the ENd word
From fed up to fed
Jon Barrett
There was a time when I got a bit fed up with the 23rd psalm.
Admittedly, it’s not a great way to feel about a piece of Scripture, but I’d come to associate the psalm almost entirely with funerals of unbelievers. While an Anglican minister, before moving to the Fellowship of Independent Evangelical Churches (FIEC), I conducted many such funerals, and the default hymn choice for the generation of non-churchgoers I was burying was Abide With Me and The Lord’s my Shepherd, the latter always sung to the tune of Crimond.
Is our apologetics ‘frightfully early 2000s, darling’?
Jon Barrett
Controversial opinion: much of our evangelism and apologetics fails to scratch where non-believers are itching, because it seeks to answer questions they’re not asking.
Or, perhaps more accurately, we remain methodologically committed to answering questions they once were, but are now no longer, asking. With the exception of that old chestnut of theodicy (the ‘why suffering’ question) much of our apologetics output still seems to be looking to undercut the objections born out of the Enlightenment or the era of scientism, and I’m less than convinced that those once-pressing issues now represent the focus of the emerging generation’s attention and curiosity.
the ENd word
How questions about the resurrection are changing in 2025
Jon Barrett
Alistair Begg recently said that preaching is often “less about telling them something new, but more about reminding ourselves what we mustn’t forget”.
He’s right. As a preacher I’m well aware that, to borrow a line from Oscar Wilde, “I have nothing original in me but original sin.” That’s not to say that I steal other preacher’s sermons (I don’t), but is an admission that I’m very unlikely to spot something brand new in a text that’s never been spotted before by anyone else. The truth has already been “once revealed to the saints” and my job is to bring out the meaning of what God has previously made known in the pages of Scripture.
