Two Ways News

I like Christmas, in a bittersweet kind of way. It’s beautiful and fun and full of hope, but also complex and difficult and sometimes sad. My mother died a few months ago, and I’m sure I’ll really miss her on Christmas morning. Christmas is a time of joy that reminds us that joy is elusive and surrounded by trouble. Like a baby laid in a manger, you might say. My favourite secular Christmas song c...

Well, as promised , I’ve written the first draft of an introduction to the Two Ways to Live evangelistic book I’m hoping we can write together. (There’s a link below to read it.) Three quick things before we dive in. First off, does the book have a title? It’s way too early to worry about that. Let’s see what floats to the surface as we go along. For the time being, I’m just going to call it The 2...

Here’s the first draft of the introductory chapter to the new evangelistic book I’m writing, based on Two Ways to Live . (See the PDF below.) The book will be coming out each week (or so) over the next few months here at The Payneful Truth . For more info about this project, and why I’d like your help, see here and then here . To receive each draft chapter as I write it, and to comment and give fe...

More of an invitation than an article this week. (And if you’ve already read this invitation on the Matthias Media enews earlier this week, and signed up to The Payneful Truth, you don’t need to read this again!) I often catch myself when I come across a book with my name on the cover. I pick it up and read a paragraph and think, “Did I write this? Surely it was someone else. Me, write books? Ridi...

I woke very early this morning, as I’ve been doing more often recently, but couldn’t muster the energy or wakefulness to get up and do something productive. It’s been a long year. So I lay there and listened to a chunk of the most recent episode of The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill , a podcast series from Christianity Today. It tells the story of the meteoric growth and tragic implosion of the minist...

In this month’s Q&A chat, I spoke with Phil Colgan, the Senior Minister at St George North Anglican Church in Sydney, and one of Sydney’s most gifted preachers. Here’s an edited transcript of our conversation. I kicked things off by asking Phil what he was preaching on at the moment. Phil: As we're coming out of lockdown we thought we'd do something that's just really encouraging for people and it...

In the wake of my post a few weeks ago about the ‘ blunder in our Bible reading ’, some of you asked some thoughtful questions about the value of word studies and word searches . The questions were so helpful, in fact, that I thought a few more sentences about words were in order … I was suggesting, you may remember, that we have a habit of overusing and misusing word studies. Given that meaning i...

I can’t remember who first taught me this axiom of Bible reading, but I have been forever grateful. When you come across a knotty passage in Scripture, don’t glide past it— untie it . A confusing or confounding passage is an opportunity to learn. Sometimes knotty verses reveal our ignorance, or that we haven’t understood the passage—such as when we’re reading Hebrews 6 and the obscure figure of Me...

A bit of occasional bored lurking is the most I do on Facebook these days. But my eyes and ears pricked up recently when one of the few organizations I follow ( Matthias Media ) started teasing the imminent release of the new Two Ways to Live (2WTL) giveaway tract. People were making various comments on MM’s Facebook post—about how they often add in this or that when they’re using 2WTL, or how the...

This is one of the freebie editions of The Payneful Truth. To receive every edition, every week, plus various other goodies and the joy of partnership, here’s what to do … A lot of Christian pixels have been spilt over the past several weeks about vaccination, conscience, the weaker brother, civil obedience, the freedom to gather, the desirability of not excluding anyone, and more besides. I wasn’...

I’ve been talking to the trainees at CBS about how to read the Bible. Like most of you, they already have a decent idea of how to do this. They know about the reading process of COMA—Context, Observation, Meaning, Application. And (again like most of you) they have also learned to read the Bible by doing it over many years, and by hearing the Bible taught and preached well over many years. But I l...

Here’s the final instalment in the little series I’ve been running on faith, love and hope, as the essential nature of the Christian life. So far we’ve had: * why ‘these three’ are so important, and why we sometimes neglect them * ‘faith’ as the foundation of Christian living * the two kinds of love , and what Christian love really is And now we come to hope … Hope feels a bit like a third wheel i...

