P.S.
PS is an email and web-based blog format issued regularly by Contemporary Christianity. The format provides an online space for writers toexplore issues relating to church, culture and life in Northern Ireland, seeking to understand the times through insights from Scripture, theology, reason and the observations that flow from lived experience.
PS will never claim to have all the answers, but we hope to prompt questions that leave our readers a little closer to the answer at the end of the piece than they were at the beginning.
Our writers range from well-known names in academia and full-time ministry, to professionals with particular subject matter expertise, to lay people with passion for a subject and a gift for writing.
You can get involved in conversations by posting comments in the threads below the blogs, and if you’re interested in writing for us, you can get in touch by emailing info@contemporarychristianity.net.
THE SLIPPERY SLOPE TO NO MAN’S LAND?
Are evangelicals and evangelism on a slippery slope - even a slide into a cultural no-man's land? The answer, I suggest, is a definite maybe! Maybe evangelicals have become so obsessed with issues of sexuality, gender and 'traditional' values that they are doing...
The Good Friday Generation writes…
On April 10th 1998 I was an almost one year old baby living in Johannesburg, South Africa; a country recovering from the Apartheid; a system of institutionalised racial segregation and discrimination that existed in South Africa between 1948 and 1994. As a one year...
Birthday Blues
At the beginning of its 70th year the NHS has hardly got off to the happiest of birthdays what with 12 hour waits to be seen at A&E departments, patients yet again lying on trolleys in corridors, cancelled elective surgery and staff leaving their jobs in...
Four Corners and Envisioning the Future
A few days ago I had the very real privilege of speaking at the prayer breakfast, which marked the start of the 2018 Four Corners’ festival, and am glad to have been given the opportunity to share the essence of that talk. I sought to explore two main themes:...
TIME TO BURY THE ‘E’ WORD
What has Jimmy Carter to do with Pat Robertson? Both would name themselves evangelicals, but it would be a very broad church indeed that could accommodate them. David Bebbington came up with perhaps the most credible definition of the evangelical movement in his...
Friday: The New Reformers
It’s often hard to step back and see the wide horizon of the moment of time, in which we live. The breathing space that decades, and even centuries allow, is a luxury not usually available within a lifetime. We are blessed on this Island, as perhaps more than...
Thursday: The Spaces Between
Harold Wilson once said 'a week is a long time in politics'. On this basis it seems like the Reformation happened almost an eternity ago, yet we live daily in its wake. While the Reformation began in the cloisters and the Church its spirit quickly spread into the...
Wednesday: Surveying the Landscape
Evangelicalism is my family – it always has been. Along the way I’ve been part of a couple of Brethren churches, I’ve spent seventeen years leading a non-denominational, evangelical international church in Switzerland, and I pastored a Northern Irish Baptist Church...
Tuesday: What does the Gospel have to say to Power?
In 2017, post-modern distrust of authority is well-acknowledged and understood. All that lies between those who wield power and their destruction at the guillotine of public opinion is the capacity of social media to channel rebellion into Tweets and Facebook shares,...
Monday: Are we part of the solution or part of the problem?
‘Churches’, says Phyllis Tickle, the American theologian of Emergent Church, ‘go through a rummage sale every five hundred years or so’. I love that image. So, five hundred years ago, in 1517, we saw the tipping point in the great rummage sale of the...
Reformation 500 – A Week of Reflections
As 2017 draws to an end it will be remembered for many reasons. It has been a rollercoaster year; with turbulence in current affairs of a level that many of us feel has been unprecedented in our life times. Passions run deep as arguments bounce back and forth, wafting...
Would Jesus drive a diesel?
I was asked to reflect on this interesting question. Maybe a better question is: ‘Would Jesus drive any car if he were living in our world today?’ Or would he campaign for more public transport and a consideration of the poorest members of the community, for whom any...