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.
Seventy Times Seven
Do you remember learning your times tables at school? ‘Two times two is four, three times two is six, four times two is eight…’ In the days before electronic calculators took the strain, the combination of daily classroom sing songs and homework repetition rooted the...
NEW DAYS COMING OR MORE FALSE DAWNS?
There have been at least three very significant events in the past month that, taken together, may - repeat may - prove to be a watershed in the current quagmire that is politics in Northern Ireland. The first was the brutal murder of Lyra McKee in Derry on 29 April...
PS Extra: Lord have mercy on us; Lord hear our prayers…
On Sunday a couple of hundred people walked the hill to Stormont and then spent a short time in prayer. Alain Emerson from 24/7 Prayer Ireland and Peter Lynas from Evangelical Alliance (NI) led the short act of worship with a reading of PSALM 85 and then...
HOW LONG, LORD?
In mid-September 2019 Northern Ireland will reach a significant milestone in its history. It’s one that seems highly unlikely to attract any of the attention of our decade of centenaries, the 100th anniversaries of the Home Rule crisis and Ulster Covenant, the Easter...
Rivers of Living Water
SECOND OF TWO...PS…blogs from the Board of Contemporary Christianity on a way forward in 2019…with an opportunity for you to respond. “Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them.” (John 7:38) The months...
Falling Seeds & Flowering Buds
FIRST OF TWO ..PS…blogs from the Board of Contemporary Christianity on a way forward in 2019….with an opportunity for you to respond. 'In recent days one verse of scripture keeps recurring in my mind, and keeps coming to me in conversation, memories and in my...
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...