Pilgrim's Ponderings

A few days ago we noticed our kitten limping around the house. It got worse over the next two days and so we took her to the vet. The vet immediately saw the limp and got to work. They took her to this little room where they were doing their little analysis of the situation. What resulted was a whole lot of noise. The vet, when trying to find out whether it was a fracture and where the pain was went about pressing along the leg of the cat. Each time she went near the injured area there was a whole lot of angry shouting from the little cat and scared attempts at clawing at anything. By the end of that ordeal the vet had her diagnosis and a little while later we got on our way home. Those moments of a screaming cat reminded me of something true. The many times in my life when God had to apply pressure of various sorts to my life to expose where there are breaks, wounds and fractures are. Times of pain and pressure help me see what is and what is not broken in my life. I must a...

Six reasons a worship leader could walk away from faith. A prominent worship leader from a leading church recently declared through social media that his faith was on shaky ground. It created a lot of conversational space filled with many opinions and many more questions. There have been some interesting responses from within the Christian community and even from others. As a believer for 24 years, a worship leader for 22 years and a bible teacher for 19 years here are some of my thoughts on this and other trends in church. 1.  The experiential faith factor. The trend in many churches today is to push for this Christian experience. What many might attribute to the more charismatic and Pentecostal stream of faith has now also become a reality in many other evangelical churches as well. I have spoken at a number of different churches and to people from various kinds of theological backgrounds. In all of this I see a trend now where the power of the worship exper...

“They were so small you would not even know they were there. But they were letting air out slowly and consistently.” - Tyre puncture repair man I had a puncture and when we changed the tyre we found that the spare was also flat. I didn’t remember it being flat but there it was as flat as it could possibly be. After doing a lot of running around and getting a mechanic to tag along we finally pulled in to the shop with that spare flat tyre. When he started to work on it to locate the puncture he found THREE of them. But what he said was you would not have noticed them as punctures because they are so small, they only let out air in tiny quantities. He told me that because I had not used the spare for all this time it just lay there in the boot with air slowly escaping until it was totally flat. I was thinking about this thought at night. If it was a big puncture (the ones where a nail gets lodged in and air escapes quite quickly) I would have picked up on it much sooner. Bu...

“Discipleship” – that’s a word that you will and ought to hear in Church often. We challenge our church members to be in discipleship relationships that will grow them and we challenge them to disciple others as well. The word is used in the Lord’s command at the time of His ascension when Jesus said “go and make disciples… ” Disciple making is in the very fabric and DNA of what it means to be a Christian. I was introduced to this truth very early on in my Christian life. In the days of my youth fellowship discipleship was a heavily used word and I thank God for those that took the time to disciple me. But I wanted to share with you three mistakes that I made when I attempted to disciple others. These are things I learned from and changed. A.       Mistaking discipleship for counselling Listening, counselling, giving advice and the likes are all a large part of disciple making. But they are never the bed rock of discipleship. I found that often the tim...