What Steve Jobs Taught Us About Beauty

My friends know that, for good or ill, I am neither technically oriented nor have much appreciation of pop music. Yet I was very interested when a friend recently showed me a tribute to Steve Jobs from Bono. I do know that Apple computer owners from the very beginning have loved their machines and were loyal [...]

Only God Transforms; Only God Deserves the Glory

“Transformation” is a current hot topic in the church and in missiological circles. In general Christian usage, the concept reflects a movement from darkness to light – from individual and societal brokenness caused by sin toward the healing of that brokenness. This healing expresses itself in the relative presence of God’s Shalom – relative to [...]

The Ideas we inherit – and the things we are passing on

Stalin famously said ‘ideas are more powerful than guns’.  Ideas change our thinking and as our thinking changes, so does our behavior and our actions. Recently I have been looking back at times in history when business and mission have been connected. Although the term ‘business as mission’ is a fairly new one, there have [...]

God plus ordinary people = impact

Over the years I have been struck by the fact that God inhabits the ordinary. The birth of a child is an everyday miracle. God often uses unknown people to change their community or world. Dallas Willard captures this concept in The Divine Conspiracy: “The obviously well kept secret of the ‘ordinary’ is that it [...]

Lose the faith – lose the culture

I was in a reception line for a charity in Sydney a little while ago and people were filing past and politely saying ‘hello’ to the heads of the charity and then to my wife and then to me, and a very charming and gracious elder lady from a prosperous area of Sydney, immaculately dressed [...]

Is cultural engagement biblical?

We’ve all seen the misguided claims of some nationalist groups that one particular nation or other in the world today is “God’s country,” or the dubious claim that one specific political system such as democracy, or a specific economic system such as socialism or capitalism, is God’s universal pattern for humankind. Throughout history, and the [...]

One tract, one verse and village transformed

Thirty years ago, Yong Am was one of South Korea’s poorest villages. It offered no school for the children and no jobs for the adults. Today, a typical small farmer earns over $60,000 per year and the Christian impact that brought such change has spread to India. Photo by Arvind Balaraman at freedigitalphotos.net The transformation [...]

What does God require of us

We are involved in a ministry within Fiji called Homes of Hope which is a refuge for female victims of Sexual Exploitation & Sex Trafficking. Our target group are teenage or young adult girls who have become single mothers as a result of rape, incest or enforced prostitution. Most of our residents are victims of [...]

“Doesn’t Wholism Just Send Well-fed, Clothed People to Hell?”

That assertion is sometimes made of a comprehensive approach to Christian ministry such as taught by the DNA. At one level, this is a straw-man argument, an attack of a caricature of wholism. The DNA is not among those who promote feeding the hungry while ignoring their spiritual dimension. But there’s another level to this [...]

Community transformation – reflections from Africa

How many Africans does it take to change a community? And no, this is not a joke. In fact I might go as far as asking, how many Africans does it take to change a nation? If you were to ask Nelson Mandela you might hear him say “one”. But then on reflection he might [...]

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