Written by T.M. Suffield |
Wednesday, December 20, 2023
We must keep returning to the Cross. We gather there to weep over our sin and our wayward hearts, we gather to rejoice that the Lord God Almighty—he who knew no sin—has become sin so that in him we might become the righteousness of God (2 Corinthians 5). We can be cleansed and forgiven, even from the worst of things.

No. That was easy.
Except, I think most readers will expect me to say “yes.” Aren’t we all without excuse before the wrath of God (Romans 1)? Yes, we are. Yet this is not saying the same thing.
Having been fed—mostly evangelistically—on the (true!) idea that even the smallest sin is the enough to damn you, that even the smallest sin needs redemption, we start to think this means they’re all the same. I encounter this fairly regularly.
It’s not right, as I’ll explore in a moment, and it prevents us from being able to say that some things are worse than others. We need to be able to tell people the truth.
In Numbers 15.22-31 we have “intentional”—called here “high-handed’—sins laid against “unintentional” ones, with different sacrifices and conditions needed for atonement. High-handed sin cannot be atoned for at this point in salvation history. We could, more simply, look at the way that the various Laws in the Old Testament ascribe different punishments to different crimes, clearly not everything that is wrong should be considered in the same way.
In Ezekiel 23, the prophet draws a parallel between two sisters in their sin in graphic terms. He makes it clear that they are allegories for Samaria and Jerusalem—the capitals of the two kingdoms. In verse 11 he says that the sins of Jerusalem are worse than those of Samaria, and that she was more corrupt. In Jeremiah 16.10, the prophet lambasts Judah for being worse than their fathers.
In 1 John 5.16-17, the Apostle makes a distinction between sins “leading to death” and those that don’t, which probably scares us a bit: I understand this to be the sin of refusing to repent and turn to Jesus. He moves on to say that all wrongdoing is sin, but there is sin that does not lead to death. There are different kinds of sin.
For a small aside, I’ve known people who would say something to the affect that “it was wrong, but it wasn’t sin,” as though sin only was the very worst of things. All wrongdoing is sin. Which means that we all sin all the time. Everything I think that’s not the truth is sinful—because thinking wrong thoughts after God is sin. It’s very possible that this post contains sinful statements. I don’t think so, and I would remove them if I did think so. If there are, I should repent. It is unlikely that I haven’t sinned in my writing so far, for all I’m not aware of where that would be. This is the nature of being fallen beings: ontological sinners made saints. As I’ll expound a little later, it’s also the wonder of grace: despite this the Lord loves me and has called me to be his chosen possession (1 Peter 2). I’m the apple of his eye (Deuteronomy 32). If you trust him, so are you.
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Written by T. M. Suffield |
Sunday, November 26, 2023
Jesus says that the gates of the place of the dead will not prevail against the church. He is talking not about some place that the Enemy lives but his descent into the grave. He broke the gates of Hades. He broke the gates of Sheol. He broke the gates of death. He wrested death out of the grip of its ruler—who is the Satan, so we aren’t that far away from what you thought it meant (Hebrews 2)—and now holds the keys of death and Hades himself (Revelation 1). He stole the keys to the gates and they are thrown wide open by the one who bears the words of life (John 6).

In Matthew 16 Jesus declares to Peter that he is the rock on which he will build his church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it. What does that mean?
In popular piety it’s most often quoted when we feel under attack by the forces of the Enemy. We’re most likely under ‘attack’ much more often than most modern Christians would allow, the nature of being modern people means that we find the idea that the Satan is a real person confusing enough. Our demonology tends to be deficient in return—not least because you’re much more likely to find ‘demonology’ as a skill in role-playing game than in a book of theology.
That’s an important set of questions, but let’s pull back to what Jesus tells Peter. We use it to reassure ourselves that the church will stand despite assault. This is true, and the Bible affirms it multiple times (Ephesians 5 & 6, Romans 8, John 17, Revelation). However, as preachers are fond of pointing out, gates don’t attack things. In the saying the church is the one who is attacking these gates of Hell.
We could be diverted into a discussion of how the church should be advancing, taking the fight to the Enemy and his legions. I think that’s right as a disposition, though we’ll end up finding it more difficult to apply than we might imagine—I’d suggest doing things is probably where you start. Start by starting. Except, while I think that’s true too, that’s not what this means.
What are the gates of Hell, anyway? And where are they? And why does the lake of fire that the devil and his angels are thrown into (Revelation 20) have gates? And why can we attack them now when the Enemy is the Prince of this world not some place underneath it (e.g. John 16, Ephesians 2, 2 Corinthians 4)?
These are good questions. We should start by noting that Jesus didn’t say the ‘gates of Hell.’ Every other time the New Testament uses the word hades it’s translated as—no prizes for guessing—Hades (ok, technically it’s not translated at all). Jesus says that the gates of Hades won’t stand against the church.
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Written by T. M. Suffield |
Saturday, October 21, 2023
We could do with being a lot more like him: not naïve, not living on the clouds, or ignorant of the deep scarring pains of existence on the face of the earth; rather embracing joy such that temptation does not touch us. It will be harder for us to be led astray by the strange lies of the modern age if we live in reality and participate in God in Christ.

