I love teaching in leadership training contexts. One of my favourite things to do in those contexts over recent years has been to throw out this discussion question and to see the looks on people’s faces: ‘If three people love each other and agree to enter into a committed, sexual relationship with each other, what’s wrong with that?’ Responses vary, but laughter is probably the most common response. Some laugh because it’s something they think is so unlikely it’s comical. Others laugh because they feel a bit nervous, unsure of how to answer. But it’s a question I think we Christians – and ..read more

In an election in which there was no party for which I wanted to vote, my personal opinion was that the least worst result would be a Labour victory with a small majority. This would have allowed the change of government the country needs but with sufficient challenge for it not to be able to steamroller all decisions. Clearly that was not the outcome. So what next? Apart from the big issues of economics, foreign policy, climate change and so on, issues on which faithful Christians can legitimately disagree, what of some of the social issues? Thinking from the perspective of a Christian pasto ..read more

Two weeks’ time and there will be a new government in the UK. I’m still not sure how I will vote (‘None of the above’ feels the most attractive option) but regardless of the outcome there are increasing ethical complexities coming down the tracks which pastors should be alert to. Beginning of life issues I’ve been writing about the problems with IVF on Think for years but it still doesn’t seem to be an issue that enough pastors have grappled with. A developing complexity is that of polygenic screening. Increasingly, parents – at least those who can afford it – will be able to screen their emb ..read more

Aaron Renn's concept of the "negative world" has never sat right with me, although that may just be because I'm not American. If you're new to it, the idea is that there have been three stages in secularisation: the positive world (up to 1994), where society at large has a positive view of Christianity; the neutral world (1994-2014), where Christianity is neither privileged nor disfavoured; and the negative world (2014-present), where being a Christian is a clear social negative, especially among elites. No doubt some of my scepticism comes from my own experience, in which Christianity was de ..read more

Ten years ago I wrote an essay reflecting on the events of twenty years before that: the ‘Toronto Blessing’, or ‘Present move of the Spirit’ of 1994. And here we are, ten years on from that essay and thirty years from 1994. (I appreciate there will be many readers of this blog too young to have any idea of what I am talking about!) In that previous essay I raised questions as to the extent that our spiritual experiences are conditioned by the culture in which we live. To what extent were the phenomena of 1994 a reflection of wider cultural currents of the time? Ten years on from those questio ..read more

Your body matters. That’s something I expect most readers of Think already know. There has been a surge of interest in the theology of the body in recent years, and for good reason: the prominence of various body-related topics in contemporary western culture has highlighted the need for us to think more deeply about bodies and what it means to be human. Many of us will have reflected on the goodness of our bodies; that as the creation of a good creator they can speak to us both about how we should live (ethics) and who we are (identity). And that they are core to what it means to be human, n ..read more

This is a guest post from Jonny Mellor A few years ago, the American pastor and theologian Tim Keller wrote, The Church needs artists because without art we cannot reach the world. That’s quite a bold statement and a bit of a curveball for most of us. Art is a strange thing. Most people have an intuition that it is somehow important but almost nobody can articulate why! In fact, it’s quite hard to even define what art is. So, for most of us, art is regarded as rather peripheral and extravagant. The cherry, or at the most the icing, but certainly not the cake! So, why would a sensible fellow ..read more

As US electoral politics rumbles on in its current ugly form, one issue of significance is 'Christian Nationalism'. This, like its equal and opposite 'woke', is a term frequently used but not always properly understood. The team I serve on that gives a lead to the Advance movement of churches, asked Bryan Hart, from One Harbor Church in North Carolina, to write a paper for us exploring the subject. Bryan has done an outstanding job and while this paper was written primarily for the benefit of our movement it deserves wider circulation. For those in the States the subject has immediate and obv ..read more

"The first thing one must know about nihilism as a philosophical and cultural reality," says James Davison Hunter in Democracy and Solidarity, "is that it is not one thing. Rather, it is a cluster of themes that follow from the 'death of God' - or, more accurately, the death of all 'god-terms' - that for most of human history established within the cosmology and culture of societies certain ultimate, transcendent, and universal conceptions of truth, value and purpose." He lists them as follows: 1) Epistemological failure: the recognition that there are now no objective, knowable truths; that ..read more

"Identity groups are, in effect, compensatory," explains James Davison Hunter in his fascinating (if somewhat depressing) book Democracy and Solidarity. In the context of the late modern society that Hunter is describing, such groups represent - “a means to power and influence in a world that has rendered average citizens powerless of the conditions of their existence, - an assertion of distinctiveness in a world that tends to flatten or level all meaningful differences, - the possibility for meaningful belief and purpose in a world that denies ultimate meaning and renders most beliefs a matt ..read more