and on the other hand a pressure to present some kind of 'saintly' outer personality. 

To become a Saint all the way down

The calling of the Christian life is indeed to become a saint, but not just in our outer actions, but to become a Saint all the way down. Often our surrounding culture uses the term Saint to refer to some kind of Spiritual Superhero. A person whom we can admire and elevate and even venerate, but not a person we realistically presume to be able to imitate. So what do I mean when I say we are called to become saints all the way down? Well, it’s certainly not to become a spiritual superhero.

Saints throughout Biblical and Church History are simply those who have learnt to live and love God with everything they are and to love others well as second nature. The promise of becoming a Saint is to live a life in the midst of chaos that can preserve the kind of peaceable heart that Jesus intends for us to have as an anchor in a world of hustle and hurry.

Jesus said: “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.” – John 14:27

As I've said already, the calling is not to pretend to be a saint but to actually become one, to become one all the way down. But what does it mean to receive and remain in the gift of peace that Jesus gives in a world of hurry and hustle?

To be a saint means that not only my actions and words, but my thoughts, affections and intuitive responses are marked increasingly and consistently by the kind of love and peace that Jesus has. 

To pretend, or to simply act saintly while harbouring deep seeds of resentment, fear, or love of self, is a recipe for disaster. 

A great temptation in our lives in Christ is to spend much more effort on "seeming to be", rather than "becoming". Put plainly, "Keeping up appearances" is not a fruit of the Spirit. We do not need to, nor can we, become perfect, but we do need to be on a journey of change that impacts the full depth of who we are. Discipleship is not just modifying the surface of our lives.

Throughout history, we have many examples of people who have sought out the path of sainthood. Women and Men who have desired to become saints, not for the praise of others, or even their own sake, but for God's sake. These people ordered their lives in response to what they have glimpsed. A life lived in response to the beauty of Jesus who had captivated their affections and attentions in such a way that everything else only truly matters to the extent to which it is held within that first love and the peace He offers.

Living in a “domestic monastery”

Many of these who have pursued the life of a saint have literally retreated from the hurry of their society to a place of peace; the desert, a hermitage or a monastery. But these days, few of the people I know have the life circumstances or calling which make traditional detachment from society possible in the form of a desert or monastery. 

That doesn't mean we can't 'borrow' practices and wisdom from those who have pursued sainthood. We can too easily look up at the seemingly unattainable heights of great people of faith throughout history and decide they were unique, and fall into a spiritual apathy.

As GK Chesterton famously quipped, “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.”.

I say that to caution that, just because we can't go to a monastery or a desert hermitage, doesn't mean that we can't find a way to create what Ronald Rolheiser has termed a "domestic monastery" that helps us cultivate an inner peace in a busy world. 

It also needs to be said that behind our protests of busyness, there are few of us who can't meaningfully pepper our days with attention to God in prayer and in service and love of others. 

Spiritual Formation as a Golf Handicap?

The Spiritual Formation movement, which has sought to help people discover these ancient treasures of Christian practice in everyday life, is currently gaining more traction and attention. I am all for this as a movement which offers a resurgence of focus on developing the kind of inner life with Christ that the gospels and wider scripture teach us to expect. 

But even the writers and (dare I say 'Influencers') of the Spiritual Formation movement seem to have more margin to engage these things than a single mother or hard-working tradesman. 

As a piece of anecdotal evidence, I heard from a friend who attended a conference focused on these very things and reported that she estimated 90% of attendees were of retirement age. Now, part of that might be having the resources and time to travel to a conference, but the other part is worth being honest about. Retirees are, on average, time-rich and can pursue hobbies and interests with more energy than the person who is navigating the middle years of life, where work, child raising and expectations are much more demanding.

But deep discipleship to Jesus cannot be like a low golf handicap; only possible for professionals, the rich and retirees. 

We need to encourage forms of discipleship that can both fit and reform people's everyday lives. In the rightly resurging attention on Spiritual Formation in our day, we need to make sure we are not simply complexifying and technologising historical Christian practices in ways that simply create a heavier burden on already overwhelmed people. Instead of addition, I’m arguing that we need to think of integration.

People in busy stages of their lives need to find ways to integrate an awareness of God's presence in what they are already doing, not just trying to find time they don't have for more prayer and bible reading. 

Don't misunderstand me, I really do believe that most busy people, including me, have more time than they imagine for things like prayer and bible reading. But when invitations to a deeper discipleship are presented as the idea of spending more time learning new practises, they begin already feeling defeated and give up.

Spiritual Formation can become like the gym membership people buy in January, deciding with will-power that they will exercise more, only for the bill to arrive month after month, adding to an already unbearable weight of guilt. It shouldn’t need to be said that the dynamic of guilt alone rarely motivates healthy actions. Jesus meets us where we are, as we are, to draw us into becoming more than we are, to become more like Him. 

So what does integration look like? I heard a student of Eugene Peterson recount a conversation she had after having triplets and feeling like a failure, that her quiet times had become non-existent. 

Eugene asked her what she does multiple times a day, and she answered somewhat bashfully, “I breastfeed! Multiple times a day, frankly, nearly all day with triplets!” He responded, "Well, that is your place of prayer, a place to pay attention to the presence of God with you and for you". 

I'm convinced that if people gained a realistic rather than overly ambitious imagination for how to integrate their life with God in busy seasons, it could renew them deeply instead of contributing to a guilt-ridden paralysis that characterises so many Christian today.

A Slow and Steady Heart in Jesus

In the duck analogy I began with, our lives are overly active, busy, and distracted on the inside while seeking to look serenely Christian on the outside. In closing, I want to offer a different analogy; a picture of the Ice diver.

Ice Divers swim under ice between two openings in the ice surface. The environment, just like our busy world, is harsh, deadly even and much energy is required to swim from one opening to the other. 

To simply stop swimming is not an option. But how Ice divers manage such a feat is down to their heart rate. 

They slow their breathing, their thinking and heart rate in order to survive and manage the ordeal of travelling through the harsh conditions. 

For most people’s lives who don't have the privilege of monastic life or the reduced pace of retirement, our lives can feel like furiously swimming through an environment that can feel deadly to our souls. In an increasingly difficult society for our lives of faith, what is needed is a steady, slow heart rate rooted in the love of God and an awareness of Him with us. Not only with us when we have the luxury of a holiday, retreat or more quiet time, but with us in every moment, frantic or not. 

As I said above, for most people, addition to a daily schedule can feel like an impossible burden. What we need is integration. To find short, simple acts woven into our existing days to bring our hearts and minds back to God's presence, voice and empowering for everyday life. 

So, in closing, consider for a moment one or two things that you do multiple times a day. 

Maybe it’s;

•  coming to a stoplight in traffic, 

• washing your hands, 

• washing the dishes, 

• cooking a meal, 

• turning a key in a door, 

• Brushing your teeth 

or a million other things that pepper your day. 

I encourage you to, for just that moment, turn your inner attention to the love of God for you. Maybe there is a line of a psalm or other scripture that you recite as a way of marking the change in your attention from the hurry of your surrounding day, to the peace and presence of God in Jesus for you and with you.

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Miscellaneous Links

Save me from the Shallows

Joshua Luke Smith is a British Christian Poet and Speaker. The poem he penned linked below acts as a succinct and beautiful accompaniment to what I have written in a frankly more bloated way above. As he poignantly ends his poem;

Don’t let shallow activities rob you of depth.
Don’t let their stimulation fool you into thinking
they are anything more than a temporary high.

Read books.
Pray.
Ask real questions.
Sit in silence.
Take time to be alone.
Get lost in conversation.
Leave your phone at home.

Seek depth—for yourself,
for your children,
and for theirs.

The generations below us
will one day need elders,
sages and guides.

We must be there to meet them when they arrive.

Words in the Wild

Save me from the shallows

When I was learning to swim, I feared depth…

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a year ago · 40 likes · 4 comments · Joshua Luke Smith

Spiritual Formation as Wave 4 in Evangelicalism

I’m not alone in pondering how Spiritual Formation as a ‘trend’ in evangelicalism will emerge. Trevin Wax at TGC comments on the ‘waves’ of (North American) evangelicalism and how ‘spiritual formation’ may be the fourth. He describes the three waves which was adopted or strongly impacted every evangelical church in one way or another as;

Wave #1: Spirit-Filled Worship - The influx of forms of charismatic worship

Wave #2: Seeker-Sensitive Church Growth - The focus on increased attendance by new or young Christians

Wave #3: Gospel Centrality - This final wave (which at least in my experience is more contestable) was the return to a focus on gospel/doctrine in the form of Keller and Piper.

He wonders if Wave #4 is Spiritual Formation when he writes;

Like the other waves, this one has a reactionary element—the Spirit-filled wave is too shallow, the seeker-sensitive wave too programmatic, and the gospel-centered movement too shy when it comes to stressing a rule of life (perhaps out of fear of returning to moralism). But the spiritual formation wave’s primary focus is positive, not negative—a way of shaping one’s life according to practices and habits that will aid one’s growth in virtue and the development of one’s character.

“If you’re not holding out a challenging and strenuous moral vision, they’re just not going to take you seriously,” an African American pastor in Baltimore told me last year about his college students. Not surprisingly, several best-selling books now focus on spiritual habits, whether from Justin Whitmel Earley or John Mark Comer.

Read the rest from Trevin Wax’s thought-provoking reflections here.

Ian Harber wrote some further thoughts in reflection on Wax’s fourth wave hypothesis

Back Again with Ian Harber

Cage-Stage Comerism

The first time I listened to a sermon from John Mark Comer was around 2013 or so. He was preaching through Philippians; his church was still called Solid Rock Church. It was a confusing time in my life. I was about midway through my deconstruction. He wasn’t yet a major influence on my faith, but I occasionally enjoyed his preaching more than most other…

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2 years ago · 312 likes · 57 comments · Ian Harber

I had to google “Cage Stage” which AI defined as

Cage stage" in a religious context, specifically Calvinism, refers to a phase of intense zeal and potentially argumentative behavior in newly converted believers.

But Harber explains how in his early enthusiasm for spiritual formation, he threw the “baby out with the bathwater”. He unpacks 5 things which have matured his early naive and zealous enthusiasm for spiritual formation. I’ll list them below, but reading his explanation will fill this out.

1. Doctrine Matters

2. It’s not about the practices; it’s about intimacy with God.

3. Talking about spiritual formation doesn’t do anything. You actually have to do stuff.

4. You still need the gospel. You don’t graduate from the gospel to spiritual formation.

Unanswered Prayer

Griffin Gooch writes a helpful and readable summary of his Theology of Prayer. I haven’t read this closely enough to know if I agree with all of it, but I couldn’t help but feel that this kind of honest readable summary is a key resource for deepening pastoral abilities when it comes to prayer and healing (or the lack thereof);

Unanswered prayer is one of the great philosophical questions in the Christian life. We’re told that Jesus will do anything “we ask according to His name” and that “if we have faith and no doubt,” our prayers can literally move mountains (John 14:13; Matt. 21:21-22). And yet, the imagined outcome of many of our prayers never seem to materialize.

Even beyond unanswered prayer, the act of prayer itself — asking a perfect God to do stuff that a God who’s actually perfect would presumably want to do anyways — is a bit confusing.

So the following is a summary of how I’ve tried to make sense of prayer.

Reality Theology with Griffin Gooch

What's the Point of Prayer?

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a year ago · 141 likes · 85 comments · Griffin Gooch

Salvation Wars

Beth Felker Jones weighs in on Matthew Bates new book “Salvation Wars” and the Calvinist blow back it has received. For my part, I think that Bates translation and understanding of pistis / faith / belief opens up a renewed understanding of the relationship between mental ascent, lived life, response to an action elements that are involved in what it means to believe in Jesus.

Church Blogmatics by Beth Felker Jones

If you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.

Fellow Pilgrims…

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a year ago · 41 likes · 1 comment

The Cost of Ambition? Exposing an ugly way of being a society

Just the title of Volf’s upcoming book makes me engaged. Scot McKnight gives an early preview of whats inside and his reflections.

Scot’s Newsletter

Better vs. Better Than

Before I even name the author or the book, we need this book…

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a year ago · 18 likes · 3 comments · Scot McKnight

Euro-Poor or Ameri-Poor - Chris Arnaude

A fascinating reflection from Chris Arnaude who constantly travels and reflects on what budget options mean in Europe versus America;

Chris Arnade Walks the World

Is it Euro-poor, or Ameri-poor?

