Let The Young Man Come To Church With Mixed Motives 'There is no abstract, almost Platonic – and therefore more noble – way in which to come to Jesus. People come for all sorts of mixed motives. And our confidence should be that as they do come with their mixed motives, we will point them to Jesus in such a way that he will reform their desires and motives.' Reforming Generosity  'In my experience, it is common to hear church leaders tell their congregation that their generosity will change the world.

Whilst we have quite some way to go before reaching the high water mark of an integrated London transport system, The Bee Network in Manchester keeps growing positively. Yesterday, Andy Burnham announced the first trains to be included in the network. This is the next step towards a fully integrated transport system across Greater Manchester that includes, buses, trams and train. You can read the story here such as you are interested in it. My reason for sharing this isn't to laud the great strides being made in local transport. That is kind of exciting for us, but not so much for anybody else.

Some minor good news landed yesterday. The Guardian report that traffic to pornographic websites has fallen in the UK since age verification checks were brought in. You can read the story in The Guardian here. They report: Ofcom said the enforcement of age vetting on 25 July led to an immediate fall in visits to popular online porn publishers, including the most visited provider in the UK, Pornhub. The regulator said visitor numbers to Pornhub in August were 9.8 million, a decline of 1.5 million compared with the same period in 2024.

It is a paedobaptist charge that Baptists refuse to baptise children. They sometimes throw around the misnomer 'adult baptism'. It is true that all Baptists refuse to baptise infants and it is similarly true that Baptists will also baptise adults (as, incidentally, do paedobaptists). It is certainly true that some Baptists will refuse to baptise children. But this is a point of Baptist contention. Are the true candidates for baptism professing believers who have reached some 'age of responsibility', professing believers who are completely free of parental authority or simply those who have credibly professed faith in Christ?

As long time readers will know, I very much like Christmas. I know being a scrooge, a grinch and a bit of a misery might seem on brand, but if you think it is so, shows what you know! I love Christmas. However, as long time readers will know, I am not a wild fan of an over-Christmassed church. For me, Christmas is a largely cultural festival. It is not in the bible, it is not a command of Christ and it is no measure of your spirituality. We celebrate Christmas in this country at all because our history and culture is so enmeshed with the church calendar.

Yesterday, I had the privilege of baptising two young girls. Both go to the same school. Both are about 10 years old. Both had clear and encouraging testimonies. One of them came from a Christian family, the other was raised in a family without any professing believers. One of them had grown up in the church, the other had no church background. One of them has been brought up to read the bible and do all the kind of things the children of believers might do, the other had no spiritual input to speak of.

6 Questions for Christian Nationalists Kevin DeYoung: 'Political theology is not like the doctrine of the Trinity or the two natures of Christ. It has not been codified for almost two millennia, it does not sit at the heart of the gospel, and it does not demand the same application and expression in every century. To maintain that Calvin’s Geneva is neither doable nor desirable as a political model for our day does not make one a progressive. It makes one a realist—about our times and about human nature. Much of what is triumphantly bandied about under the banner of Christian Nationalism is the product of a digital echo-chamber that bears little resemblance to what regular churchgoers talk about, let alone what the rest of the non-Christian population in a democratic nation would ever countenance.

You may well have seen an historic racism row that is currently swirling around Nigel Farage. It centres around things he is alleged to have said whilst at school and his repeated denials of ever saying such things despite a plethora of witnesses asserting otherwise. He initially gave a very carefully caveated denial before coming out more vociferously, and then sending Richard Tice on media rounds to do the same on his behalf. Leaving aside for a second whether Nigel Farage actually said the things alleged or not, from a PR point of view he seems to have played the whole issue very badly indeed.

Wed Streeting has defended plans for the NHS to conduct a puberty blocker trial. The Times report: The health secretary has defended an NHS trial of puberty blockers as he faces pressure from dozens of MPs for the study to be halted. Up to 250 girls and boys as young as ten will be recruited from NHS gender clinics to join the clinical trial of hormone-suppressing drugs, which is being run by King’s College London. Streeting has argued the trial has 'ethics and safety at its heart'. But it is a struggle to understand how a human trial on children, using drugs that are known to cause irreversible damage already, can possibly be described as either ethical or safe.