For those of who are new to The Payneful Truth, every month or so I have a Q&A style conversation with a friend. It’s usually one of the partner-only posts, but this month I thought I’d made it a freebie for everyone on the list. This month it’s with my good friend Marty Sweeney , director of Matthias Media in the USA, and a pastor at Old North Church in Canfield, Ohio. We talk about some new book...

What is love, when all is said and done? We finished the first part our exploration of this surprisingly tricky question with more questions than answers. Perhaps Don Carson’s little book on The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God needs a counterpart: the difficult doctrine of the love of Christians. But we did make some progress. We figured out that love is deeply connected with goodness —with...

The French call it l’esprit d’escalier— which means something like ‘the wit of the staircase’. It’s that clever thing you wished you’d said but only thought of after the conversation was over.  After last week’s post on faith , I had two of these moments—one I thought of myself and one pointed out by a friend. After a comment from a friend, I really wished I’d made more of the fact that ‘faith in...

As flagged  last week , the Bible often sees the Christian life as a matter of “faith, love and hope”. “These three”, as Paul describes them 1 Corinthians 13, seem to capture the essence of our response to the gospel and growth as a Christian. I made the point last time that we don’t tend to use this triad of virtues so much these days in talking about Christian living and maturity, and wondered w...

Amidst the disorienting sadness of the last week following my mother’s death, gratitude keeps breaking through—not only for her life and faith, but for the messages of sympathy, encouragement and hope that many of you have sent in—so many in fact that I don’t think I will be able to answer them all individually. Thank you for being so thoughtful.    The funeral has been delayed until next week (fo...

While keeping an eye on the women’s K1 slalom (“Jess is making a real statement here!”) and occasionally flicking across to see if the tall, lumpy determination of the Olyroos could hold off those nippy Spaniards in the group of dreams, I happened across a very good article by Stephen Liggins about not getting too carried away with the Olympics. ‘ The Olympics Games: Good but not God ’ was the tit...

This is one of the free public Payneful Truth posts that I put out once a month. If you’d like to get every edition, every week, see the info at the end of this post about how to get a free trial subscription. I’m training a bunch of would-be, could-be pastors at Campus Bible Study, and it occured to me that I should figure out what it is exactly that I’m training them to become. What does it mean...

In last week’s edition we began looking at seven types of ‘apologetics’ that are scattered across the spectrum of our interactions with the non-Christian world. Brief recap: * Persuasion : the reason and argument that takes place when we are actually presenting the gospel. * Answering objections : responding to the questions, objections and accusations that arise in response to the gospel.  * Pre-...

I did some training with the CBS staff recently on ‘apologetics’, and how it relates to ‘evangelism’. And as I did so, I realised that one of our problems is simply that the word ‘apologetics’ gets used today to refer to such a range of different things. And so to clear the ground a little and clarify understanding, I put forward the following ‘seven kinds of apologetics’. Or perhaps it would be m...

A special welcome to the new partners who have signed up in the last week or two. Great to have you as part of the conversation. I suggested in last week’s post that perhaps the key moment in the growth of Christian disciples is when we start to look left : I lift my head up, and open my eyes, and see the multitudes all around me that need to move to the right—to take steps towards knowing Christ...

Welcome to another free, public edition of The Payneful Truth . (I’m now sending these freebies out in the third week of each month.) Here’s what you might have missed over the past month: * 10,000 reasons our songs are changing : how should we think about the unmistakable trend towards slower, more emotionally intense congregational songs?  * Singing and the affections: a follow-up post on emotio...

We have another grandson on the way. We’re still a few months away from meeting him, but his parents have already decided what he’ll be called, and have even let the rest of the family in on the choice.  And so Little Nick has become a someone in our family already. We talk about how well-defined his leg muscles are in the ultrasound (‘bound to be a good rugby player!’), and we joke about whether...

The implicit question I left hanging at the end of last week’s Payneful Truth has been taken up and asked by a number of people in the few days since.  We can all agree that we don’t want theologically dodgy emotional manipulation in our singing. But what is the place of emotions in singing?  The best form of the question came in an email from Jack : You say: “Singing for us is a form of speech—to...