We live in a strange moment of time and cultural winds that gets called all sorts of different names, but we can all agree its ‘modernity.’
Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing, how concerned we are by it, and what features it has that we should embrace or push against are all tendentious topics. Of the writing of many essays there is no end.
It won’t surprise regular readers that I am not sanguine about modernity. I don’t think it’s been a good thing for the world or the church. Some of you may instantly want to quip that I should try living in the Middle Ages without anaesthetic, so for the sake of clarity I am not simplistically suggesting that everything was better six hundred years ago. It self-evidently wasn’t, and I’m as much a child of modernity as any of the rest of you reading this; even if it was better, it would seem confusing, strange, and worse to me.
We live in a moment that many would call ‘late modernity’ which does rather assume we know the future, but has replaced ‘postmodernity’ at least among thinkers who are not keen on the postmodern. The implication being that over five hundred years into modernity (when it starts could be argued but we’re probably talking about the Tudors, which might surprise some of you. We could also pick the Reformation, the English Civil War, or the American Revolutionary War.) we’re seeing features that feel like it’s end-stage. The promise of liberalism is falling apart. What was called postmodernism twenty years ago is now largely regarded as a natural development of what came before, it’s just being modern writ large.
Why should we care in the church? We and everyone we know for generations backward have been swimming in waters and telling stories that have been tweaked and moulded by these philosophical currents. This is true of previous eras too, but it’s more difficult to see the winds that still surround us.
The modern age gifted us wonders, like Protestantism, and terrors, like the separation of symbol from thing. We lack a sense that one thing has much meaning or connection to another thing. The world is made of atoms, right? So, each thing is just a thing and their baring on each other exists in the form of the gravitational attraction of atoms towards atoms but not beyond that. Each thing is therefore what we say it is.
But the world isn’t made of atoms, it’s made of stories.
This thinking is a feature in many of the ways that the modern world pushes against Christianity, whether we think of gender ideology or a memorialist view of the Lord’s Supper (sort of the same thing).
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Written by T. M. Suffield |
Friday, October 20, 2023
Churches should speak and teach as though this is true. It’s utterly bewildering to so many young Christians I meet that their lives are marked by difficulty. The prolonged feeling of the absence of God in the midst of it is also bamboozling, but so utterly ordinary that almost every older Christian could tell these stories.

If you want to mature, you’re going to have to suffer.
Actually, that’s not quite right. You are going to suffer, that’s the nature of life under the sun. Some of that will be petty, some of it will be serious, and (heaven-forfend) some of it will be so psychologically scarring that you’ll be getting over it for a long time.
In of itself that won’t make you mature, but it will be the venue of your testing (1 Peter 4). It will give you the opportunity to endure and in so doing develop character (Romans 5). This is what we call maturity, a growing Christlikeness (2 Corinthians 3) and a growing wisdom (Luke 2) that happens through being broken like bread.
We have to learn to find God in his hiddenness, to encounter him in the pit of pain, to allow his rod and staff to guide us through the valley (Psalm 23), in order to grow up.
This is, I contend, what Jesus meant by Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted, but that’s not what I want to address directly today.
Suffering is normal
This is not how the world was originally designed to be—though maturity through testing is how the world was meant to be, but Adam failed the kingly test that Jesus passed—and it is not how the world will one day be.
However, our cultures think suffering is to be avoided rather than learned from, and often act as though it’s a terrible and unexpected imposition on us. It would be good if someone warned us.
The Church doesn’t always do much better. Some treat suffering as a lack of faith (more common than we’d like to admit), others as a deeply confusing reality because we expected God to bless us transactionally, and others speak as though Christians in the West don’t suffer (I hear this a lot, and then people wonder what’s wrong with them when they do).
It is of course true that Western suffering is different, we are unlikely to die in famines, less likely to die in plagues, and face fewer natural disasters. The suffering of the average Christian is much more likely to be psychological, but if following Jesus isn’t costing you anything that we could group under the catch all category of ‘suffering’ then are you actually following him?
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Written by T. M. Suffield |
Saturday, September 30, 2023
You need some sense of where you’re going long term—that could be supporting missionaries, it could be sending people to pastor elsewhere, it could be planting churches or sites, it could be growing until you’re of a size to do a particular thing (though I’m wary of this last one, because growth soon becomes its own goal; growth is only good when in service of other goals). These are all valid, other things will be too, and they are a unique vision in the sense that not every church will do the same things with their limited resources.

