Written by T. M. Suffield |
Monday, August 21, 2023
Discipleship is inefficient. It’s slow, it’s messy, it can involve going the wrong way for large periods of time, it’s painful, and it always involves suffering. Berry argues that we have come to understand nature to engage in production rather than work in cycles. Churches don’t ‘produce’ anything, but I think if we think of trees as conveyor belts for the making of fruit then we can end up thinking the same way about Christian ministry: we do these things to get that fruit. Instead, trees die and rise again each year bursting with fruit and then dying and then bursting with fruit.

Neil Postman argued that our metaphors demonstrate our thought patterns. I’ve argued that our metaphors fence our thought patterns such that we can’t think outside of them.
I suspect the relationship here flows in both directions rather than simply downstream, but metaphor and thought connect in important ways. When we use machine language to describe ourselves, we both reveal that we think we’re machines and we persuade ourselves that we are machines.
Reality, as it always does, pushes back. We should be concerned by thinking that humans can recharge, because it undermines the Biblical reality of rest in the gathered people of God. We should be concerned by the idea that we need to process things rather than think or feel them.
Wendell Berry, in his essay ‘Agricultural Solutions for Agricultural Problems,’ argues that after the industrial revolution the machinery metaphor has changed how we think. He highlights three examples, each of which I think is worth reflecting from the perspective of church ministry.
Efficiency
Berry argues that we now see efficiency as an end. We assume that the best thing for each thing we do is for it be run efficiently, because that’s what a good machine looks like.
We would commonly criticize public services for being inefficient, but why should a particular service that the government offers be efficient? I want to react against the question—after all, they’re spending my money as a taxpayer—but I think seeing efficiency as an inherently good thing is a product of these shifts, and an arguably less humane one. This is not saying that efficiency is bad as a means to good ends, but it becomes bad when it is pursued as an end in itself.
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Written by T. M. Suffield |
Sunday, July 30, 2023
All food is a gift, whether we grow it or we buy it or it comes directly from the windows of heaven as flakes in the desert (Exodus 16, Malachi 3). We don’t have anything which isn’t a gift from the hand of God (James 1), whatever proximate causes there may be, the Lord is always the ultimate giver.

Have you ever considered what you eat and how you eat it from a theological angle? It’s a conviction of mine that everything is theological, and that God’s people can speak to all of life with his word and reflection. There’s nothing that the Bible doesn’t speak to, for all we must admit that some matters it speaks to more tangentially than others.
There’s a whole literature on the theology of food, which I must admit to not having read. As a result, this post is brief not so much in length but in breadth: this is a sketch of the contours of how we think about food and about eating.
Food is Not Fuel
We live in a moment that wants us to think that we’re machines. We eat to ‘refuel’ our bodies to go again. There’s obviously something true in that we can’t go without eating for all that long (though it’s a heck of a lot longer than most people think, as anyone who has done some serious fasting can attest to), but we don’t eat to ‘refuel’ as though it were a required task that we can forget about once it’s done.
The trees in the garden were ‘good for food’ (Genesis 2), which is to say that they were to be enjoyed. Bacon sandwiches are not fuel, I’m sure they allow my body to continue but they’re also art. Any suggestion that a good future would be one when we don’t have to prepare or eat food—which is common in science fiction—is not a good or godly vision of life.
Food is a Gift
All food is a gift, whether we grow it or we buy it or it comes directly from the windows of heaven as flakes in the desert (Exodus 16, Malachi 3). We don’t have anything which isn’t a gift from the hand of God (James 1), whatever proximate causes there may be, the Lord is always the ultimate giver.
When we dig into rich chocolate sundaes and slice our knives into tender steak these are good gifts that God has given us. When cheese exists, how could God not love us? When eggs exist, how can we doubt the creator?
Gluttony is a Sin, Feasting is Not
Any good thing that we become addicted to is a problem (Philippians 3).
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Written by T.M. Suffield |
Wednesday, July 26, 2023
It’s always worth noticing that the command to make disciples is not just make lots of new Christians, but also therefore to grow all those Christians up into maturity. Maturity might include sometimes not associating with certain people for your own sake—immaturity definitely should.