My last morning in Italy was in a distant suburb of Milan, my plans for a low-stress travel day upended by a rail strike. Determined to get food before the long maze of international travel began, I headed to the plaza at six a.m., the one with the six-hundred-year-old Renaissance sanctuary, not the one with the five-hundred-year-old Baroque basilica, t…

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a year ago · 287 likes · 126 comments · Chris Arnade

Those two meals fifty hours apart capture a contrast between the US and Europe2 I’ve seen in years traveling both3, with the US undeniably wealthier in easily quantified material terms, but lagging in harder to measure, more subjective qualities, such as aesthetics, fulfillment, and contentment.

Fighting over if the US or European lifestyle is superior has become an ongoing debate, which I’ve taken part in many times. I’ve played both sides of it4, not out of duplicity, and only occasionally to be a troll, but because there isn’t a simple answer.

“…there is a genuine comprehension gap between the US and Europe. There really are two different minds with two different understandings of what it means to be a human, and that manifests in different rules, regulations, and priorities, since policy is a result of a society's cultural preferences.”

The comprehension gap is real and worth reflecting when common languages and cultural foundations can collapse the gaping difference between ‘what it means to be a human’.

Obviously material wealth is a primary contribution to human happiness and fulfillment. Outright destitution and poverty trumps all else, but above a certain level of riches there comes a point of diminishing returns7, that asymptotes towards a flat line above which little is gained. One dollar of additional GDP no longer brings the same benefits as it does further down the development ladder, and in some cases, it can actually be destructive, as all other contributions to happiness are pushed aside to acquire it.

That’s all for now…

“If man had his way, the plan of redemption would be an endless and bloody conflict. In reality, salvation was bought not by Jesus' fist, but by His nail-pierced hands; not by muscle but by love; not by vengeance but by forgiveness; not by force but by sacrifice. Jesus Christ our Lord surrendered in order that He might win; He destroyed His enemies by dying for them and conquered death by allowing death to conquer Him.”

― A.W. Tozer, Preparing for Jesus' Return: Daily Live the Blessed Hope

“Easter was when Hope in person surprised the whole world by coming forward from the future into the present.”

― N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope

Hi Friends,

Welcome to Issue #93 of the Lectio Letter. This members-only newsletter normally contains music, film, and food suggestions, links, and an article written by yours truly.

But this issue has a slightly longer article for Easter week, but without the normal miscellany, which is more time-consuming than you’d imagine, so that we keep some kind of rhythm up for you all while we are out on the road.

In Holy Week the Church rehearses Jesus’ final week in Jerusalem. He pronounces Judgement on the failure of God’s people to be the people of God for the sake of the Nations and affirms an outlandish act of devotion in the midst of naysayers. Becoming ‘Easter People’ I contend, means removing the man-made barriers subtly present in our Christian cultures that keep out those who God intends to welcome in Jesus.

As I heard someone memorably state, “we are welcome as we are, but not to stay as we are”. To be welcoming and affirming are considered one and the same in our modern progressive culture, but the Jesus-way is that we are all welcomed as we are, but in order to become who He is.

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Chasing Money Changers and Pouring out Perfume this Easter Week

It is easy to abstract Easter into it's theological outcomes and forget the very flesh and blood realities right at the heart of the story.

After all, Easter is the climax of a story about bodies. Bodies placed in a garden, bodies wandering the wilderness, God become a body in Jesus Christ, that body being judged and killed, and that body being raised up again.

A little later on, in the Church's way of telling time, we will make our way to Pentecost where God's breath, life and Spirit will breathe once again on a body of people who will become, the body of Christ on earth.

That body of people will be a faithfully-waiting-forestaste of the realm of Spirit (heaven), filling the realm of the body (Earth) and all things being made new again.

But in this time between the times, we don't like our bodies very much. We often abuse our bodies, become numb to them, or seek to escape them, and yet as I've rehearsed above, God's story is inherently a story of bodies.

So, this week is all about the in-bodied human Jesus rescuing humanity through recovering the vocation of Adam, to be an in-body representation of God.

Jesus recovers this in His incarnation, His life, His death and then the first act of God's new creation is the resurrection of Jesus body.

In Mark 11, we read that in the last week of Jesus' life, he returns to the centre of the world for God's people; Jerusalem. In the week before violence is done to Jesus' body, we see him bring a form of violent judgement on what God's people had understood to be the Holiest place on Earth.

15 On reaching Jerusalem, Jesus entered the temple courts and began driving out those who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the benches of those selling doves, 16 and would not allow anyone to carry merchandise through the temple courts. 17 And as he taught them, he said, "Is it not written: 'My house will be called a house of prayer for all nations'? But you have made it 'a den of robbers.'

18 The chief priests and the teachers of the law heard this and began looking for a way to kill him, for they feared him, because the whole crowd was amazed at his teaching.

19 When evening came, Jesus and his disciples went out of the city.

The temple wasn't just the centre of religious life for the jews, it was the centre of the world for them. It was the very presence of God amongst them.

It was the place God had given them to be a reminder of the temple-palace-garden that was set up in Eden. Eden was intended to be a basecamp for making something beautiful out of God's wider creation in partnership with His image bearers.

The Genesis story shows us that God's creation was intended to be a temple where God's presence was to be manifest. At the centre was the image bearer, Adam, representing God to the creation as a Priest and King. Throughout the story of Israel, a desire to recover this sense of God's presence dwelling with them is a constant.

The interior of the temple was actually laid out as a garden, the roof as the cosmos of stars. The temple and, particularly, the holy of holies, was the space of the expected new creation. The place where the spaces of heaven and earth overlapped.

The purpose of the temple was to mediate that presence and that one day the temple would be like an atom bomb of the new creation. This tiny space on earth expanding God's redeemed space, heaven and earth united.

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“Advice; It’s more fun to give than receive “

— Malcolm Forbes

“The Godly give good advice to their friends; the wicked lead them astray.”

— Proverbs 12:26

Welcome to Issue #91 of the Lectio Letter. This members-only newsletter is filled with music, film and food suggestions, links, and an article written by yours truly.

On the 9th of this month, I arrived at my 4th decade. Despite not carrying a great deal of anxiety about this ‘turn of the page’ combined with my tendency to construe any unexamined cultural significance as an empty construct, I was pushed and pulled into some level of self-reflection. The article below is a mixture of pithy practical advice alongside some of the things that sit deep within my ‘bones’ as it were. Hopefully, they will be equally interesting, amusing, bemusing, and inspiring.

As I reflected on my life so far in the days that surrounded the 9th of March and found that as I ‘dropped’ into some deeper reflection, the primary feeling was that of gratitude for relationships.

As with most lives, mine has the muchness and manyness of good and difficult threads and yet what sits deepest when I contemplate, is a deep and resounding gratitude. Like most people, there are many things that I wanted that I don't have at 40, many things I wanted to happen that haven't. Yet these are eclipsed by a whole series of things that I would describe as pure grace, unasked-for gifts.

Recently, I read Stanley Hauerwas’ memoir, as he constantly witnessed to friendships that, as he put it, "made his life possible". Similarly, Henri Nouwen’s collection of letters that I've been working through points to the irreducible necessity of relationships which constitute his being, wellness and identity.

C.S. Lewis once remarked when asked to advise young people about where to live;

“Friendship is the greatest of worldly goods. Certainly to me it is the chief happiness of life. If I had to give a piece of advice to a young man about a place to live, I think I should say, 'sacrifice almost everything to live where you can be near your friends.”

― C.S. Lewis, The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume 2: Books, Broadcasts, and the War, 1931-1949

C.S. Lewis’ quote may seem strange rather than resonant to the outsider who looks in on our lives: In a period of deep and meaningful relationships in my late teenage years, I left the context of Cornwall to move to Scotland… Pretty much as far away as anyone could expect someone to travel within the admittedly small British Isles.

But in that move, I was serendipitously placed to be with Rachel who is surely the deepest and best friend and Wife anyone could've asked for. Exactly a year after Rachel and I were married we moved our lives to South Africa, tearing ourselves once again from the daily overlap of people we loved dearly.

But somehow in choosing Jesus first as friend, these friendships although deferred by distance have become transfigured; all the more precious. It also has put us in sincere need of friends and neighbours that we have found and have graciously found us, here in South Africa.

Looking across the tapestry of relationships that make my life possible I have the deep sense that I am extremely rich, not in any way in material terms compared to peers, but certainly in relationships which stretch across almost inconceivable cultural breadth and also authentic depth.

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Status Board

Reading

I’ve returned to a few books I’ve read before in these last few days; “Biblical Critical Theory” by Christopher Watkins, “The Congregation in a Secular Age" by Andrew Root and “Alienation and Acceleration” by Hartmut Rosa.

I’ve come back to them for a forthcoming series with my friend Matt Lewis on his “Follower” Podcast. I’ll include a link when they come out, but our first interaction didn’t lead us very far into the contents of the books, but instead led me to unpack why I think paying attention to how the world is naming its pain, without capitulating to all it’s interpretative categories is a worthwhile Christian endeavour.

“As Chesterton says, “the modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad” because they are “isolated from each other and wandering alone.”
― Christopher Watkin, Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible's Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture

I’ve also been enjoying “Supper of the Lamb” by Robert Farrar Capon, which has been on a ‘to read’ list for a number of years after person after person told me I would love it, and I do.

“Why do we marry, why take friends and lovers? Why give ourselves to music, painting, chemistry or cooking? Out of simple delight in the resident goodness of creation, of course; but out of more than that, too. Half earth's gorgeousness lies hidden in the glimpsed city it longs to become.”
― Robert Farrar Capon, The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection

It presents itself as a cookbook, but in actuality, it is 1/3rd cookbook, 1/3rd Theology of Food and 1/3rd humorous pontification of how and how not to cook and what tools to use. It’s a primer of the goodness of creation and an anti-gnostic treatise. I’ve struggled to not just keep reading sections of it aloud!

Eating

Recently we re-made this Nduja Chicken and Potatoes dish from the Trullo Cookbook. It’s actually quite simple but the potatoes were fantastic and the chicken delicious. A good meal for a larger group (below quantities are for a group of 6). The benefit of this kind of classic meal is that you can have everything in the oven for 20 minutes before guests arrive and reserve that all-important first 10 minutes of hosting for serving drinks and not stressing about doing something with the food your cooking everyone.

Ingredients

2-4 tbsp nduja, whipped into paste

8 Maris Piper potatoes, cut into wedges

4 sprigs of rosemary

6 garlic cloves, smashed

Olive oil (plenty of it)

18 chicken thighs (3 per person)

salt and pepper

Directions

1. Preheat the oven to 180°C

2. Put the nduja in a bowl, add a splash of hot water and blend/mix to loosen into a paste.

3. Chop the potatoes into wedges and put them with rosemary and a sprinkle of salt in a pan and cover with room temp water.

4. Bring up to the boil then drain immediately. Let the potatoes completely steam dry in a colander then coat generously with olive oil and mix together.

5. Heat an empty roasting tray (large enough to hold the potato wedges in a single layer) in the oven for 5 minutes, then take it out and add olive oil so that it is about 2-3cm deep.

6. Add the potatoes, rosemary and garlic from the boiling water and season with salt and pepper.

7. Roast the potatoes on the top shelf of the oven for 45 minutes-1 hour or until crispy, stirring from time to time.

8. While your potatoes are roasting, heat a large heaby bottomed frying pan on a medium heat. Add a small amount of olive oil.

9. Pat the chicken thighs dry with paper towl and season with salt and pepper and, working in batches, colour the skins in the pan and then flip them over until golden then transfer to the roasting tray.

10. Put the chicken on the lower shelf of the oven and roast for the remaining time of the potatoes (roughly 30 minutes).

11. Spread the nduja paste on the skins for the last 15 minutes of cooking and muddle it all around.

12. Serve the chicken and potatoes on platters in the middle of the table with a green salad.

Listening

Something about the production of this popular track has kept it on one track repeat these last weeks.

Modern take on throwback soul vibes from Curtis Harding;

This is a short-form jazz delight that is worth some good speakers by Vega Trails;

For a slightly longer piece of modern jazz that has been in the background for me, listen to the latest release from 44th move;

Watching

Despite not being hardcore Formula 1 fans, we joined the crowd of people who have been captivated by the Netflix series “Drive to Survive”. The human drama in any sport is the most intriguing, but also seeing lives who are fully given over to such an intoxicating mix of pride, money and fulfilment is a worthwhile lesson in how making ‘winning’ an ultimate goal can be uniquely corrupting.