It’s common these days to expect a church to have a specific vision, often expressed in a pithy statement about what they will or won’t be seeking to do in their location. Sometimes it’s accompanied by a mission statement—which sometimes is the same thing, but at least in business speak isn’t—though these are more common in churches that drew on a slightly older stream of business insights.
Is this a good idea? I’ve gone on record as thinking that lots of churches in the spaces I move in have missed what the church is for, and think this can be symptom of the same thing.
However, we should distinguish carefully because there is, I think, a good and a bad way to do this.
Good Vision
My late friend Zoltán Dörnyei was a Professor of Psycholinguistics who later in his life completed a PhD in Theology. One of his interests was the place of vision in the Christian life, due to his work on the importance of ‘mental imagery’ in acquiring a second language.
The scriptures tell us that without vision the people perish (Proverbs 29). In order to go anywhere and do anything, you need vision. In other words, to do something you have to first visualise it. Zoltan would teach that you needed to both appreciate the benefits of the thing you are considering and consider the costs of failure.
In church life, if the body is going to do anything—and we mean here acts as diverse as witness to their friends, move to a new venue, give their money, volunteer their time, support a project helping the poor, make friends who aren’t like them, and many more—then the elders of the church will need to articulate a ‘vision’ of why this is worthwhile as well as the potential costs of failing.
This isn’t business speak, it’s clarity and ‘leadership’. It’s also not anything super-fancy, for all you can be better or worse in how you go about it. By vision we mean simply painting a picture with words so that people understand why they might choose to take some concrete actions.
We can’t function without this, for all it can easily stray into manipulation—which is true of much of what we call leadership—where you make the vision sound compelling so that people are more likely to take those actions. That’s a tempting thing for a pastor to do, but honesty is integral for Christian leaders in these matters.
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Written by T. M. Suffield |
Monday, September 25, 2023
You don’t have to be best friends with everyone you invite over but we are supposed to welcome strangers. Do it by degrees, go a little further than before, but make your table a hub of life and hope to those who eat at it. Beyond the commands of scripture, we could talk about cultural benefits and statistics and do some delightful social science, but let’s not. Instead, think of this. When you were far off, a rebel and exile from the presence of the living God, he decided to lay a table for you to come and eat at.

One of the qualifications for elders is hospitality (1 Timothy 3, Titus 1), which means ‘welcoming strangers.’ While this is an absolute expectation of pastors, most of the qualifications describe the ordinary Christian life. We’re meant to be welcoming strangers, and we’re all meant to be doing it (Hebrews 13).
Yet, we’re terrible at it.
It’s natural and human to be better at welcoming people who are like you than people who aren’t. You have a better sense of what they would receive as a welcome, conversation flows more easily because you have more things in common, and though we are often uncomfortable with the fact of it we also prefer to welcome those like us. There’s something in all humans where like calls to like.
This can be a normal innocuous, human thing, or it can grow into the excesses of racism or other prejudices. We shouldn’t be overly dismayed if you notice that you find it easier to welcome people who are like you. Welcome requires walls, and the walls of your household are more likely to be comfortably shaped for those whose walls look similar. That’s life.
Christians are also compelled to step out of our worlds and welcome the stranger. This means the literal stranger, the person you haven’t met at all before—I am now used to meeting people for the first time in my kitchen, strange though that would sound to many people—but it also means the person who is different to you. Those differences can be small or large, sometimes we are trying to join hands over vast cultural gulfs. We are not commanded to be the best of friends (though you can be!) but to welcome.
It’s not easy to do the difficult thing and have people in your home who you think you’ll struggle to talk to or that you’ll struggle to feed (hot sauce for West African friends who think your food is dreadfully bland is a winner), but we should.
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Written by T. M. Suffield |
Saturday, September 16, 2023
If you spend your days in prayer, in the Bible, walking the hills, visiting the sick, dreaming about the future, and gazing on Jesus’ face? That is ministry. If you then spend the occasional day and your evenings and weekends weeping with those who weep, rejoicing with those who rejoice, enjoying life around the table with friends, and releasing others to do what Jesus did? That too is ministry.