When reading through 2 Timothy with some folk a few weeks back, I got a number of questions about some of Paul’s instructions that seemed very strange to my fellow readers.
There are a number of people that Paul seems to not want Timothy to associate with. He lists some individuals but then at the start of chapter 3 describes a long list of character traits before saying ‘avoid such people’ in verse 5.
The question as people framed it was ‘why should we not associate with them, surely we want them to hear the gospel?’
I answered the question briefly, for the sake of time, explaining that you might go in thinking you’re going to pull other people out but actually you will be pulled in. For our own sakes we should be careful who we eat with (1 Corinthians 10).
I could have gone on to describe that in our day the most winning ‘strategy’ for the gospel is institutional subcultures… but I didn’t and I don’t want to write that post today either.
I’d like to draw out two threads that the questions revealed in people’s thinking, that I suspect are quite common.
Who are these people?
The assumption is that these people need to be preached the gospel, because they’re sinners. That’s a reasonable inference. What I think we miss is that, most likely, these people—these lovers of self and of money, proud, arrogant, disobedient to parents, abusive… he goes on at length—are within the church.
How do we know that? Context helps, Paul is instructing Timothy on how to deal with false teachers and quarrelling within the church. Beyond that though, the passage directly tells us: one of the dispositions listed is ‘having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power.’
To have the appearance of godliness, you need to be within the visible church.
Now, you might want to say that these apparent sinners within the church need to be called to repentance in the gospel. You’re right that they do. It’s fascinating then that Paul’s advice to Timothy is to avoid them.
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Written by T. M. Suffield |
Monday, July 17, 2023
It’s vital that while we set our aims—whether to be a witness in the workplace, a pastor, raise a family to serve the Lord, or my own specific desires and calling that I’ve written about a bit—that they are godly (all those examples are), but that we think that success is being obedient to God. If it fails but we failed well, by which I mean obediently in holiness and repenting of our sin where it is to be found, then that is successful in the kingdom.

Well if God’s called you, it’ll work out.

I’ve been told this lots of times myself, I think I believe it half of the time. But it’s not true. Not in the way we mean it anyway.
What we’re saying is, you’re going to do this risky seeming thing on the basis of your faith that God wants you to do it, so the risky thing will work out, right? It follows, except it’s not my experience. I’ve followed God into several things in my life that’s it’s unclear why I was ‘called’ (assuming I’m right that I was, but let’s leave that question aside for now), and what I was attempting certainly wasn’t successful in any real sense that I could describe. Neither, in most instances, has it been the kind of abject failure that might make you decide you weren’t called after all, though I’ve certainly questioned these things many times.
The original statement is true in a sense, if God called you, the end for which he called you will definitely work out. The problem is that God does every action for a thousand ends, most of which are hidden from us, and it’s possible that none of them are the grand end that you’re thinking of.
To take an example that isn’t from my own life—imagine you moved to plant a church. Surely that means that the church will grow, even though it might be hard graft? I think most of us would realise that isn’t true objectively but would expect it to be true for us. Sometimes church plants fail. Does that mean that the planter wasn’t called by God? I don’t think that follows at all, the Lord is much more concerned with our character and with the individual person-to-person pastoring we do than in our institutions (though I believe he loves those too).
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Written by T. M. Suffield |
Thursday, July 6, 2023
My “buffer” has been eroded to about eight pieces ahead (four weeks), which is less than I’d like and produces stress of its own. So, my plan is to take a writing “rest’” over the summer with the aim of building up my buffer. You’re still going to get two posts a week, but through July and August one of those will be a repost: either some of my very early work that no one read or a “greatest hits” piece. You can decide which are which.

Occasionally this throws up some odd circumstances, like when I wrote about how the country felt after the Queen’s death two months later, and then the following January. Funnily enough, no one was that interested. The lesson here is the one I’ve generally been trying to learn: you don’t need to hear from me on current affairs.
If you really want to hear my hot takes, you can always follow me on Twitter. I like a lot of pictures of cats.
We live in a world of what Douglas Rushkoff calls Present Shock, where the ever-present social internet, 24 hour news, and the push notification means that—as his subtitle puts it—everything happens now. Neil Postman’s genealogy of the media malaise, in his seminal Amusing Ourselves to Death, starts with the way that the invention of the telegraph meant that news arrived at ever increasing speed until the disaster somewhere a long way away is now a thing that we are living through as well. For all this might have positive impacts for philanthropy and our ability to organise humanitarian relief, Mark Sayers points out in Strange Days the way that also breeds ‘ambient anxiety.’ We are anxious about things over there despite their impact on us being negligible or difficult to trace.
While quality Christian current affairs writing is valuable to us, as we learn how to think through the events of the day Christianly, it’s not my niche. I’d rather jump off the events I’m living through into a broader principle that might be relevant in a few months time. We desperately need more thoughtful Christian writing. I think my blog is helping me do that, though we shouldn’t mistake this for that, my most thoughtful writing is article length and so happens in other people’s journals. We need more of those too.
I’m going to continue writing cold takes because it works for me. I don’t think everyone needs to, but I imagine more of us need to, so I commend the practice to you. Here are three reasons I think it makes me a better writer.
It’s Good for My Soul
I’d like more people to read my stuff. I’d prefer to not be doing the job I do to make ends meet, I’d love to be thinking, teaching, writing, and mentoring full time. That’s probably a long way off if it’s even possible, but it’s incredibly tempting to make a name for myself in the quickest way possible. If you build a platform, it’s more likely that you can get paid for Christian thinking and teaching.
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Written by T. M. Suffield |
Sunday, June 11, 2023
If you want hearts to change with minds you need to change what we do as well as what we think. Try celebrating the Supper more frequently, as the climax to your meeting, give it time and I think the Lord will do his own work. Habit combined with the Holy Spirit is an unstoppable combination.