40 Pieces of Advice at 40

It’s a little bit amusing to me that despite stating numerous times on this lectio letter that I don’t like giving practical advice in such an impersonal form this is, by my count, the third time I’ve sent a Lectio letter centred around ‘advice’.

1. Take personal responsibility for things you can control: Your actions, your failure, your passivity, your pain.

2. Patience is not easy to grow, but if you don't your life will be miserable.

3. Set your hope in eternity. Everything else here is just a preview of the coming attractions and can't fulfil the delight we were made for.

4. Find small simple ways to give up control every day. There will be a day when you don't have a choice and working this muscle will make that day easier.

5. Collect something. It's quirky, gives you a hobby and makes you a resource for others.

6. Find a place, time and habit of turning off from the world. We need more people who have guarded their peace.

7. Beware noise, hurry and crowds, they are all focused on distraction and the world is saved by attention to presence.

8. Develop a heart that values humility to the extent that you can thank people who confront you. It takes courage for them to do it and no one does it perfectly.

9. Develop a habit of sitting with the love of God for you. There are lots of ways to do it, but you'll either live out a life that flows from this reality, or not.

10. Find a way to interrupt the tendency to judgment with curiosity and empathy. Even if you can't muster it, imagine how an empathetic person might feel and emulate that.

11. Reframe failure in a very practical way into a learning opportunity and never let it touch the conviction that you are deeply precious and beloved of God.

12. Remind the people closest to you that you are willing for them to point out to you the things they think you can't see about yourself.

13. You can grow old without growing up. Learning and new experiences can help you not to fossilise.

14. What you do every day is a pretty good sign of what you'll become good at. Make sure it's the thing you want to be good at.

15. Getting stuck in comparison with other people is the quickest way for all peace and happiness to exit your life. Celebrate others and cultivate gratitude for what you have.

16. Be able to spontaneously laugh at yourself around others. If you can't, figure out why you can’t and try to work on that.

17. A Scarcity mentality is essentially the original sin, decide that what you have today is enough for you and learn to cultivate trust for tomorrow.

18. Learn to recognise when you are hungry or tired and make sure you stay away from important conversations or big decisions.

19. Make sure you have people in your life that if you make a huge mistake you are confident you could knock on their door and find compassion, rebuke and truthfulness in good proportion.

20. Make lists for the small stuff... you're wasting energy trying to keep it in your brain.

21. Time is the most precious resource you have. Make sure you spend as much of it on what is most precious to you.

22. Before you go into a conversation about something you expect to disagree on, decide what would make you willing to change your mind.

23. Struggling to keep working at something? Use a Pomodoro timer, work for 20, walk for 5, go back to it,.

24. Pay attention to your group number on boarding passes and only stand up and queue when it’s called. It's assigned seating for goodness sake.

25. In the morning while brushing your teeth, use the time to pray for someone else. In the evening while brushing your teeth, use it to ask God what he thought about the different things you did that day.

26. Watch out for the tyranny of the urgent. When someone is consistently insistent try to slow things down so you don't catch the disease.

27. In arguments make the words "always" and "never" out of bounds. You are always going to be overstating things and never get to a state of mind where you can reconcile ;)

28. Being willing to change your mind is a strength, not a weakness.

29. If you are unsure what skills you have to offer in a specialised environment, your emotional intelligence can still make you indispensable.

30. Unforgiveness is, as has been said “taking the poison yourself and hoping the other person dies”

31. When packing for travel, remember you can buy almost anything you forget and Yes, you are packing more than you need.

32. You will become like the people you spend most of your time with.

33. If you are part of a group that isn't doing or living in a way that you think is important, don't start by pointing it out, start by making sure your life is an attractive alternative to what is missing.

34. Everyone is a little bit insecure. So develop enough confidence and self-assurance to put others at ease without being domineering.

35. Develop a secret service of generosity to others and let it be a secret only you and God share. It will deepen your intimacy with God and guard you against pride.

36. If it costs you less than 20% of the cost of a flight ticket, pick a reasonable time to catch a flight. 6am take-offs are miserable nights and start your trip with more fatigue than necessary.

37. Try to cultivate a wilderness into a garden. It might just be some house plants, patch of grass, or a vegetable plot but it will teach you alot about the pace of life and your own life. Hint: There is a reason Jesus used so many agricultural parables.

38. Grow your understanding of where each book of the bible exists in the greater narrative of the bible. It will help you discern misuse of individual verses.

39. Read difficult books in a group, you increase your understanding by the factor of brains included until you reach about 10.

40. Many aspects of life, maybe especially religious ones, require some kind of public self’. This is not necessarily bad, just make sure the gap between your public self and private self doesn’t get big enough to tear your soul.

When I started this list, I set out to write 40, but in the end I couldn’t stop. I’ve reserved 26 more for paying subscribers below this line. But if you don’t have a membership and want to read it, then you can still hit the free trial button below to see the rest.

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“But Calling, as I see it, is the way God has called you to bear His Image in the World. So in that sense, all human beings share the same calling”

—

“When we give our attention to deepening our life with God (highest calling) and then turn to live out the commands of scripture (common callings), our specific calling emerges as we love and live with God.”

—

“It is worth paying attention to what brings us joy, what makes us come alive and where our desires lay but in the earlier stages of life these are a mixed bag at best. Which is to say, you have mixed motivations, desires and ambitions and while some form of them may be from God, they likely need to be refined and purified.”

—

“Some people struggle to name their calling but operate effortlessly in it, while others never stop talking about it but rarely seem to embody the grandeur of their words. While it can be helpful to clarify our calling over the years of our lives, actually living your life in relationship to the daily direction of the Holy Spirit is the best way to develop in your calling.”

— Excerpts from This Lectio’s Article below

Welcome to Issue #91 of the Lectio Letter. This members-only newsletter is filled with music, film and food suggestions, links, and an article written by yours truly.

This time, I’m sharing 3 pieces of advice I’ve consistently referenced in conversations with people since the beginning of the year.

Inevitably, a new calendar year offers an opportunity to reflect, consider new paths and set a course. With new possibilities, we are also faced with the hum of anxiety about the wrong choice (which I wrote about here in October last year). In previous eras, most people would pick a career path and continue until retirement. Now it seems like every 3-5 years we are faced with decisions about the trajectory of the rest of our lives. How do we go about making and understanding those decisions?

I’ve shared three things in the article below, the first is a way to think about types of calling. The second is understanding where we are in life and how to imagine the relationship between what we need to do vs. what we get to do. Thirdly, I introduce the difference between an assignment and a calling which has been very clarifying for me as I think about what I say “yes” to and how to know when I’m finished.

At the end of the article, I’ve included a list of other articles that I’ve written since I began the Lectio which have something to say around calling, discernment and decision-making. Some of them are only accessible to paying members, but the good news is that you can use the button below to start a trial and read them today!

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Since I completed the always mammoth task of compiling the yearly book review edition of the Lectio (which if you missed you can read here) we have had a full southern hemisphere summer!

I spent the beginning of the month in Norway for a week teaching at YWAM Grimerud. It was a wonderful time, although moving between 39 centigrade to -18 in under 24 hours was quite an adjustment. I discovered my wardrobe was seriously under-gunned and had to borrow clothes on arrival, but -18c makes for some pretty spectacular scenery.

I was speaking on a DTS which is YWAM’s entry level mission school. It was a stretching experience as I am more experienced in speaking to those who have been in missions a little longer, but they were a delight. There were students from the UK, New Zealand, India, Turkey, the U.S., Denmark, Norway, Israel, The Netherlands and the Faroe Islands.

I was very grateful that Rachel’s parents were able to come and stay with her while I travelled and I could spend a couple of days on either side of the trip with them both.

Work

I mentioned in the last lectio that I was planning to read much more on the Apostle Paul this year. Part of the reason is that we are helping run a seminar for Bible Teachers and Students in YWAM on the Apostle Paul. You can read more about it here.

Reading

These past few weeks I’ve been reading a couple of books which are actually compilations of letters. It’s a great format if you only have short snippets of time to read something;

Letter to a Future Saint

The first is from Brad East who is a fantastic theologian working from Abilene in the U.S. who published a series of letters which began as letters to his young relatives as they prepared to be baptised. These have been developed into short-form catechesis. Catechesis is still practised in some traditions but historically it is the teaching period that runs up to baptism and helps the person who is about to be baptised take in the whole story of God and come to an understanding of what it is they are doing when they put off their old life and put on the new. Brad East does this in an easy to understand way and would deepen mature and early Christians to the nature of our faith and the life that flows from it.

Love Henri

Over the course of his life, Henri Nouwen wrote thousands of letters to friends, acquaintances, parishioners, students, and readers of his work all around the world. He corresponded in English, Dutch, German, French, and Spanish, and took great care to store and archive the letters decade after decade. He believed that a thoughtful letter written in love could truly change someone's life.

This compiled collection of letters from Henri Nouwen is a real treasure. Nouwen is widely beloved as a writer but in many ways struggled through his life as gifted, broken and limited which these letters well attest to. A few things strike me from his letters; 1. He was deeply committed to community and understood he deep reliance on the faithfulness of friends to keep him faithful. 2. He wrestled deeply with his own faithfulness and offered wisdom from his own trials 3. He continually guides people away from the periphery of faith and towards the flesh and blood reality of who Jesus is for us.

One of other reoccurring themes is his continual pursuit of a deepening prayer life and reading these letters for me had the effect of catching that desire in a new way.

Eating

After a very full week in Norway, one of the trip’s great delights was a 6-hour layover in Athens. I jumped straight on the metro and headed for Pharoah, a restaurant Rachel and I loved last year and since then won a bib gourmand from Michelin.

I was sad not to be sharing the experience with Rachel but on the upside, I suspect they thought I was a critic dining alone and I was showered with several ‘complimentary’ tasters. I was in and out within the hour and left stuffed with the most delicious Mediterranean food.

Listening

Now and again, after being in a place like Pharaoh, I daydream of another career. In my dream, I run a coffee shop that sells theology books and scandi homeware (yes, in the real world I’d be bankrupt in 2 months) which transforms into a wine bar that serves pop-up set menus in the evening (as you can tell, I’ve daydreamed a little too consistently about this).

But join me for a moment in my dream as the coffee shop turns into a wine bar, the soundtrack might include sounds like the retro/jazzy/afrobeat tracks I’ve been enjoying below;

What’s your Calling? 3 Pieces of Advice

In the past month, as I suppose is to be expected in the first few months of a new year, I have been in many conversations with younger people about decisions, life direction and a sense of calling. In this Lectio, I would like to share three things that I have been building these sort of conversations around.

1. There Are Different Kinds of Calling.

In circles of ministry, it is common for people to cite a sense of calling. Of course, all people have a calling whether or not they are in "full-time ministry,” but you rarely find a mechanic, surveyor or airline pilot who expresses the sense of their life’s work with this kind of language. But “calling,” as I see it, is the way God has called us to bear His image in the world and, in that sense, all human beings share the same calling as expressed in Genesis 2. 

This calling is for humans to faithfully reveal who God is in their actions and relationships. Despite the tragedy of Genesis 3, this calling is sustained by God's faithfulness to a specific people (the Jews) throughout the Old Testament, and then fulfilled (or perfected) by Jesus. 

Jesus is the one true human image-bearer who fulfils the human call to be in relationship with the Father for the sake of the world, and so now our high calling is to imitate Him by the power of His Spirit. Although most Christians understand this call to imitate Jesus, we tend to neglect it. I've written in more depth about this before in Lectio #67. 

The Puritans spoke of 3 callings:

1. Our Highest Calling: to be in friendship with God.

2. Our Common Calling: the commands of scripture (for example, do not steal, love one another, make disciples etc).  

3. Our Specific Calling: the unique calling unique of each person, and very often this can be to a place and a people where we live out the common calling of Christians. 

We often fixate on our specific calling because we have absorbed the secular script that "we are what we do," but understanding the 3 callings can offer us a fresh and vital way of seeing our specific calling.

As we give our attention to deepening our life with God (the highest calling) and then turn to live out the commands of scripture (our common calling), we find our specific calling emerges as we love and live with God. Too often our angst for direction and specific calling is present because we haven't attended fully to the first two commands, hoping that the specific calling will fulfil the need in us that is meant to be met in attention to our highest calling. 