Pastors hate being told that don’t have a real job—the old joke being that you only have to work one day a week. The thing is, it’s more true than you think.
I’ve been an elder in a couple of churches for around ten years now. Which makes me pretty green in the pastoral stakes, but not completely new to the game. I’ve not been a salaried elder in that time, though my ecclesiology makes me just as much a ‘Pastor’ or ‘ordained’ as those that have been. For ease in this post though I’ve used ‘pastor’ to distinguish those elders that are paid by their churches.
Churches have to follow all the same employment law as anyone else. Your trustees, or however that works in your setting, will have to ensure they are following the law. Someone has to sort payroll, make sure employment rights aren’t breached and all those things. That’s important, because it’s the law. I also think churches should be the very best employers around, following kingdom employment values rather the World’s. Your encouragement to your people to start businesses and employ people well will fall very flat if the church is a terrible employer.
But, in the midst of all that, I think it’s important that whatever the technical legal situation might be, no one thinks the Pastor or Pastors have jobs. Or salaries for that matter.
It is, I would contend, better to think in terms of stipends to cover the costs of living—which means whatever it costs to live in the area your church needs your pastor to live. It may be more than the median income if you expect him to have a slightly larger house so he can host large groups and meetings there, which is something you’d often expect him to be doing.
There’s not a legal difference here, by the way, not least in the UK anyway. You pay the same tax on a stipend to a salary, but I’m talking about the way that changing terms can (slowly) change thinking.
As a small detour, there is an argument in here for paying all of your staff the same amount. Becoming a Pastor from some other church role isn’t career advancement, it’s a release to follow the call of God on your life. Pay them all what’s needed to live, perhaps plus a housing allowance or similar for those who you require certain things of, and let them get on with releasing the people into ministry.
Not doing ministry, but that’s another story.
Why is this helpful? Because if you think you have a job you tend to think about contracted hours and about productivity.
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Written by T. M. Suffield |
Sunday, September 10, 2023
Life is very short, you have few decades, and you won’t make much of a mark on the world. So live. Eat good food with others. Have as many kids as you’re able to and raise them well. Give yourself to your local church and community. Build something that will outlast you. Follow Jesus with everything you’ve got.

Behind my desk is a wall of words: 16 quotes or phrases that encourage me, each done in attractive typography.
One of them is from N. D. Wilson, a writer whose wordsmithing I appreciate, even if I think we would think differently about very much where church and faith are concerned:
heartbeats cannot be hoarded
Which is obvious enough. It comes from his book Death by Living, where his central conceit is that lives are for living. If you have to die from anything (and you do) then living is probably the way to go.
I find the idea helpful. For me, when I’m tempted to hold back, or to not act through fear, or most often to not try because failure seems possible, even likely, I try to remind myself that my heartbeats are not for hoarding. What is the point of having ideas and not trying to do something with them? What is the point of living a life of bland mundanity where you don’t even attempt anything?
Did Jesus not tell us he came to live life to full?
We do have to be careful to define this as he did—so we’re not talking about life needing to be high octane, or that our achievements should be of a particular kind or variety. Instead, we’re talking about attempting to do things for the Lord.
And again, we should recalibrate our expectations, away from extraordinary, towards ordinary faithfulness.
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Written by T. M. Suffield |
Sunday, September 3, 2023
Rancière wants to remove our ability to stand on the shoulders of others. I recall Anthony Thiselton drilling into me in his hermeneutics classes that we were pygmies on the shoulders of giants. Rancière would have us cut the giants off at the knees and then merrily dance into the sunset. As Christians we must instead confess that the tradition matters, the past matters, those who have gone before us show us the way.

