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Josh Moody

Date posted: 1 Dec 2012

‘Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s...’ This is the famous pronouncement of the Master in response to a particularly intense period of Pharisaic grilling. But what precisely does it mean as Christians in America negotiate a cultural landscape that appears less friendly to traditional Christian values and the message of the gospel than in the recent past?

The blogosphere is not short of answers, but I suggest that 1 John, in particular, provides a compelling look at the right way to respond. In the context in which John was writing, there was an incipient ‘Gnosticism’ that was advocating a toned down spirituality, denying that Jesus was the Christ in ‘flesh’, and therefore that it was possible to be spiritual without actual practical commitment to the local church or, indeed, without practising righteousness. In other words, in response to pressures from a pagan environment, the church was susceptible to a form of teaching that allowed it to live in a less combative fashion with its neighbours — understandable in its own right — but by means of denying core doctrines (‘Jesus is the Christ’) and core moral behaviour (‘practising righteousness’).

Josh Moody

Date posted: 1 Nov 2012

Is everything wrong with practically everything these days?

You can hardly turn over a blog page, or flip through a list of scrolling tweets, or listen to some startling statistic, without being given the impression that this is the case.

Josh Moody

Date posted: 1 Oct 2012

Many at this stage in the election cycle are cynical of the motivations of our elected leaders.

Some may despair of finding effective (let alone godly) government. Yet, here are five reasons why you should pray for the government.

Josh Moody

Date posted: 1 Jun 2012

A group of pastors gathered in Wheaton, outside Chicago, in May for a three-day course on Bible exposition.

Vaughan Roberts from Oxford and yours truly provided the instruction sessions and expositions for this course, but the real heart of this Simeon Trust workshop is the small group ministry that takes place. Dave Helm, head of the Simeon Trust in America, has provided a wonderful set of material and a framework which serves many pastors up and down the country to encourage them to preach the word faithfully.

So far we have identified three issues which cause problems. These are theological ignorance, the work of false teachers, and an unfettered pragmatic approach to ministry as possible reasons for the current theological crisis in evangelical mission organisations. However, there are other factors which may support the spread of heresy and problematic mission strategies.

Low view of local church

Sometimes it is a low view of the local church and its role in world mission that fosters unhelpful strategies and even heretical views in the mission field. For many years mission organisations have been reminding local churches in the West of their responsibility for world mission. Local churches, they rightly argue, must be mission-minded.

Josh Moody

Date posted: 1 Apr 2012

Suffering is hateful. Bloody. Nasty. Indiscriminate. Horrible.

Just ask Job if you don’t believe me. For all the books out there on suffering — and there are many — it is a topic that will not go away because the easy answers do not work.

Josh Moody

Date posted: 1 Jan 2012

One of the strange delights of living in a country where you did not grow up is the joy of exploring a whole different sporting culture.

For instance, take basketball. Well, when I went to school, basketball was played as distinctly second-rate also-ran game. For an Englishman I was not that bad. But I remember an American we had with us who was on our team and seemed to spend the whole time running up and down putting the thing in the appropriate basket. I could catch, pass, but throwing the ball through the rim was a whole different ‘ball game’.

Josh Moody

Date posted: 1 Feb 2012

When John Stott’s memorial service in America took place, I was fascinated to hear the influence of British evangelicalism.

Person after person who spoke talked about how some of the luminaries known to readers of this paper — John Stott, Dick Lucas, and others — have had an outsized influence on developing a thinking person’s approach to biblical Christianity. The work of the Simeon Trust (www.simeon.org) generates similar conferences to that of the Proclamation Trust and frequently quotes Dick Lucas aphorisms.

General

A famous letter was written in AD 112 by Pliny, the governor of Bithynia in Asia Minor, to the Roman emperor Trajan, asking for advice concerning the attitude to take in relation to groups of Christians in his province. This is a fascinating and vital piece of evidence concerning the activities of early Christians and the attitude of the Roman authorities to them.

Thomas Helwys founded the first Baptist congregation in Spitalfields, London, in 1612. He advocated the principle of religious liberty, and for this was thrown into Newgate prison, where he died by 1616.