2. Desire, Discernment, Phase of life and the "Get to Do" versus the "Have to Do."

Ok, I'm cheating here by combining a few different things, but they do have an interrelated nature. 

The first thing to say is that discerning how you are uniquely gifted to operate in the world in worship to God and in service of His purposes is an unfolding process. You may catch a glimpse in your younger years of how you are uniquely gifted through having an experience that makes you feel you alive in a certain way, or through a powerful encouragement or prophetic word, but the reality is that most of us are not fully formed to embody our calling well. 

It is worth paying attention to what brings us joy, what makes us come alive and where our desires lay, but in the earlier stages of life these are a mixed bag at best. We have mixed motivations, desires and ambitions and while some form of them may be from God, they will likely need to be refined and purified. 

One of the ways refining happens is through our character which grows through not getting to do all the things we desire. While it is not an exact science, I have come to observe as true a dynamic I first encountered in Robert Clinton's famous leadership book, "The Making of a Leader," which attempts to chart the growth and development of characters in the bible. 

The dynamic is that there are always 2 types of tasks in life. First, the things we have to do but would maybe not choose to. For example, doing the dishes and cleaning the bathroom, working on accounting issues and offering to tidy up after events. Second, the things we get to do and love doing. These may be things that bring us, God, and others delight, things that feel like they fit us and we enjoy or feel energised by doing.

The “get to” type of tasks are good indicators that you might have a specific call embedded somewhere in those types of activities or places. But the reality is that our lives will always have the “have to” kind of tasks embedded in them. 

In our earlier years, we can expect that if we were to break down our time spent, more of our lives are spent doing things we “have to” versus things we “get to.” There are several reasons for this, but a core one has to be cultivating character by discovering the value of doing things we don't like to do but need to be done. 

Over the years, if our character is growing, we should find ourselves in situations which allow us to do increasingly more of what we enjoy and yet come to value and engage in the things we have to do. I hesitate to be too prescriptive here because there is no such thing as a linear path but I tend to encourage people to consider the following breakdown between have to/get as we move through life:

10-20yrs: 90% / 10%

20-30yrs: 80% / 20%

30-40yrs: 60% / 40%

50-60 yrs: 40% / 60%

60-70 yrs 20% / 80%

70-80 yrs: 10% / 90%

The reality is that from 50 years onwards, I don't think attention to this matters as much because we are hopefully living out our calling with less anxiety than is present in the first half of our life. This is just an exercise to help people understand why, at the age of 20, we don't get to do and be everything we sense we are made to do and be.

The concluding point here is that sometimes people can become so 'helpful' in their area of service within an organisation/community that said organization/community struggles to release them into greater freedom to pursue their calling. These contexts/communities/organisations exist on a sliding scale from well-meaning to outright toxic, and this is a situation that I have counselled several people in. There are few concrete pieces of advice to offer here as each dynamic is unique and deserves careful and prayerful discernment. However, I would say that if we remain connected to healthy, prayerful people outside of our context, they can offer us objective perspectives on our own life and the community we find ourselves in. Having an objective perspective is hard when we are so close to the situation. Perhaps something worth considering might be a gathering similar to a Quaker tradition called a clearness committee. 

3. Assignments and Callings

Some of us struggle to name our calling but operate effortlessly in it, while others of us never stop talking about it but rarely seem to embody the grandeur of our words. While it can be helpful to clarify our calling over the years of our lives, actually living our life in relation to the daily direction of the Holy Spirit is the best way to develop our calling. What good is it to hold the deed to a house we own but never live in it. Instead, live in the house well and delight to discover that it is ours. 

“Big picture” callings are, by their very nature, dream-like. They are the perfect, big ideas untouched by the complexity and inevitable messiness of everyday life. Very often, a framework, guiding word or some new vocabulary can give you a sense of where you find yourself. One of the most helpful things for me has been clarifying between “assignments” and “callings.”

I identify my own calling as "helping people to see God more clearly so they can deepen their discipleship.” One of the practical ways in which I have done that is to run training programmes. In these programmes, I love to create a curriculum and then to teach and facilitate discussion around the character and nature of God. In the past couple of years, I've been so grateful to have moments to do that but for most of the past ten years, I have been serving in programmes where someone else was doing these things. Instead, I organised airport runs, figured out finances, organised food and pastorally walked alongside people as they participated in the programme. 

I wouldn’t describe any of the above as my calling. But they did facilitate a couple of things. First, they helped me gain skills around details and organisation that are needed to run these kinds of programmes. Second, they helped me gain an appreciation for how deeply important these areas of service are. This season was an assignment. I wasn’t fulfilling my deepest sense of calling, but I was in the midst of an assignment observing others who were doing what I one day hoped to do, learning from their successes, challenges and failures. I was also developing a clearer understanding and appreciation of how valuable these often “hidden” services make such environments a possibility. 

Now, as I am slowly doing more of what is a good and enjoyable fit for me, others are taking on some of these tasks. To be clear, we don’t serve as a way to qualify for a position of greater leadership. We serve to learn what Jesus-like leadership actually is. We only mature in our calling when we can affirm the value and worth of every contribution. 

There are times when God asks us to take on a time-bound assignment that contributes to developing the gifting and character required to fulfil our calling. We don’t always see how it relates but we are aware somehow that God has asked us to serve in a particular way. Much vocational angst and tension comes from not having understood a season of service as an assignment and feeling trapped by it. The key things with an assignment, which are different from a broader calling are:

1. It usually looks like a very specific-orientated role or action. 

2. There is a sense that God is asking you to engage in it.

3. There is a time span or clear line when you know you have completed it.

The third point tends to be clarifying for people to reflect on. How would we know we have completed this thing that God called us to? Knowing this for oneself and communicating the sense of it to the people we are working with/on behalf of can create clarity for everyone. It keeps us from suddenly announcing our departure from a role or place without others understanding our sense of commitment.

Conclusion

In defining and clarifying calling, there are few absolutes but the three sections in this article are perhaps my most commonly offered frameworks when I find myself in conversation with young people. If you are interested in delving deeper into calling, I have written a number of articles in the Lectio previously,  and a book I highly recommend is, “The Gift of Being Yourself”  by David Benner. Foundationally for Christians, vocation is a calling to serve God and others before a pursuit of self-fulfillment, and the words of Jesus remain true in this as in many other places:

“those who give their lives will find them.”

I’d love to hear from you what has helped you in discernment around calling and what you think is missing from the above in the comments.

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Links to Other Things I have written on Vocation, Discernment and Decision Making

How to make Decisions - Lectio #87

Understand your unfolding gifting and calling - Lectio #67

The Gift of Failure: How Humiliation helps us find true Humility - Lectio #63

“Shoulds” and “Coulds” - Lectio #60

How (not) to change the world, Part 1 - Lectio #48

How (not) to change the world, Part 2 - Lectio #49

How (not) to change the world , Part 3 - Lectio #50

What is "Kingdom" work? - Lectio #47

You Are Not What You Do | Part II - The Three Callings - Lectio #22

You are not what you do | Part I - Lectio #20

The Mission of God and our attempts to join in - Lectio #14

 "We are like God but we are not God..." - Lectio #9

Wor(k)ship - Lectio #2

Miscellaneous Links

In a world that is so full of tumult and chaos, I’ve felt increasingly sure that the only way to keep one’s mind and heart open to Jesus is to work to sustain an awareness of the peace Jesus has given us

“Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.”

— John 14:27

Wendell Berry’s Poem, The Peace of Wild Things speaks to this and has been beautifully illustrated through a commission from the On Being Project;

The Least Mature Set the Culture?

Digital Liturgies

Does Maturity Still Matter?

Note: Today I am posting an essay that first appeared at Mere Orthodoxy in May 2023…

Read more

a year ago · 43 likes · 8 comments · Samuel D. James

Samuel James picks up Mark Sayer’s thoughts on how emotionally immature people can often end up holding the most sway in communities and networks. This is worth reflecting on for anyone involved in the health of communities and institutions.

Change is the only Constant

Fully Alive by Elizabeth Oldfield

Deep roots and wide branches

I can’t be the only one feeling the need for more spiritual core strength. I am managing two seemingly opposing instincts: I want to resist this reactionary moment by reaching out to those different from me, to model a hospitality I do not see playing out on the world stage. I’m also aware of a desire to pull back into safety, to shelter in sameness and…

Read more

a year ago · 76 likes · 23 comments

This is a very perceptive article from Elizabeth Oldfield exploring the tensions between change and stability, or you might think about movements vs. institutions. This is a rarely unpacked dynamic that is all over Christian communities and needs attention. I like her concluding remarks on the nature of trees in relation to this.

A Beautiful painting via Joel Miller on Substack

Someone died and left the US government $7 Billion Dollars — And no one knows who, but there are some clues

Billionaires are like black holes. We deduce their existence from the fundamental laws of capitalism, see their gravity pull politics into their orbit, even detect signals of their existence in the public markets…

…Last year, observers with the economic equivalent of a radio telescope detected a radiating anomaly on the February 28, 2023, daily balance sheet of the US Treasury Department: a $7 billion estate- and gift-tax payment…

The degree by which this payment exceeds others in modern history — it’s not just, ‘Oh, this was the biggest one by 20%,’” Ricco said later. This was the biggest one by a factor of seven.

The data wasn’t erroneous, Treasury officials found, who are legally forbidden to discuss tax filings. But it was a mystery. Who died? And why didn’t they hire better tax attorneys?

It’s not just that this number is an outlier. These days, paying the estate tax is almost optional. Most estates aren’t taxed, and most people with an estate that is taxable — worth more than $13.6 million, or $27.2 million for a married couple — can afford to minimize its impact with careful tax planning and philanthropic largesse. When David Koch, the heir and conservative political activist, died in 2019, his reported $42.2 billion fortune didn’t leave a ripple in the estate-tax data.

Read the rest here

Liam Thatcher on Keller Preaching Quote

“For the first 200 sermons, no matter what you do, your first 200 sermons are going to be terrible.” — Tim Keller

I’ve encountered this quote from Tim Keller a good many times, and have found it to be a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it’s hugely releasing to know that you’re not going to be perfect from day one. That learning the craft takes time. That even the great master Tim Keller didn’t come out of the womb preaching perfectly honed sermons. That he also (like I) had dozens of talks in the back catalogue he hoped nobody would ever hear.

But on the other hand, it’s a daunting – even paralysing – quote. Because frankly, many preachers will never make it above 200. Few of us are preaching weekly, at least in my context. Many new preachers will start with one or two a year, and even experienced preachers will often only deliver 15-20 annually. If these figures are correct, then many preachers will simply never have the opportunity for their sermons to be anything other than terrible.

Read the rest

The clearest picture of Saturn ever taken

That’s all for now…

"Spiritual reading, for most of us, requires either the recovery or acquisition of skills not in current repute: leisurely, repetitive, reflective reading. In this we are not reading primarily for information, but for companionship. Baron Friedrich von Hügel once said it was like sucking on a lozenge in contrast to gulping a meal. It is a way of reading that shapes the heart at the same time that it informs the intellect, sucking out the marrow-nourishment from the bone-words."

Eugene Peterson, Take and Read

Welcome to Issue #90 of the Lectio Letter. This members-only newsletter is (normally) filled with music, film and food suggestions, links, and an article written by yours truly. But this time it’s my yearly review of (almost) every book I read in 2024.

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Why Read?

This year, just as I did in the introduction to last year’s list and the year before, I am reflecting on why we should read.

Let me first say, that I am far from the most voracious reader I know. Like most of you, I imagine, my life is full of responsibilities and time scarcity alongside the lack of discipline, which makes a Netflix show or short online article, more attractive than plodding through a demanding book.

With that said, in a world with an abundance of access to information we badly need to recover a true wonder. The wonder is that the largest proportion of people in human history have both the access and ability to read books.

Because we have lost the wonder of this historical novelty we take for granted our access and thus treat it as a burden instead of a privilege. Throughout human history, it was only the elite who were able to access books which shared the perspectives and wisdom of the past and of other cultures. But in our information age we are inundated and therefore overwhelmed by this level of access.

That is where wonder and strategy must be combined. To sense the privilege of being able to read books and then to set a course to read. But wonder will only take us so far, we also need vision for what reading will cultivate in us for the sake of God and Others.