Some time last century Nietzsche killed God, or reported on our murder of the divine, anyway.
As the trends and forces which made him declare that God was dead accelerated we have systematically done the same to each authority figure we encountered, in diminishing scales of authority like repeatedly smashing Russian dolls, until they are all gone.
To have autonomy we have to not only kill God, but we must murder each authority figure that we find. After we subsume Nietzsche’s will to power it’s an inevitable climb up a hill of skulls. We become intellectual Oedipus’ who have to overturn the wisdom of the masters. We’ve stopped doing so actively long ago, instead we passively kill the wise daily.
This has allowed us to each enthrone ourselves as god of our demesne, and no god brooks rivals. So we separate one from another, each man an island, unmoored and solipsistically floating, lonely as a cloud.
Ok, so that’s overstated and overwrought—not least because reports of the Lord’s demise were greatly exaggerated, go and have a peek in the tomb—but what has happened in the last couple of centuries is a successive dethroning of God from every arena of public and private life. This is then followed, inevitably because vacuums must be filled, with a slow but inexorable enthroning of the self in each throne we find.
This is the backdrop, or part of it, that created the phenomenon we name (and inhabit) ‘expressive individualism.’ The problems with community that persist in our societies, well documented at this point, exist for all manner of structural reasons—and it can be difficult to tell cart from horse. However we arrived, we find ourselves in a place where we place community after our selves. I decry it and yet I do it, a product of the social imaginary in which I live and breath and have my being, it is difficult to not view the world through the prism of my ‘identity’ and sense of self.
Yet if we can break back into reality we might just discover a richer, wider, surprising world that wants to teach us stories of its and our maker. We might discover the world is much stranger and more delightful than we give it credit for, having explained away the mysteriousness and tied everything up in neat boxes. We’re wrong of course, but we need to begin to see the world again, to see the reality that everything we encounter participates in and points towards.
To see reality we will need teachers, and we’ve killed them all. Thank the Lord he’s the God of resurrection.
Not so long ago I worked at a different University where I was responsible for helping academics develop their pedagogy. This included evidence-based evaluations of whether new teaching methods ‘worked,’ coaching academics on their practice, and reading a lot of academic studies in pedagogic journals.
Once at a conference we were extolled the virtues of Jacques Rancière, a philosopher who was interested in ‘emancipatory pedagogy’ among other ideas.
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Written by T. M. Suffield |
Saturday, September 2, 2023
Discipleship is slow. Gamification is all about quick wins and rewarding incremental progress. Discipleship, the lifelong obedience towards God that transforms us into the likeness of his son, is often incremental, but it’s never quick. If anyone suggests a quick win for an issue of character or obedience, run away from them.

I was speaking to a friend and he suggested a startling thought: we want our discipleship to be gamified.
On the face of it I could shrug it off, he and I are millennials, gamification is a Gen Z problem. They’re the generation that sees progress in terms of levelling up. We’re the I’m amazing, I don’t have a problem generation.
Ah.
By gamified we mean having clear achievements, progress meters and rewards for levelling up: life being like a video game, and one where I beat the game instead of the other players. When I last worked in the private sector I ran graduate programmes at Rolls-Royce, and it was touted as the next big thing to include in graduate programmes and development activities, there was a desire to gamify to ensure that young talent was kept motivated and engaged through their training. I would be surprised if they got that far, the engineering industry would itself be resistant, but it was thinking ahead of its time.
Then, in the early 2010s all of our graduates were Millennials, the ‘participation trophy’ generation. Now, all of their graduates would be Gen Z, the ‘level up’ generation.
I see this in my own life. I track what I read on a website called Goodreads. I found it helpful to keep a log of how much I read in a year, and to easily look back at what the books were. It both encouraged me that I read more than I think and gave me a tool to review a year’s reading to see if I want to make changes to what I read the following year.
I do wonder how much my reading output increased once I started logging it though. Things change when we observe them, that’s basic quantum physics, and basic human behaviour too. There’s something motivating about my annual target (I’ve pitched for a lower 52 books this year, but the homepage helpfully tells me that I’m ‘7 books ahead’). I stopped logging how far through a book I was because I wanted to mark down the next page number rather than read the book, I wonder if the reading challenge has a similar effect (Ed: in the last two years I’ve stopped doing this, for this reason).
Have you ever found yourself wanting to finish a book to say you’ve finished it rather than to enjoy its pages? That’s gamification. When we remember that Goodreads is owned by Amazon, we might also see why they might desire me to finish more books.
Technology changes us in ways we might not expect. It’s difficult to throw useful tech away in monastic pique because it either is, or masquerades as being, useful. Telling the difference is harder than you might think, and your soul needs you to.
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