It surprises many people I talk to, but it’s true that the more you do something the more you like it.
Most of us assume that we keep things special by only doing them occasionally. There is a pleasure that comes from the occasional activity, but what we love we do. Our tastes are formed by what we put ‘in our mouth.’ I’ve told the story before of my colleague who gave up sugar, retraining her palate such that she no longer liked sugar, but carrots were wonderfully sweet. Our habits form us.
Which means we should think about habits carefully. If you want to love reading the Bible, read the Bible. You can train your loves by choosing discipline and we need to know this so that we persevere through the time when we don’t love something until we do.
This, framed the other way around, is why habitual sin is difficult to break: because we love it. We don’t want to, and the Spirit reframes our loves for us, but we’re trained by what we do. Our affections are more malleable than you might think.
This has lots of applications in the Christian life and in the Church. If you pray, you’ll grow to love prayer. If you stop going to church, you’ll stop wanting to. There are a thousand other examples.
Of course, there are a multiple of reasons that it’s not as simple as that to retrain our habits.
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Written by T. M. Suffield |
Sunday, June 4, 2023
If we chase after experiences we won’t find them, but that if we look to worship God in spirit and truth, we will have dramatic and dynamic encounters with God by his Spirit that will change us, change our churches, change our towns and cities, shake the foundations of the earth, challenge the powers successfully, and occasionally be just a little bit strange.

In my last post in this series filling out my ‘eucharismatic’ manifesto, I argued that the church exists to worship God, and therefore our primary purpose is worshipping God.
However, if you’ve been following along, you might think that this is an odd first step when I have argued that the church is defined by her encounters with God, which seems to shift the focus to us. That’s not right, church isn’t about us, it’s about God.
Except, I’m a Reformed Charismatic; Calvinistic in my understanding of salvation (and more). Which means I want to argue an important point that affects what happens on Sundays, but also everything else in the entire cosmos. It’s this: God always moves first.
When I repent what I discover is that in the counsels of the Almighty God, he first chose me and elected me to life, the Spirit regenerating my heart so that I can respond in faith to his call and repent. When God calls, he makes what he calls for happen.
When I move towards God and meet him, I will always find that he has moved first. God’s kindness is gratuitous, it overflows, what we call grace or gift is how God always works with his people.
It’s because of the Lord’s gracious posture towards us, his movement, that we can speak of the gathered Church as a series of encounters with God, or even of the Church itself as the mystery of the bride encountering the husband, the son encountering the father, the army encountering the general, the Temple bricks encountering the divine presence of Yahweh filling the holy of holies.
When we gather to worship God, he will have graciously ‘presenced’ himself with us. And before you cry that ‘God is everywhere’ and so can’t be especially present, you’re going to need to go and look at the holy of holies again.
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Written by T. M. Suffield |
Saturday, May 27, 2023
So much of the faith is weirder than we’re used to thinking, not just the sensational stuff like angels and Nephilim, but ‘simple’ concepts like Union with Christ. It’s the heart of the Christian view of salvation, yet I rarely hear it talked about in our churches. It’s weird, it’s enchanted, it makes us much smaller and the world much bigger—there are depths beneath your life that we cannot fathom, ‘full of mystery and hope’ as B. F. Westcott puts it.

