The BBC has been in something a muddle in the past week. Former England footballer Gary Lineker was stood down from his role as presenter of the channel’s flagship sports programme Match of the Day. Fellow pundits Ian Wright, Alan Shearer and Micah Richards refused to appear as a protest. …

What do preachers do after a busy day of preaching? I often like to wind down with a TV series or film. Yesterday, after a busy day of preaching in Riga that included an unexpected extra service at 3pm I cooked some pasta and sat down to watch a film. …

Last week I went to see the latest film by the film director Stephen Spielberg. The Fablelmans is a semi-autobiographical film that tells a version of his family’s own complicated story and his own love affair with telling stories through film. This entertaining film begins with Spielberg directly addressing the…

With apologies to the hymn writer Isaac Watts, the epitaph for many preachers could well be: ‘Ten thousand, thousand are their texts, but all their sermons one!’ The defence of the preacher is that all they are doing is telling the old, old story. I agree if you continue the…

How emotionally connected to a congregation does a preacher need to be? Now that I preach in a variety of settings rather than in one church each week, that connection is more difficult to establish. I was thinking about this recently when reading about ChatGPT, an AI information-gathering and writing…

As a parent and grandparent, one of my favourite requests is, “Tell me a story.” This weekend the power of story came home to me again while preparing to preach on one of the parables of Jesus. It is one of the smallest of Jesus’s parables and focuses on something…

Yes, it is that time of the year again. How many times have you heard those words or said them in the past few days? For me the “Happy New Year” of New Year’s Day turns in the happy birthday of the 2nd of January, which is my birthday. Sometimes…

This week on my last day of a teaching trip to Latvia I had the great privilege of spending a morning with a group of Lutheran pastors. We were talking about ten tips on preaching Christmas. Christmas preaching only rolls around once a year, but it does seem to creep…

This weekend I have been in Latvia surrounded by snow and immersed the Old Testament Prophets. If I might be allowed a confession, I have always found the Old Testament Prophets some of the most difficult books to preach on. There are a variety of reasons for this. These include…