...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.

I'm a people person. I like being with people. So I like being a teacher, and so on.

What we are seeing in America is the creaky old age of an eighteenth-century settlement, deemed at the time to be the new flowering of humankind-come-of-age (the 'Enlightenment') and so deemed to be above revision. At this point the urgent need is for prayer and prophecy.

We can glimpse it in the book of Acts: the method of the kingdom will match the message of the kingdom. The kingdom…goes out into the world vulnerable, suffering, praising, praying, misunderstood, misjudged, vindicated, celebrating: always – as Paul puts it in one of his letters – bearing in the body the dying of Jesus so that the life of Jesus may also be displayed.

Often the Jesus-focused churches are leaning towards a 'social gospel' interpretation of the kingdom, and the 'Paul' churches are talking about being saved from sin and going to heaven. But when we understand both Jesus and Paul in their historical contexts within the first-century Jewish world, the issues become both more complex and ultimately (I believe) more clear.

I knew that I had to be a preacher. I had to be a minister, which was a puzzle to me because my dad was a businessman. It was a family company and I assumed that I would take it on from him.

Jesus's resurrection is the beginning of God's new project not to snatch people away from earth to heaven but to colonize earth with the life of heaven. That, after all, is what the Lord's Prayer is about.