Jonathan PayI’ve been a Christian all of my life and I’m still not sure I’ve got it right. This is where I think out loud about belief, church, and what following Jesus looks like when life is complicated and theology is messy.
Paul wrote like a man running out of time, because he thought he was. That’s the plainest way I can put what changed for me this year: a lyric I’d known for years clicked in a new way: “why do you write like you’re running out of time” from Hamilton is sung at a man racing to […]
For most of my life I assumed Jesus knew he was God, the way you know your own name: fully aware, from somewhere in his human mind, that he was the second person of the Trinity walking around Galilee. The earliest evidence tells a different story. Jesus was a Jew arguing with other Jews. His disagreements […]
Today I am picking and choosing. I am going to take Paul at his word when he says something I find compelling, and I am going to be less impressed by things he says, or things said in his name, that point in a different direction. And I think that’s fine, that’s what everyone does […]
I read my Bible as anti-empire. The Exodus is liberation from an imperial slave state. The prophets indict Israel and Judah for the same crimes of exploitation and injustice they indict other nations for. Jesus proclaims a kingdom that isn’t Caesar’s and blesses the people Caesar’s kingdom grinds down. Revelation names Rome as the beast. […]
I grew up believing the Bible had a clear sexual ethic. One man + one woman = one marriage, to the exclusion of all others. The verses were right there, the framework was obvious. I built my understanding around it and lived it. I don’t believe that anymore. Not because I stopped reading the Bible, […]
I got theological training from Andrew Wilson (author of Incomparable, God Stories, and more). That sentence probably doesn’t mean much if you don’t know the UK evangelical landscape. Andrew Wilson is a teaching pastor at King’s Church London (at the time he was Eastbourn based, IIRC), a theologian in the Newfrontiers network, and (for one […]
I grew up believing the Bible was one book with one voice. That’s what I was taught. God’s Word: singular, unified, without error. If two passages seem to contradict, the problem is your reading. If one author says something uncomfortable, keep reading until you find the verse that resolves it. The clear passages interpret the […]
Get behind me, Satan! You are a hindrance to me, for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things. (Ironic?) There is a line in The Usual Suspects lodged in my head, “the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist”, and I keep circling back to the […]
Does understanding how something works diminish its capacity to move us? Between medical scans, we prayed, and healing came. The sceptic in me knows about unconscious pattern recognition. The believer has felt something larger. Here’s what I’m learning: I don’t have to choose between faith and reason.
Eighteen years after writing about faith and maturity, I’ve learned that theology isn’t about certainty, it’s about kindness. From striving to rootedness, from fear to grace, this is what growing up in faith really looks like.
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