Walter Bruggeman, in his book Interpretation and Obedience, said that:
The key pathology of our time, which seduces us all, is the reduction of the imagination, so that we are too numbed, satiated, and co-opted to do imaginative work.
We’ve lost our ability to imagine, and the world is flattened for it. The horns of Elfland are silenced, but for those who have heard them there is a hollowness to the sound of this little world, that yearns for something greater.
That yearning, that longing, is the spiritual gift of dissatisfaction, and the ground of joy. Imagination is one of the ways to get to it.
Perhaps you aren’t convinced that we’ve lost our ability to imagine, you can imagine perfectly well, thank you very much! And you can find flights of imaginative fancy cast in glorious technicolour on large and small screens everywhere you go. This is of course, true.
I could point to the two pitfalls of Hollywood at the moment: either the nostalgia trap where we remake old stories again less well or retell the stories of very recent history, or the sequel trap where the films that really make money are just the same story churned out over and over again in different configurations (here’s looking at you MCU).
At the bottom they are of course the same pathology; they’re a lack of new stories to tell. Though, to gently nuance myself, telling the same story in different configurations is an imaginative literary trope that we call ‘typology’ and is all over the Bible. I don’t think the writers of Marvel films are doing this, but you could do something that has repetitive elements with great literary artifice if you are a very skilled writer.
Bruggeman was writing before this was the case in our visual storytelling, though, and you would be able to come up with counterexamples that demonstrate originality, I’m sure. The real way we can tell we’re losing our imagination is that all the fun stuff is now confined to fiction.
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Written by T. M. Suffield |
Friday, May 12, 2023
Putting aside that it’s easier to understand a text when you read it all, it is how they were written. Paul expected his letters to be read as a whole and for the church to hear them like this. There’s nothing wrong with reading shorter passages and expounding them—the Bible itself does this frequently—but if we do so without ever catching the whole then we are missing something we’re supposed to have.

A couple of weeks ago I ran an event in Birmingham called ‘Reading 2 Timothy‘, where we did exactly that: read the book of 2 Timothy over the course of a Saturday morning.
It’s a Bible study, which probably doesn’t seem that revolutionary. It probably isn’t that revolutionary, to be honest, but I’ve not seen it done like this elsewhere.
The aim is to read all of the book, within the timeframe we’ve given ourselves so that we can read it in context.
There are six reasons why that’s a good idea:
Context
When we read a particular passage in the context of the surrounding sentences, we understand get insight into what that particular passage does or doesn’t mean.
We can widen the same principle out to the book as a whole: when we read a passage in the context of the whole book we get insight into what it means.
Thread
But, more importantly, when we read books of the Bible as a whole we start to understand the thread of the argument they’re making. Most people I know struggle to grasp a sense of a book as a book, there are multiple reasons here, but one of them is that we read in an atomistic way. When we read as a whole, we can follow the story that’s laid out for us.
Structure
We also then get to ask questions like, “why did the author put this paragraph here” assuming that the structure of the book itself will teach us.
It’s also difficult to notice the literary artistry of a book without being able to read it through in a sitting (or in four gulps across a morning in this specific case).
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Written by T. M. Suffield |
Thursday, May 11, 2023
Son of Man is the bigger and grander title, and we should read it in two ways: one as here in Psalm 8, the Son of Adam, the Serpent-slayer. The other as in Daniel 7, where Daniel extends the promise of the new Adam to show us that he is God come himself. Son of Man, after Daniel has prophesied at least, is a messianic title larger than just any King, and it’s a title that claims you are the one who will sit at the right hand of the Ancient of Days.

Psalm 8 is about Jesus. Which is not a ‘big’ claim, the Psalms are the book of Christ and they all tell his story in one way or another.
Psalm 8 is a kingly Psalm, that connects itself to the creation and the early chapters of Genesis. We could fruitfully notice the parallels with Psalms 18 and 118, and the way they’re followed by a series of Psalms that also have parallels (9, 19, 119) that echo the initial pillars at the start of the Psalms (1 & 2). We could also note the similarities in those numbers.
But that, interesting though it is, is not what I want to draw your attention to.
In verse 4, here from the ESV, we read:
what is man that you are mindful of him,
and the son of man that you care for him?
Which sounds all wonderfully poetic, and we assume it means something like the NIV’s rendering:
what is mankind that you are mindful of them,
human beings that you care for them?
Except that I think that’s missing the point, and like the NIV often does, scrubbing Jesus out of the Psalms in the name of inclusivity. If the ‘man’ here was meant to stand for ‘humanity’ then broadening the meaning to clarify and update the usage makes perfect sense.
Let’s follow the thread of the Psalm to see if that’s the case.
In verse one we have an affirmation of God’s ends in creating the world; God created in order to making his name majestic in all the earth:
O LORD, our Lord,
how majestic is your name in all the earth!
You have set your glory above the heavens.
We end in the same place in verse nine. David then says that the Lord has established his strength from the mouths of babes, because of his foes,
Out of the mouth of babies and infants,
you have established strength because of your foes,
to still the enemy and the avenger.
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