To my mind, what books primarily offer us is an opportunity to cultivate a virtue in short supply these days: Humility.

To begin to read is to desire to know, which is an admission that we do not yet know all we need to know. This doesn’t mean we come as readers with nothing to offer. A great deal of books need extraordinary discernment to, as they say, spit out the bones and eat the meat.

We live in a time when now, as much as ever, the words to the Ephesians are relevant to us; we can too easily be “tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching”. Through reading books we can be further equipped through the wisdom of others to learn to discern these waves in humility.

Given the great number of books available, it can sometimes feel like books themselves might be the way we are “blown here and there” but as I reflected on last year, we read with an ear for what God is speaking to us and in the community of saints in the midst of those words.

Practically speaking, one of the ways we can receive the most from books is to pick a subject area and consistently read in it. This does not have to be to the exclusion of other areas but it does mean having something of a strategy. As will be clear to most of you who read the Lectio regularly, I read at the intersection of theology, spiritual formation and mission.

But in the last few years, I have also read several books on South African politics and the practice of the Sabbath. What results is that I have received a body of understanding around these themes and practically it means I am able to read the books in those fields more quickly, with more understanding, discernment and retention because I can perceive how the book ‘fits’. While it is a good thing to read widely, I also think developing these specific areas which interest you can be uniquely equipping and rewarding.

In this coming year, I am hoping to read much more about the life and words of Paul, the most prolific writer in our New Testament for a project in 2025. Paul’s writings contain some of the most important, implicational and contested parts of the scripture and fresh attention to his life and the writings that arose from it are crucial in navigating the missional and pastoral realities many of us find ourselves in.

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It’s a University with over 200 campus locations around the world which helps equip those engaged in missions and discipleship. In each newsletter is one article written by me, a recipe and music recommendation as well as what I am reading currently alongside a short life update. The first 10 people who sign up with the button below with 50% for the whole year.

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Introduction to the 2024 Book Reviews

Well, This is the fifth annual book review of “(almost) every book I read” (read 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023 here)

Do you have a book you read this year that you thought was fantastic? Let me and others know which one by leaving a comment…I’d enjoy that!

A couple of weeks ago, I was delighted to unexpectedly “fill in” for a guest who cancelled on our friend Joshua Johnson’s Shifting Culture podcast on favourite books of the year.

It was fascinating to discover that out of the 20 books picked between Joshua and the other guest Lore, I only knew of 2 of them… as I mentioned on the podcast, a few of them will now populate my “to read” list of 2025, one of them I’m already reading!

Did you read something that you loved this year? Now’s your chance to share it! Let me know in the comments, I love receiving recommendations!

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Also, if you are reading in Gmail, this email will likely be clipped due to its length. If you want to read it all, scroll to the bottom and then click “View entire message” or read it online at LectioLetter.com to see it all. You are not getting it all if you don’t see my signature at the bottom.

Top 3 books of 2024

1. Beholding: Deepening Our Experience in God by Strahan Coleman

I discovered Strahan Coleman as a Kiwi Christian musician about a decade ago. In the intervening season, he has struggled with chronic illness which is the story which sets the backdrop for this book on beholding prayer.

This book more than any other this year made me think, “Oh I should buy this for [insert name]” (hence its position as the #1 book this year)! What makes this book particularly engaging for me (similar to Fully Alive by Elizabeth Oldfield) is that he is roughly my age and has had very similar experiences and influences in his faith.

Coleman tells how his early faith was filled with prophetic charismatic experiences, signs, wonders and provision. When chronic illness became his reality, he was forced to reconcile what he had known about God with how God seemingly wasn’t acting in his current situation.

Coleman turns towards a contemplative form of prayer he describes as beholding prayer and recognises the way that his previous, seemingly more exciting experiences with God were marked with requests for something other than God Himself.

What I particularly appreciated about his writing is that, in contrast to the large ex-vangelical publishing bubble, he retains and integrates all that is good about an expectant charismatic spirituality and deepens those impulses towards a refined desire for God’s will above all others.

It’s a story of someone moving from doing lots of things for and with God, to learning simply to be with God. He navigates around the temptation to an either/or dichotomy and narrates a deepening wisdom and peace as He comes to know God in his new humbled circumstances.

2. The Imago Dei: Humanity Made in the Image of God by Lucy Peppiatt

What does it mean to be made in the Image of God? It’s an important biblical phrase that gets picked up increasingly in serious ethical dilemmas in our modern world; euthanasia, transgender, race, and many other conversations which require us to speak Christian-ly about the intention and dignity of human lives and bodies.

Here Lucy Pepiatt, in a remarkably short book, surveys major ways of interpreting this phrase, along with discussions around how those relate to ethical dilemmas Christians face. It is though, in her last chapter where she brings forth some of her own suggestions that the book really shines. Well worth a read if you are looking for an accessible and theological introduction to the “Image of God” language.

3. The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis by Alan Jacobs

Alan Jacobs has done a pretty extraordinary thing with this book. He covers the thinking of Jacques Maritain, T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, W. H. Auden, and Simone Weil who during World War II, at a point where victory was assured, as they were separately attempting to imagine what a moral and spiritual regeneration would look like after the war.

They were almost all disconnected from one another, but Jacobs finds a number of golden threads amongst their work. Their consistent argument was that only an educational system which developed character, virtue and an understanding of the fallibility of humans would bring about a post-war world worth living in. Their call in the midst of the de-humanising effects of war was to deeply re-humanise people through an education which drew on Christian hope.

And the rest of the Books

4. The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Caused an Epidemic of Mental Illness by Jonathan Haidt

In the Teleios course we designed this year for young leaders we created a research assignment and one group tackled this book. The book begins by creating a thought experiment; What if your children, without your consent, were invited to live on Mars, despite not knowing exactly what the implications would be for their health?

Haidt argues this is almost exactly what social media companies have done; executed a large experiment in developmental psychology on minors. While that sounds like the shrill fear-mongering of apocalyptic-ready luddites, Haidt meticulously unpacks research findings which back his concerns that social media is having an unanticipated and devastating effect especially on girls and on those 13-16-year-olds who are in a particularly formative phase. This book is long (and can be read selectively) but is deeply worth reading for parents or those invested in the development of teenagers.

5. Practicing the Way: Be with Jesus, Become Like Him, Do As He Did by John Mark Comer

John Mark Comer has become the preeminent populariser of Dallas Willard. His ability to integrate psychology, church history, formation and culture studies with a succinct simplicity makes this an excellent read. Comer has thought long, hard and practically about the task of becoming like Jesus and the result is a book that deserves its popularity.

Having read around this subject for almost a decade, few things were new in Comer’s book, but what stands out is his integration and explanation which reveals a skill developed through his many years preaching.

The overwhelming popularity of this book though does give me some hesitation. The hesitation is not rooted in Comer’s work but in the faddish nature of Christian publishing. I have deep conviction that discipleship or the term Comer picks up “Spiritual Formation” is the foundational call of renewal to the Church in our day. Rapid popularity in publishing sometimes means that certain things are ‘sellable’ in the short term but then, as capitalism requires, the focus moves on.

Again I believe Comer would be well aware of this, but Spiritual Formation coming into vogue might offer at least as much danger as it does opportunity. I hope my cynicism is proven wrong here, but Spiritual Formation language entering the mainstream might innoculate those who expect it to be a quick one-stop shop and move on discouraged. As I said, I hope I am very wrong.

6. Low Anthropology: The Unlikely Key to a Gracious View of Others by David Zahl

Zahl is a thoughtful yet humourous author who in this book tries to recover an appreciation for the doctrine of original sin. A tough assignment you might think, but Zahl argues, and I agree, that optimism about our human condition hurts us more than we expect. I

nstead, he wants us to recognise that the brokenness within and without us is the very stuff that Jesus leads us through it towards love, empathy and an embrace of our creatureliness.

7. Digital Liturgies: Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age by Samuel James

Samuel James in this book recovers the understanding that as it often quoted “the "medium is the message”. He argues that the Internet is not just an information delivery system that brings us good and bad, but that the format, namely being on a screen, can be deeply distorting for people in the areas of Authenticity, Shame Outrage and Meaninglessness.

Picking up similar themes as “You are What You Love” by James K.A. Smith, he more specifically focuses on the gestures, habits and repetitions that online life creates and asks the question; How is this deforming us as people who seek to follow Jesus.

8. Hannahs Child: A Theologians Memoir by Stanley Hauerwas

Stanley Hauerwas shaped my thinking significantly when I studied in Aberdeen, Scotland. He is a brick-layer son from Texas turned Christian ethicist never truly at home in his own skin and well known for speaking prophetically disruptive truths.

This memoir was deeply enjoyable in that it wove together a good deal of 20th-century theological academic history in North America and identified Hauerwas formations and motivations. He recounts becoming a Christian through being a theologian (quite the admission), and his friendship with MacIntyre, Yoder and others.

His personal life, by his own admission, is a place of deep pain, particularly in the context of his first marriage. What shines through for Haerwas is how God, particularly in the shape of His many friends, upheld his life and as he likes to say, made him possible.

9. Fully Alive: Tending to the Soul in Turbulent Times by Elizabeth Oldfield

Elizabeth Oldfield writes as the previous head of UK Christian Think Thank Theos and a broadcaster who is bringing to bear in this book her experience of holding a winsome witness in the echelons of the secular elite.

I genuinely enjoyed reading this book, especially given much of her formative Christian experiences happened in the corners of British Christianity similar to my own. The book is a kind of 21st-century apologetic for the presence of what Christians have called ‘Sin’ continuing to exist in the world despite most secularists pretending like it doesn’t exist.

Each chapter investigates one of the original seven deadly sins and reveals its abiding presence and significance in modern life. I did enjoy reading this book (despite some bad language and eyebrow-raising disclosures in the chapter on sex) and while, from what I can tell, it has enjoyed quite a bit of success, it felt like a book caught in the middle between two potential audiences. I felt that I’d feel a bit bashful to recommend it to friends of faith but also to friends exploring faith. This admittedly may be simply due to the circles I am in.

10. The Gift of Being Yourself - David Benner

I’ve read this before, but it really is a book that keeps on giving. At just over 100 pages Benner has written a classic on vocational discernment. The title though, makes it sound like Benner has written a floppy “be your best self” book but early on he ruggedly asserts that we can only come to know ourselves in knowing God.

There is a knotty issue in discipleship where, we might say, a level of self-awareness is a crucial ingredient and yet that self-awareness must be obtained through God-awareness not self-referential navel-gazing. He unpacks in this book the need to dispense with a false self, which, while not biblical language, gives us an imagination for the aspects of ourselves that we “present to the world”.

He argues that only after this has been put away in favour of the love of God can we give ourselves up and therefore find our lives as they are, hidden in Christ.

11. Paul: An Apostles Journey by Douglas Campbell

Douglas Campbell is a likeable yet bombastic kiwi Pauline scholar who is a proponent of the biblical studies movement “apocalyptic Paul” which emphasises the themes of overcoming powers and principalities, as well as how revolutionary to Jewish expectations (apocalyptic, in fact) Jesus’ incarnation, death and resurrection was.

Here Campbell explores Paul’s biography from Acts into the letter attributed to Paul. Campbel reflects on how we approach mission (from Campbell’s prison ministry experiences and referencing Paul’s words about His own approach) which was the most engaging for me (including the important issue of patron-client relationships). He also covers the issue of sex, gender and politics.

I’ll be re-reading NT Wright’s biography of Paul and am interested to see how they relate and compare given they hold contrasting views on Paul’s timeline and emphasis.

12. How God became King by NT Wright

This is Wright at his most accessible in asserting that the gospels are all about how Jesus became King. Wright argues that while the early church was concerned with the creeds to affirm that Jesus was not only human but God, whereas the gospels are concerned that we understand Jesus as Israel and ultimately the world’s true King.

Crucial to the gospels is Jesus’ enthronement not in earthly power but on a cross and then resurrected. This reveals the true nature of God’s power as sacrificial rather than “lording it over” His people. Wright also shows how Jesus’ incarnation reframes the Jewish expectation of the temple and our expectations of how to “get to” God by picking up the temple theme and asserting that He is now the place to see what God looks like.

While Wright pulls on one end of the rhetorical rope fairly hard as he tends to do and is popular for, but with that said, I wouldn’t hesitate to pass this on to someone looking to understand the gospels in their first-century context.

