Whenever we spend time in hospital, we are keen that whoever is treating us is not only competent enough to make an accurate diagnosis of what afflicts us but is also able to suggest effective treatment for our condition. However, we may all know doctors who could have ticked those boxes and yet lacked a […]
I don’t know if any of you made any New Year’s Resolutions this year, and whether you have managed to stick to them(!), but as we continue our blog series on Matthew’s Gospel, chapter 13 presents pastors with some vital resolutions to meditate upon and seek to implement in the year ahead. You may recall […]
I wonder what is on your Christmas wish list this year? Globally, 2023 has been a difficult year for many. Droughts brought Somalia and Ethiopia to the brink of famine, earthquakes in Turkey and Syria saw 58,000 lose their lives, flooding ravaged large parts of southern Africa, Brazil, Chile, India and Korea, and cyclones and […]
In our experience at EPW, one of the biggest difficulties facing pastors and believers in the majority world is the gap between the reality they see and God’s promises in scripture. For example, the gap between the daily persecution of Christians and God’s promise of a perfect world. Or the gap between the acute pain […]
In our EPW training conferences, one of the hardest tasks is to work out the primary application of a passage as opposed to any number of secondary applications. So, for example, when we look at a Pauline epistle, the key question for us to ask is what did Paul want the Philippians to do as […]
One of America’s most famous novels is Mark Twain’s, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Sadly, church and religion do not escape the author’s infamous wit. Huck is confused that two so-called Christian families show such little love to one another. He can’t understand how one family could praise a sermon on Christian love on the […]
Dr Martin Luther King’s famous ‘I have a dream’ speech took place on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC on 28 August 1963. It is one of the most extraordinary pieces of rhetoric you will ever hear. In just 1700 words, the Baptist pastor and civil rights leader painted a picture of […]
When did you last forget about something on your ministry to-do list? How often do you have to postpone something at the last minute? As flawed creatures, we know that even the best of us are still unreliable. We make promises and we plan to honour them but, sadly, we sometimes fail to keep them. […]
At Equipping Pastors Worldwide, we recognise that ministry is often difficult and frustrating. Pastors we serve around the world tell us of times when it does not look like the gospel is powerful or as if God is in control. That can be demoralising and depressing, especially when pastors face persecution or have to endure […]
Isaac Ambrose, an English Puritan writer in the 1600s said: “We preach nothing else but Christ as the object of our faith. … only Christ is the whole of man’s happiness, the Sun to enlighten him, the Physician to heal him, the Wall of fire to defend him, the Friend to comfort him, the Pearl […]