Justice and beauty are central to God's new world and should be central to our work. Together they frame the good news of Jesus.

To open the Bible is to open a window toward Jerusalem, as Daniel did (6:10), no matter where our exile may have taken us.

...left to ourselves we lapse into a kind of collusion with entrophy, acquiescing in the general belief that things may be getting worse but that there's nothing much we can do about them. And we are wrong. Our task in the present...is to live as resurrection people in between Easter and the final day, with our Christian life, corporate and individual, in both worship and mission, as a sign of the first and a foretaste of the second.

It's partly that I'm an extrovert and that I like being with people. If you shut me up in a library with nothing else around for weeks on end, I'd go mad! I have to sort of go out.

Our culture is so fixated on dying and going to heaven when the whole Scripture is about heaven coming to earth.

It shouldn't be difficult, then, to make the transposition at this point into the early Christian vision of Jesus and the Spirit and the way in which the material world is both celebrated and renewed through their work. The Jewish basis for the early Christian patterns of belief and behavior is clear. It is important that God's people are embodied, because God made this world and has no intention of abandoning it. The material of creation is a vessel made to be filled with God's new life and glory, even though the transformation may involve suffering, persecution, and martyrdom.

Having lots of members of my family who were in ministry in one form or another, I suppose it shouldn't be surprising that at quite an early age, I was very, very conscious personally of the love of God.