13. Why the Gospel?: Living the Good News of King Jesus with Purpose by Matthew W. Bates

Last year I read Bates’ Salvation by Allegiance alone and interviewed him for our Teleios group. We used sections of this book to consider how faith as an allegiant life responding to Jesus reshapes how we understand sharing the gospel.

Put simply, the gospel is an invitation to a whole life which is shaped by being a follower of Jesus not just an affirmation of intellectual belief. Bates here side steps (or back steps) the reformation controversies around what it means to be saved and connects it much more deeply to Jesus’ initial invitation to “come and follow me as King”.

14. James by Percival Everett

Almost 20 years ago while I was working a mind-numbing office job I found a free ebook called The Adventure of Huckleberry Finn. In my upbringing in the UK, I was never exposed to what a cornerstone of American literature this book was but read and enjoyed it on its own terms.

The original story’s main character is Huck, who is accompanied by a runaway slave he refers to as Jim. James is a book written from the perspective of “Jim” or as we come to know him “James”.

The book is clearly the work of a world-class writer operating at the highest level. I devoured the book in the course of a long-haul flight and it is well worth a read, especially if you’re familiar with Huck Finn.

Everett in writing the book creates impressive twists and backstories that the original novel doesn’t move near. My only hesitation in the book was the anachronistic stretches of James’ life behind the eyes of his white counterparts. The idea that James is a deeply literate pretend Christian but true atheist organising groups seemed like it was as much a mechanism of projection as the difficult aspects of Mark Twain’s novel. With that aside, there is much to reflect on when you read and consider these narratives side by side.

15. Bitter Lemons of Cyprus by Lawrence Durrell

This year Rachel and I visited Cyprus for the first time, hosted by some dear friends, we helped lead a Teleios intensive there and then returned to be part of another training.

In our preparation, we quickly discovered a political divide that runs through the centre of the capital that dates back to the 1970’s. Wanting to gain more of an appreciation for the land we would spend time in, I happened upon Lawrence Durrell’s account of living there leading up to the explosion of tension which resulted in the division.

Durrell’s account is winsome, albeit given its age, colonial but his love for the country and its people nevertheless shines through.

16. The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak

I read this book on our second trip and it deals much more directly with the time of the conflict itself. It dramatises the story of Turkish and Greek teenagers being caught up in the conflict and is told partly through the narrative of their daughter finding themselves navigating life in the UK.

The Father is a botanist who has brought a tree from Cyprus to the UK and is filled with fascinating facts about Cyprus’ nature alongside the heartbreak of political and cultural conflicts made personal. It is a beautifully written book and captures the complexity of Cyprus’ modern history.

17. Keeping Faith: How Organisations Can Stay True to the Way of Jesus by Stephen Judd, John Swinton and Kara Martin

For many years I have felt the tension of being involved in, and observing other, Christian organisations learn more about how they operate from the corporate business world than from the gospels.

I very much hoped this book would represent a corrective to that and in many ways it does do that. It’s a book that looks at the very practical challenges of running organisations and thinking about how not to cower to financial and impersonal pressures but to care for people.

What let the book down (at least for me) was that despite being co-written by 3 authors it was never really clear who was writing what. Secondly, the examples given were based in Australia which made the book feel too located to recommend to others working in a different area of the world.

18. Heaven and Earth by William H. Willimon

Will Willimon is a methodist preacher who is best known for co-writing Resident Aliens with Stanley Hauerwas. I bought this as an Advent accompaniment and despite my reservations below, I enjoyed his reflections. Initially, Rachel and I intended to read together but I continued alone after she abandoned it feeling like it was too dry for her.

While this is a fair critique, I think the main challenge with a book that revolves around a liturgical season was the length of the chapters. It could have easily been broken up into smaller parts and sometimes the reflections felt like they dragged. It’s not a book I’d recommend widely for that reason as well as the fact the content (likely drawn from his extensive sermon archive) targets his home audience (educated elite North Americans) as a chaplain at Duke University.

19. Rooted In Love by Margaret Blackie

I mentioned in my introduction that reading those who are not from your ‘corner’ of Christianity can be hugely refreshing. I read Blackie’s book (which let’s face it should win the prize for worst cover) on a retreat and found her gracious introduction to understanding the Ignatian stream of Christianity very helpful.

As a Roman Catholic contemplative of course there are places I would want to adjust or nuance her language but the combination of vulnerability, history and simplicity made this book a great invitation for just the kind of retreat I was engaged in.

20. The Connected Life: The Art and Science of Relational Spirituality by Todd W. Hall

Over the last 10 years I have, through reading the likes of Curt Thomson, been convinced that the path of discipleship is a path of integration. A love for truth includes the truth of scripture, Jesus as Lord and also the truth of our lives and relationships.

An overly intellectual faith holds truth as an intellectual concept which never touches earth, this results in split lives which leak out in depression, moral failure and deconstruction.

In this book Todd Hall attempts to integrate psychological understandings of connection so that we are relationally engaged with the God we know in Jesus Christ. He makes connections around attachment behaviours and the resulting relationship with have with God and others and makes the case that, in my words not his, to be Spiritual is to be relational.

21. Introducing Radical Orthodoxy: Mapping a Post-secular Theology by James K.A. Smith

You could be forgiven for never having heard of the theological movement of Radical Orthodoxy. Its main proponents are John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock and Graham Ward, they argue that large swathes of Christian thinking have fallen into the sacred / secular divide and seek to articulate a theological vision which moves beyond modern and post-modern approaches.

What is particularly fascinating about the movement as Smith represents it is the ontology of participation. It is the radical affirmation that true knowing only takes place when it is inhabited by God’s life. It’s the ultimate pushback on Descartes “I think therefore I am”. While this kind of subject may seem like the ultimate philosophical abstraction, it has huge implications for Christians in how and by what means we “know” what we “know”. If the grounding of all our “knowing” of Jesus is simply asserting a truth claim, we will have deeply deficient discipleship.

22. Diamonds, Gold, and War: The British, the Boers, and the Making of South Africa by Martin Meredith

This book covers the period of colonial British exploits in South Africa, focussing on Cyril Rhodes and other mining magnets who made their fortune in the 1800’s. It leads up to the period of the Anglo-Boer War and covers the history of modern-day Botswana and Zimbabwe. It primarily details the tensions between the British and Afrikaans peoples struggling for supremacy, power and freedom. At over 500 pages this was not short but drawing from personal letters and public documents Meredith puts together the complicated and often contriving actions motivated by a desire for power, national supremacy and wealth.

It once again reveals the history of South Africa as a place of deep suffering, certainly for the original black inhabitants but also for the horrendous treatment of Boer families in the war by the British. The Boer politicians were motivated by a desire for independence but also a deep Christian Nationalism which created a skewed self-understanding as a chosen race and new Israel. This, alongside the paternalism of rampant British colonialism, created the sub-structures which led to the horrors of Apartheid.

If you’ve made it this far, then Well done!

These yearly reviews are quite a lot of work! I always hope to write them as I go through the year, but alas, I end up facing the task at the beginning of a new year. I have to say that my reading this year left me dissatisfied. Maybe because I was reading to build curriculum which makes me read instrumentally but already this year I’ve been enjoying chewing on a few books which have felt like good kingdom marrow. I’ll mention them in the next Lectio. If you want to receive that, you can get 50% off through the button below

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As I said in the beginning, I’d love to hear if you have a book you’d highly recommend.. or a question about the books I reviewed leave a comment below;

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The next Lectio will be out in a couple of weeks, full of music, food, reading and link suggestions along with an article from me, and should be slightly shorter than this one..

Grace and Peace,

That’s all for now,

Liam

Advent is the season that, when properly understood, does not flinch from the darkness that stalks us all in this world. Advent begins in the dark and moves toward the light—but the season should not move too quickly or too glibly, lest we fail to acknowledge the depth of the darkness.

— Fleming Rutledge

Waiting is not a very popular attitude. Waiting is not something that people think about with great sympathy. In fact, most people consider waiting a waste of time. Perhaps this is because the culture in which we live is basically saying, "get going! Do something! Show you were able to make a difference!… For many people, waiting is an awful desert between where they are and where they want to go. And people do not like such a place. They want to get out of it by doing something.”

— Henri Nouwen

Welcome to Issue #89 of the Lectio Letter. This members-only newsletter is filled with music, film and food suggestions, links, and an article written by yours truly.

This time I’m sharing an Advent reflection before returning to the series I began on the nature of modern missions (if you missed the first one, you can read it here).

As I looked through the articles I’ve written on the Lectio, the theme of Advent has come up quite a bit including being the topic of the very first Lectio article.

But here, I’m reflecting on Advent’s invitation to be part of a Bigger Story where God is the main character, not us. As you can discern from the title, I’m seeking to be a little provocative this time around.

But if you’re interested in more of an introduction to Advent here are some of the things I’ve written before;

Lectio #21 | Why are we Waiting

Lectio #38 | Happy New Year Christians | Advent Part 1

Lectio #39 | The World is getting undressed | Advent Part 2

Lectio #40 | Who has the time to wait to become Citizens? | Advent Part 3

Lectio #41 | Learning from Mary that Hope takes Practise | Advent Part 4

Lectio #78 | How Does Hope Mature | An Advent Reflection on John the Baptist

This post is available to all subscribers, if you’d like to support my work or read any of the ‘members-only’ posts then feel free to use this 30% off link for a year subscription

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Life

December is a strange mix of crazily busy to a sudden slow down here in South Africa.

In the Southern Hemisphere, we are in full-blown summer while still singing songs and sending cards which speak of dark nights and snow. A strange world indeed.

But South Africans do know how to make the most of this yearly coordinated shutdown. Unlike the UK where people tend to take a handful of days off, South Africans take at least 2 weeks and, it can seem sometimes like 2 full months. Cape Town receives a mass migration both internal, domestic and international which makes going anywhere a little bit of a headache if everyone wasn’t feeling so darn festive.

After 14 years of 30°c windy Christmas’ on the beach, we’ve gotten used to it (sort of). At this point, I’d rather keep the sub-minus temperatures immortalised in the songs and cards and keep a summer Christmas on the beach.

Last week we ran our yearly Christmas party. It’s become a tradition to do something exciting related to water (slides, games etc.) and this year was no different. Mid-December here though is still a bit fickle and is comparable to something like May or June in the Northern Hemisphere where you get 4 good days with a sudden cold snap.

Well, we had rented everything and bought the food only to discover that our water fight Christmas party was the rainiest day of December. Kids being kids though loved it all the same, we had an hour’s break from the rain where they all gladly enjoyed the water slide and then warmed up with boerwoers rolls (sausage sandwich kind of thing) and a Christmas story.

This is also Rachel’s Birthday month and we had a great day borrowing a friend’s moped and heading into the Cape Point Nature Reserve where we found a tidal pool and unexpectedly some friends who lent us snorkel gear to explore the rock pool there.

Counterintuitively, the water around Cape Town on the Atlantic side gets much colder in the summer. The predominant south-east winds blow the shallow surface water, which is warmed by the sand, back out to sea revealing sea temperatures of as low as 9-10c. Quite a contrast on a 30°c day! But we haven’t yet had a sustained week of strong southeast winds so the water has been beautifully temperate.

While squeezing me for good Christmas gift ideas (because apparently, you can only have so many surfboards and wetsuits), I suggested to Rachel that I’d enjoy taking a guided snorkel in the kelp forests in False Bay by a local guide here. The local guide however was off to Antarctica to lead an expedition over Christmas and so only had slots in these last weeks of December. It was an incredible revelation to see what is below you after so many years bobbing on the surface on fibreglass. I’m very grateful to my parents-in-law and brother and sister-in-law for early gifting the fun of it all and to Luke for joining!

Reading

I’ve been reading Heaven and Earth—Advent and the Incarnation by Will Willimon, who wrote Resident Aliens with Hauerwas (whom I mentioned in the last edition). It’s been good to read, if not somewhat inevitably North American in its tone and examples. Rachel’s honest take is that she found it quite dry, but I enjoyed it.

I’ve also been reading Kiwi Duke NT Professor Douglas Campbell’s “Paul: An Apostles Journey”. Academic New Testament studies is not really my home turf (as ironic as that may sound to those not acquainted with the highlight-segregated world of academic theology departments) but this has, so far, been a well-written and interesting take on Paul’s life. I’m looking forward to re-reading NT Wright’s biography of Paul again next year to see if I can spot their disagreements (which I know about by reputation).