You may have heard that I have a new book coming out. It will be out in January. Sadly, not in time for you to buy it for anyone as a Christmas present. Happily, however, if you pre-order a copy this side of Christmas, you will be in line for a tidy little discount. You can pre-order your copy of Independent Elders here. If you are wondering what other people are saying about it, here is some info from Grace Publications and a nice endorsement from Mez McConnell: This books both advances a case for the independency of the local church and draws together the biblical data on how eldership ought to function in the local church.

Whilst I’m onto my annual blog traditions, I thought I would re-share this post. It goes as a pair with the one I shared yesterday. If yesterday’s message was you are free to do what yo…

Well, it is that time of year again. You may just be getting into the Christmas mood. You may be getting ready to wheel out all the old traditions. Bloggers, it seems, are no different. Ian Paul has his annual post on Jesus not being born in a stable. He went early on it year and posted it in the first half of November. Like him, I have my annual blogging tradition: the gentle reminder that Christmas isn't in the Bible so you can celebrate (or not) as you will.

Christian Liberty 'People believe that the only way to combat the ever-increasing tide of secularism is to build high doctrinal sea walls to preserve the church from the flood of falsehood. They believe that if everyone toes the same doctrinal that uniformity of belief and conviction will preserve the church from compromise, decline, and devolution. The problem is that people envision doctrinal uniformity in areas about which the Bible says little to nothing: politics (think tax rates or universal healthcare), courtship (how to meet and marry your mate), or education (home schooling is the only way), for example.'

The old adage 'context is king' is wheeled out a lot when it comes to reading the bible. What we usually mean is that meaning is primarily derived from context. Reading words or sentences in isolation, ripped apart from their context, can make the bible say a lot of weird and wonderful things. We fundamentally determine what this word means in this particular sentence by it's wider context. And we place things in the ever-broader contexts, starting with words in sentences, then sentences in paragraphs, paragraphs in sections, sections in books and, finally, books in the canon.

When it comes to evangelism, everybody wants to know how to reach this or that group of people. How do you engage Catholics? What about Hindus? Muslims? Not just religious groups, but various other demographics, whether it is class based, sub-cultures or whatever. If we're not from the particular group we want to reach, we very often want to know how to reach this group of people who don't necessarily look, speak or reason like I do... But I suspect we would be helped in all these cases by two simple and related things.

As I write this, we are just gearing up for our weekly community group. Ours runs with a fairly standard setup. We meet together to eat a meal, then pray for one another and, after that, to chew over the sermon from Sunday a little more. But the meal is a key bit of what we do. I thought I would share a few reasons why it is significant for us. Fellowship For a start, there is something that happens over food. It doesn't seem to matter what food it is.

One of the repeated noises you hear in 2 Kings is the continual refrain that such and such a king did evil in the sight of the Lord and specifically that they continued in the sins of Jeroboam son of Nebat. If you know the story, when Israel split into two kingdoms (Israel in the north and Judah in the South), in a bid to stop his people wandering down to Jerusalem to worship at the temple and spend all their money in the now rival Judean economy, Jeroboam set up two golden bulls at Dan and Bethel.

Yesterday was a hard Sunday for us. We announced to our church that I would be stepping down from the ministry here by September 2026. Below is the text of the statement I read to the church.

Christian Nationalism from a Baptist perspective I don't usually link to social media posts, but I think this thoughtful comment from John Stevens, National Director of FIEC, warrants an exception. Peter, James, and the Question: Who Actually “Ends the Debate”? 'If you listen carefully to a lot of Catholic apologetics on Acts 15, you can almost hear the script. It goes like this: the council argues; Peter stands up as the unique rock and voice of the Church; he defines the doctrine; everyone falls into line; James simply works out the pastoral details.

Yesterday, the Guardian report on a new approach to funding local council areas. They report: Deprived towns and cities in the midlands and the north of England are the big winners in a major shake-up of local authority funding that will redirect cash from affluent rural areas to urban councils hit hardest by austerity. Ministers said the changes put in place a fairer system that recognised the extra needs and weaker council tax raising powers of councils in so-called “left behind’ areas. It guarantees them real-terms funding increases for the next three years.

A little ruling noted in The Times yesterday offered an interesting insight into not just education, but discussions that circulate around religious education. The salient facts are that religious education in Northern Ireland has been found not to be sufficiently objective or critical. It has been deemed to amount to religious instruction and was said to be so because the core syllabus was devised by the Catholic, Presbyterian, Church of Ireland and Methodist churches and 'was not delivered in an “objective, critical and pluralistic manner”. The ruling said the syllabus 'amounted to evangelism and proselytising.' …