Published on 25 February , 2008
in Snapshots.
I’m currently in the process of developing a Wordpress sermon plug-in. I’m trying to make it so that churches with Wordpress enabled blogs can simply upload sermons to their website, where they can be searched, listened to, and downloaded. There is already one plugin that can do this (WpSermons), but that doesn’t have all the functionality I need, so I’m working with a coder to have one written from scratch.
My question is: what sort of functionality would you like from a Wordpress sermon plug-in? I can’t promise to include any suggestion you make, but it might well be possible if you make a suggestion this early in the coding process.
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Let me highlight some things I’ve been reading and listening to over the last few weeks, which I’ve been blessed by:
- Mission: Home or Away? (MP3 file) A wonderful sermon preached yesterday morning by Liam Goligher at Duke Street Baptist Church. He answers the question “Am I called?”, and gives a wonderful survey of all that is being done for gospel around the world - and all that still needs to be done.
- The New Testament on Divorce: A interesting insight into current debate sparked by David Instone-Brewer’s article in Christianity Today. John Piper then responded, followed by this response and follow-up by Andreas Kostenberger. Very roughly speaking, Instone-Brewer considers the NT to encourage grace after a necessary divorce, John Piper believes re-marriage is never right, and Kostenberger takes the middle-ground. Instone-Brewer follows up the debate with some clarification here.
- Thinking about Covenants: This post from Ben Witherington may stretch you, but is well worth chewing over.
- My King: I listened again to S M Lockridge’s “That’s My King” recently, which is still incredibly moving. A few years ago I made a video from his words for a couple of hundred people at a youth conference. This afternoon I found myself wondering how many times it had been watched or downloaded after I posted it on the web. I counted 48,623 from this website, 178,400 on YouTube, 75,451 on Google Video, and 13,620 on GodTube. That’s a total of 316,094 since I put the video up in January 2006, or 465 downloads every single day! If you’ve not yet had a listen, do so now.
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Costly Grace
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German pastor who was banned from preaching by the Gestapo. But in 1937 he had written in his classic work The Cost of Discipleship:
Suffering, then, is the badge of true discipleship… Luther reckoned suffering among the marks of the true church, and one of the memoranda drawn up in preparation for the Augsburg Confession similarly defines the church as the community of those “who are persecuted and martyred for the Gospel’s sake.”… Discipleship means allegiance to the suffering Christ, and it is therefore not at all surprising that Christians should be called upon to suffer. In fact, it is a joy and a token of His grace.
It is perhaps not a surprise to discover that in 1945, after imprisonment in a series of concentration camps, he was hanged by the Nazis. Ten years later, the camp doctor wrote “In the almost fifty years that I worked as a doctor, I have hardly ever seen a man die so entirely submissive to the will of God.”
Continue reading ‘Destined for persecution (part 2)’
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Published on 24 November , 2007
in Articles.
I need to lay my cards on the table right at the outset. As far as I know I have never been persecuted for being a Christian. Certainly there have been occasions where ‘friends’ have made fun of me. Undoubtedly there have been times when my Christian faith has caused me to be excluded from some activity or opportunity. But persecuted? Not yet.
And that, frankly, is quite remarkable. The Christian heritage that we have enjoyed in Britain for centuries has kept the vast majority of us shielded from the truth which most of the rest of the world knows all too well. The persecution of Christians is a normal state of affairs.
I say all this because there is an increasingly realisation that the privileges that we have enjoyed for so long are beginning to come to an end. Even in this country there have been recent occasions where Christians have lost their jobs simply for living out their Christian convictions. There have even been those arrested and prosecuted for doing what you and I believe the Bible commands us to do.
Continue reading ‘Destined for persecution’
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A recent interview (well, OK three weeks ago) with Greg Haslam raised again the issue of how God speaks. And given the current interest in the Christian blogosphere in discernment (mainly thanks to Tim), the interview is worth exploring again. I’ve held off commenting earlier, because I wanted to be able to provide a counterpoint example, and until now hadn’t found one. Then, this morning, came the latest Tyndale Bulletin, together with a link to Peter Williams’ interview by Justin Taylor back in August, that provided just what I was looking for.
Both men (Peter and Greg) were describing their change of direction in ministry, and how they had been guided. See if you can spot the difference:
God gave me over fifty personal prophecies that made it clear I would be going there, mostly from men who knew nothing about what was afoot… the Lord had told me that this was ‘For the sake of my wider kingdom purposes in London and beyond.’… I remain officially outside of that movement [New Frontiers], in line with all God told me to do five years ago.
Continue reading ‘Hearing God’s Voice Today’
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I recently had a conversation with a well-known pastor who claimed that theological colleges shouldn’t teach theology. After dropping that bombshell, he explained what he meant. Instead of simply teaching theology, he said, they should teach students how to do theology.
The distinction is important, and goes for churches as much as for theological colleges. Every Christian – not just those who will become our pastors – needs to be equipped to know not just what the Bible says, but how to find out what the Bible says. Sadly, few of our churches explicitly teach this skill, and most Christians are relying more and more on preachers and commentators to tell them what the Bible says, and losing the joy of discovering it for themselves.
Worse still, some evangelical churches appear to be preaching a new Catholicism. Just as medieval priests did not believe that the laity could be trusted to read the Bible on their own, so many evangelical churches give the impression that it’s just too risky to let the ‘ordinary Christian’ read the Bible without the help of more experienced Bible teachers in print or in person.
Continue reading ‘Better Bible Study’
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One of the reasons I write so few blog posts is that I’m too busy reading excellent posts from elsewhere. Let me share with you some recent highlights:
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