Eating

For many years, on Rachel’s Birthday it’s been hard to beat our local restaurant’s carrot cake. Its delicious and not expensive.

But this year she requested a Danish Dream Cake.

This Danish Dream Cake (or ‘Drømmekage fra Brovst’) originates from Brovst, a village in Jutland. In 1965 a young girl baked her grandmother’s secret family recipe in a competition and won, and the cake has been a favorite of Danes ever since.

— Epicurious

I’m much more confident cooking than baking. The difference to me feel akin to watercolours vs. painting by numbers (not to diminish the virtuoso bakers out there). Simply put, it requires detail and precision, not exactly my strong suit.

But all in all it turned out pretty well and we enthusiastically ate outrageously large slices for the days following.

Ingredients

The Base:

3 eggs

1 cup (225 g) granulated sugar

1⁄2 tsp. vanilla essence

1¾ cups (225 g) all-purpose flour or cake flour

2 tsp. baking powder

2⁄3 cup (150 ml) whole milk

3⁄4 stick (75 g) butter, melted

For the topping:

1 stick (100 g) butter

1½ cups (150 g) dried shredded coconut

1¼ cups (250 g) dark brown sugar

1⁄3 cup (75 ml) whole milk

Pinch salt

Instructions

1. Preheat the oven to 185°F. Prepare a 22cm (9inch) springform or round cake pan, greased and lined with baking paper.

2. In the bowl of a stand mixer, whisk the eggs, granulated sugar and vanilla essence on a high speed for a few minutes, until white and light. Meanwhile, in a separate bowl, sift the flour and baking powder together.

3. Carefully add (fold) the flour into the egg mixture. Mix the milk with the melted butter in a jug/pitcher and carefully pour into the mixer, folding it in until incorporated. Pour the batter into the prepared cake pan.

4. Bake in the preheated oven for 30-35 minutes, or until almost done (try not to open the oven door for the first 20 minutes of the total baking time).

5. To make the topping, put all the ingredients in a saucepan and gently melt together.

6. Remove the cake from the oven and carefully spread the topping all over the cake. Return to the oven. Turn up the heat to and bake for a further 5 minutes (until the top goldens).

7. Leave cake to cool before eating

Listening

It’s the time for Advent and Christmas Carols! We were grateful to join some friends for an Advent celebration at their home recently where they led us in singing “Come thou long expected Jesus” and “O Little Town of Bethlehem”.

I, however, spent most of the time confused as I recognised the tune but couldn’t quite follow it. It occurred to me that on either side of the Atlantic, we use different tunes.

Through a little bit of research, I discovered that the North American tune is actually the oldest written in 1868 (according to Wikipedia), while the Commonwealth version was adapted by composer Ralph Vaughn Williams who collected ‘folk songs’ around the UK.

Here’s the North American tune sung by Nat King Cole;

Given the lifelong presence of these Carols among anyone who has lived in the West in last 50 years, there is a deeply emotionally resonant nostalgia that emerges when one of these tunes is played which ever side of the Atlantic you’re from.

The one below was the tune I was expecting to emerge.

The legend has it that Christmas Carol services originated in Truro, Cornwall where I grew up.

The story goes that on Christmas Eve everybody in Truro would get disgustingly drunk, and that the Bishop of Truro (Benson) was so disgusted that he decided to lure everybody out of the pub and into the church with his new service.

Mark Forsyth - BBC

Carols, which is a word that means to dance around, gives some indication of the roots of it. Most Christmas carols were either formed as drinking songs or at least locally known, folk tunes. In the early 1900s Ralph Vaughn Williams embarked on a project to travel around the UK to collect some of these tunes, without which there is a very high likelihood they would have been lost. Now there are a number of carols which are known by the area where the tune was discovered.

These were local songs that sometimes had roots in the early forms of nativity plays that existed from the Middle Ages onward in the UK.

The Sussex carol is a good example of a ‘locally named’ Carol;

“..the composer Vaughan Williams overheard it being sung by a Mrs Verrall from the nearby village of Monk's Gate (in Sussex) in 1904.”

My favourite of these ‘locally named’ carols is the Herefordshire Carol;

The Herefordshire Christmas Carol, [or]This is the Truth Sent from Above, was one of several folk tunes preserved and popularized by Ralph Vaughan-Williams. In 1909, he transcribed it from Ella Leather, a collector of Herefordshire folk music, who had herself recieved it from a Mr W Jenkins, a folk singer from Kings Pyon.

The text recalls the fall from grace of Adam, and the promise of redemption by Jesus. However, in almost all printed editions (including The Oxford Book of Carols and the ubiquitous Carols for Choirs), several of the verses are missing. The missing text leads to a presumably unintended faux pas, with the second verse ending ‘Woman was made with man to dwell’, and the next verse starting ‘Thus we were heirs to endless woes’!

— Ancient Groove

The full verses are available here and recount the biblical story which gives another inclination to the purpose of these songs. They formed an intentional catechetical basis for the large numbers of illiterate Christians in the early 19th-20th Century.

"The carol was increasingly associated with the poor and illiterate," said Ms Skeaping. Were it not for folk music collectors, such as Williams and Cecil Sharp, who noted and published the songs they found, she believes the carolling tradition may have been lost forever.

— Jenny Scott - BBC

The most famous of these Carols is the Coventry Carol. Its bleak and almost melancholic tune is well deserved, as the story unfolds below.

“…the carol was sung in one of the medieval mystery plays performed in the city each year on the feast of Corpus Christi - the pageant of the shearmen and tailors.

"The plays are first referred to in 1392, with the earliest-known manuscript dating from 1534," she said.

Like many traditional carols, the words have a darker subtext.

"The so-called 'Coventry Carol' comes near the very end of the play, at a highly dramatic moment when the women rock their babes to sleep for fear Herod's soldier will hear them crying and slaughter them,"

— BBC

See the footage above which creates the dark WWII backdrop to what made the song so powerful in the 20th Century;

In Coventry, the carol is sung annually at the cathedral.

"For me, the really special thing about the Coventry Carol is the way it was used in 1940," said David Stone, the canon precentor.

"The cathedral was bombed on 14 November, and on Christmas Day that year the then provost broadcast live on the BBC to the world. His very famous message was that he was trying to forgive those who had done this terrible thing.

"After that, the choir sang the Coventry Carol in the ruins of the old cathedral."

He said the "shadowy" subject matter of the carol made it a particularly appropriate one for Coventry.

"The theme of redemption following suffering is part of the Coventry story," he said. And this is part, he added, of what makes the carol so special.

"It connects with people's lives as they really are," he said.

— BBC

Finally, Advent songs and Christmas Carols are not quite the same thing. Advent is filled with apocalyptic expectation while Christmas is filled with the wonder of incarnation. So for Advent I think Lo! He Comes with Clouds Descending is the best Advent Hymn;

Advent's Good News: Your Life is too Small and You Can't Work Hard Enough

Happy New Year to you! No, this Lectio wasn’t mistakenly sent out before 1st January, because we are in Advent which is the beginning of the Christian Year. 

As I've said before, the way we tell the time shows us what is important to us and God comes every year disguised as Advent to disrupt our way of telling the time. 

The way we tell the time has a story hidden in it about what is important. At this time of year, when most people are coming to the end of their rope, and for those of you in the Northern Hemisphere, the darkest days have begun, God shows up in Advent. 

It’s not quite time yet for the baby in the manger, because the Church observes the Christmas season beginning on the 25th and ending on the 6th of January. But God shows up in Advent in the midst of the deeply human longing for the brokenness of our world and our lives to be set right. 

So much Christian preaching and activity is motivated by an unspoken intuition that God has done something and now it's our turn: Reach the lost, fix your marriage, serve the poor, pray more, give more and work harder. The early church British monk Pelgaius' teaching that “we can do it all ourselves” was roundly condemned as heresy in the 5th Century, yet it seems like the temptation to live that way is perennially human. So Advent is the great rebuke of work ethic, bootstrapping, hustling and hard work.

It preaches to us once again, that we are lost, broken, weary and in the dark and that only God can set things right. Advent teaches us to remember the storyline in the run-up to the first Christmas; The longing of His people, the various creative yet unfruitful strategies of spirituality adopted in the impatience for God to show up (see Herod, Sanhedran and Rome). But Advent highlights the few faithful and simultaneously unimportant people (Simeon, Anna, Zechariah, Elizabeth, Mary, Shepherds among others) to whom God revealed His inbreaking.

If we are honest, everyone is tired from working hard for God and we'd love for Him to show up and just sort it all out. That's why Advent isn't just a remembering of the longing of the Jewish people, it’s about the longing of the human heart for God to set things right and yet God seems to be taking His time, am I right? 

So Advent is a training in patience. It is a recognition that for all the complex mess in our lives and in our wider world only God will do as the healer. Patience, if it was ever easy, has become near impossible with our attention-deficit surroundings, instantaneous messaging and next-day delivery cultures. My friend John said He heard NT Wright say that of all the fruit of the Spirit, patience is the hardest one to fake. I think that is probably right.

Yet Advent is here to tell us that waiting in time is not wasting time. Waiting builds many things into us but the one worth reflecting on in this often frazzled season is the awareness that only God can fix what is broken, only God can shine a light into the darkness. Yes, we participate in that ministry in this time between the times, but it took God to come in the flesh to start this work of redemption and only His return will make it fully new again. So in the meantime, learning to faithfully wait is the primary skill of Christian life. 

Waiting is not as passive as it sounds; there are the muscles of prayer, growth in the gifts and fruit of the Spirit, and trust in God despite what surrounds us. These are the things we are given time for. We are reminded in Advent also, that we are not alone in the waiting. We have ancestors, if you like, people in History who have shown us how to wait; Zechariah, Anna, Elizabeth, Mary, and John as I mentioned before. What each of their stories, which are so often remembered and read in this Advent season is that, the freedom we long for, amongst many other things, is also a freedom from ourselves. 

The Advent story, running into the Christmas story is that God has done, is doing and will do something truly cosmic. It's the good news that your life, your story, does not have to carry the unbearable burden of being significant on its own.

You have been joined to a grander story that, yes, counts you as important, but not more important than God. Rebellion and Redemption are themes of your individual life, yes, but only because you are caught up in a drama much more wonderful than just your individual life. This might strike you as something obvious, even easy to piously affirm but consider the moments when you are in pain or in great need. This reality becomes harder to live in light of. 

In the midst of our deeply felt needs our default mode is to turn into spiritual narcissists. In our broadly narcissistic culture, the Church has been tempted, and often given into, the pressure to make the gospel and the story of God “relevant” to people’s individual lives.

Of course, the inclination to connect the gospel to individual lives is a deeply important one, but the invitation is not to come to Jesus to have your life made better again but to come and lose it. In so doing, you actually find it.

Again, many of our sermons and activities seem predicated on the implicit idea that your singular life is the centre of the Universe and God is reduced to a mere fairy godmother. But Jesus' invitation is to be made free by transcending the claustrophobic constraints of your individual story and its circumstances and to know the liberation of being part of God's story. As we do that, we realise God’s story was the loving context our individual stories most deeply desired all along.

So much Christian unhappiness is quite simply the result of losing perspective. When we think our lives are the centre of the universe, that our worries and pains are worse than others, we have fallen into a lesser story. Advent comes to tell us “Wake Up! God is doing something big, bigger than you, but it catches you up too!”. Yes, this is said with the loving compassion of God, but also with the insistence and urgency of a parent urging their child not to run into traffic. We are reminded to wake up to God’s story, to breathe out our worries, and to breathe in God’s redeeming reality. Only by giving up our fixation on our own individual stories can we be freed to know the joy and liberation of being part of something so much bigger, the Story of the people of God.

I've been on the front row of tragedy, pain and loss enough to know that a human life alone cannot bear the weight of carrying all the truth, reconciliation and redemption that we are promised in the fullness of God's story. God’s love for you is indescribable in its depth, but it is a love that liberates us into a greater hope than simply the circumstances of our lives being fixed here and now.

Advent is here to remind us that our hope is in something greater than our circumstances being changed. The Hope that God gives is the hope of the people of God throughout history. A people who are not looking for the fulfilment of the good life now, but "looking for the city which has foundations, whose architect and builder is God" (Heb 11). Our circumstances, our individual lives, are not a big enough canvas to perceive the work of redemption at play which Advent announces and Christmas is the foretaste of. 

This Advent, zoom out with me to the big picture of what God is doing and be freed from the life you were called to lose anyway and refuse to be offended at the God who never offered to be your divine vending machine. The high point of Spiritual maturity is self-forgetfulness. Even in pain and loss, we can lift our eyes, trust in God and refuse the worry and spiritual narcissism that weigh us down. Jesus promises us that if you want to save your own life, you will lose it; but if you lose your life for His sake, you will find it.

May that be true for you this Advent.

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That’s all for now…

"Unfortunately, evangelicals in mission still tend to proceed as though their major problems are methodological. They are not. They are theological.”

— David J. Hesselgrave

"Identifying the gospel is both simple and challenging. No culture-free expression of the gospel exists, nor could it. The church's message, the gospel, is inevitability articulated in linguistic and cultural forms particular to its own place and time.

— George R. Huntsburger

Welcome to Issue #88 of the Lectio Letter. This members-only newsletter is filled with music, film and food suggestions, links, and an article written by yours truly.

Some of you might think I’ve picked a strange title for this edition of the Lectio Letter. Many of you probably know of us as people you would describe as missionaries! If that’s you, then you exist in a world where that word makes sense to you. It might even be hard to imagine that the word evokes deep resentment in others.

In this article, I’m exploring how western churches engaging in local mission, the increase of secular narratives and the history of African colonialism creates complications for us when we use the name ‘missionary’.

All of that said, I am deeply committed to the work of God’s mission in the world, but I am not committed to define myself as a ‘missionary’ when it closes more doors than it opens.

But if you get to the end of this edition and feel like “I don’t know what all the big fuss is about”, then grace to you. You live in a world where the word “missionary” makes sense and that’s no bad thing.

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“Discipleship and spiritual formation are less about erecting an edifice of knowledge than they are a matter of developing a Christian know-how that intuitively understands the world in light of the Gospel.”

― James K.A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom

“The mind is divided, like a rider on an elephant, and the rider’s job is to serve the elephant. The rider is our conscious reasoning-the stream of words and images of which we are fully aware. The elephant is the other 99 percent of mental processes-the ones that occur outside of awareness but that actually govern most of our behavior.”

— Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind

Dear Faithful readers of the Lectio letter,

This issue was written from a predominantly Muslim nation where I was involved in a gathering of people working in the kind of places you go to prison for proclaiming your faith in Jesus.

It's deeply humbling, exciting and inspiring to hear of the kind of work that is seeing God's Kingdom come to earth in places that our news cycles portray as hopeless and broken.

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Welcome to Issue #87 of the Lectio Letter. This members-only newsletter is filled with music, film and food suggestions, links, and an article written by yours truly.

This time around, I’m reflecting on the nature of decision-making. Our tendency is to think the source of a good decision should come from our hearts or our heads. But I’m trying to offer some practical thoughts on how there may be a better way. That way, is inevitably, to become the kind of person who makes good and Godly decisions.

I hope it’s helpful to you!

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As I mentioned in my apologetic intro, we have been on the road again.

While it was a delight to see many friends and co-workers, we are honestly even more delighted to be back in South Africa with no near-term trips planned. It’s been a rich but exhausting 6 months. We’ve been on 26 flights, 8 of those being 10 1/2 hours each… I’ve been using a new app Flighty to keep track of the nerdy stats;

Our most recent trip was to take part in some meetings which involved those working in the Middle East. Some of our Teleios participants from Lebanon were with us and so we were tracking with them and praying for their families and teams still in the country. There is heartbreak, resilience and extraordinary mission and service taking place amid everything you read on the news. While I cannot share details here, we also heard of incredible first-hand stories of thousands of people coming to Jesus in some of the most closed nations on earth along with the heartbreak of imprisonment and people having to flee the nations they have called home.

Reading

I’ve begun reading a book by Alan Jacobs “The Year of Our Lord 1943” which is truly an extraordinary book. The book draws on the work and life of five Christian intellectuals working at a time when they knew the Allies would win the war and began imagining what it would mean to form an education system that created people who could thoughtfully and emphatically resist the temptations which led to WWII. It’s a great introduction to Jacques Maritain, T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, W. H. Auden, and Simone Weil if you are not aware of them, woven together in an extremely creative way which, as I suspect is intended, enables us to think about how to form people and culture towards a vision of Christian goodness.

I also began ‘listening’ to the audiobook of Fully Alive by British author Elizabeth Oldfield who used to work with Theos, whose work I admire. It is a very good book which is openly toted as a follow-up to the widely cited book “Unapologetic” by adult convert Francis Spufford.

Both books employ a straight-talking, swear-word-using approach to being “relevant” or “authentic” and convincing non-Christian readers that they are not trying to gloss over the intellectual challenges of following Jesus in the modern age.

While I want to heartily endorse the book because so many of the struggles, history and cultural situatedness of Oldfield’s world mirror my own, I couldn't help but feel the book was more Christian than most atheists I know would be willing to engage but also more crass than many of the Christians I do know would enjoy. I’m disappointed to have to say anything negative about a book whose approach and topic I enthusiastically endorse otherwise.

Eating

On a recent visit with our friends Freddie and Hannah, they made the closest thing I’ve ever tasted to restaurant-quality Dashi. Dashi is the base for Japanese Udon Soup, and despite Japanese cooking being filled with unusual ingredients for most Western home cooks, this soup is deceptively simple…as long as you can get the right ingredients. Our favourite Udon spot in London, Koya, is now making “at home” kits and their fresh udon makes all the difference.

For the below, we found Kombu (dried Japanese seaweed) and Bonito (dried tuna flakes) in an Asian food store, but I’m confident you could find them online in the US/UK too.

Ingredients:

15g Kombu

15g Bonito

24g soy sauce

12g mirin

35g sugar

10g salt

Process

1.⁠ ⁠Soak 15g kombu overnight (or several hours is fine) in 1.5 litres of water.

2.⁠ ⁠Then take out the kombu, bring liquid to boil and add 15g bonito, turn off the heat and strain bonito flakes out to make a liquid broth.

3.⁠ ⁠⁠Place mirin in microwave for one minute or heat in a pan.

4.⁠ ⁠Add 15g sugar to mirin and mix until dissolved.

5.⁠ ⁠Add mirin, soy sauce and half the amount of salt into the dashi and bring to boil.

6.⁠ ⁠Once almost boiling, taste and see if you’d like more salt and season to your liking, and keep aside.

For the udon, we used the cheap packaged variety we could find in South Africa, although as I mentioned above, the fresh stuff from Koya if you are in the UK, will make this sing.

There are a variety of ways to top this by combining certain recipes. We tried this one from NYTimes Cooking, but the Beef toughened up too quickly in the mixture of liquid.

Listening

British Jazz Quartet Ezra Collective at the German music channel Colors

Moody Indie sounds from Mk.Gee

Background Piano delights from “Mammal Hands”

Still on repeat is Sampha’s Dancing Circles 2.0

Decisions, Decisions, Decisions

I recently attended a meeting where a Christian leader was training younger leaders on decision-making within ministry teams. The training was aimed at helping these young leaders approach decisions more thoughtfully and reflectively, rather than reacting impulsively. 

While this approach to slowing down decisions to make them more intentionally seems common sense, when you try to put it into practice in real life it suddenly becomes impossible and you can end up paralysed.

Don’t Overthink your decisions

We live in a world overflowing with choices, both big and small, and my contention is that many of these decisions should be happening automatically. 

Take driving, for example a novice driver has to think about every action, while a skilled driver operates almost instinctively.

The skill we need flows from the kind of person who through an immersion in the scriptures, an attentiveness to the Holy Spirit and a yielded posture to the will of God can interrupt our intuitive decision-making when it counts. 

We need to know when we can operate in everyday freedom but develop an underlying attentiveness when a decision needs more reflection.

Become the kind of person who makes good Godly decisions

So the right question is how do we become this kind of person? 

A person who has enough latent biblical wisdom, enough of an ability to abide in the vine and enough self-awareness to know whether or not we are yielded to God’s will above all? 

As you might imagine, I don’t think there is a single pathway to becoming this kind of person. The classic disciplines of broad scripture reading, examen and indifference can certainly help. There are good descriptions of those practices available in other places online, so for now I will simply offer three questions which represent each of them;

1. Do you spend time across the breadth of scripture, not just your favourite verses or books? And have you worked to gain a coherent understanding of the “big story” of scripture?

2. How often are you attentive to and able to be interrupted by a sense of the Holy Spirit directing, guiding, assuring or convicting you?

3. How aware are you of the themes in your preferences and personality or the values of your family and national culture and how they could become blockages to hearing God direct and value something different?

Counterintuitively, if we want to speed up our Godly decision-making, there may be a season of radically slowing it down. 

At the stage where we are still learning to make decisions in light of our commitment to the ways of Jesus, we may need to overly distrust our gut-level intuitions in order to receive some new ones. 

I've heard of people in the early stages of following Jesus seeking guidance about which car park space to take, which colour T-shirt to buy and other such things. While this is an admittedly quirky practice and because of the insignificance of those things, not something I’d recommend long term, they have helped people grow in friendship and attentiveness to the guidance of the Holy Spirit. 

Rational or Romantic?

Without growing in an attentiveness to the wisdom contained in the scriptures, an attentiveness to the ongoing guidance of the Holy Spirit and a deep yieldedness to the way of Jesus we will likely fall into one of two tendencies that are baked into our worldview. 

These two tendencies run through the current of our modern age because they were developed in our history as two important movements of Western thought. They are Romanticism and Rationalism. 

Romanticism promoted the idea that we are disconnected from ourselves, and disconnected from “deep insights of the heart” by the “oppressive” structures of society. In its most extreme forms, it gets expressed through the ethic of "You do you". 

Romanticism says to follow your heart and make the decisions which seem mostly deeply true for you disregarding the potentially oppressive opinions of others. 

While the most extreme forms of this are easy for Christians to resist, there is a more subtle form that exists and is even encouraged by certain approaches to attempt to discern or decide Christian-ly. 

Christians can rely on a sense of 'peace' or a gut intuition that something is right. I've seen Christians trust these senses without really being aware that the Bible has something to say about it which goes in the other direction. Those of us who are from the charismatic movement in Christianity are most in danger of this kind of error.

The other movement is Rationalism. Rationalism emerged through a deep conviction that truth could be known through facts and that very often our affection and emotions lead us astray. 

The goal then, is to dispassionately observe the facts and make a decision. This is offered as a 'fix' for the above tendency of romanticism but it is just as wrong. While it distrusts the passions and emotions of human life, it has a faulty view of how humans were made by God to live as I explore above. We are not meant to, and cannot, in fact, be rationally 'on' all the time. 

Our intuitions and emotions, our 'loves' as Saint Augustine spoke of them, are always acting on us. The idea that we bypass our hearts with our heads is simply not how God has made humans to function. 

Most significantly, neither the romantic nor rational impulse includes God Himself in decision-making. Christians are called to follow a person, not a principle. Rationalism in Christianity devolves into rule-following and romanticism devolves into following feelings rather than following Jesus. 

The person leading the training I mentioned in the introduction asked us to write down how we make decisions.

In the spirit of “showing your work,” here’s what I wrote down. While the nature of the decision might change what I’ve written significantly, so I make so claim for this to be exhaustive, I believe it captures some important elements.

How I Make a Decision

1. Am I aware of my bias? Am I truly yielded to whatever God wants in this situation or do I have a strong preference rooted in my culture’s values or personality preference?

2. Is there clear biblical guidance? Consider if there are any Scriptural stories which provide insight into this decision.

3. Assess your biblical literacy. Recognize your strengths and involve others who may fill any gaps in your understanding.

4. If Scripture is clear, discern how and when to be faithful to that. Even when the scriptures are clear, in every decision, context matters. Consult with others and the Holy Spirit about how and when to act.

5. Stay connected to God. Ensure you remain open to His guidance not just in the decision but in the ‘living out’ of that decision, relying on your relationship with Him rather than a set of principles.

6. Consider others affected by the decision. Even if you have the authority to decide alone, aim to foster loving relationships and ideally input with those who will be impacted by the decision.

7. If there's no clear biblical precedent, wait for direction. Spend time in prayer, seeking the Holy Spirit’s leading.

8. Examine your desires. Reflect on the motivations behind your preferences and involve others who can help clarify them.

9. Think implications through. Consider whether you can accept the outcomes and how they may impact those you love or your existing commitments.