Written by T.M. Suffield |
Tuesday, May 9, 2023
We need difference—the difference between the Church and world is what we usually call holiness—and then we need to behave like Christians and radically welcome people within the bounds of our homes and churches, without having to knock down all the walls, expecting that the encounters around the table will change all of us.

Sounds paradoxical, doesn’t it? We think we know that to welcome is the very opposite of having a wall up. We’re wrong.
Ivan Illich taught that the welcome of hospitality requires a threshold. By definition, we need to move over a threshold in order to be welcomed. If there is no threshold to move over, I can’t welcome you.
To put it another way, if someone isn’t in some sense an outsider, I can’t welcome them into my space. Why not? Because if they’re already an insider there’s nothing to welcome them into.
We live in cultures that don’t like this from two angles. Either, we loath the idea of walls—groups that are not accessible to everyone without a process of entry—from the angle of inequality, imagining that the only way to get true equity is to tear down the walls.
Or, we are so radically individualistic that we’re instinctively allergic to the idea of welcoming someone into something private enough to have walls. From this angle we either bridle at the idea of walls because we can only imagine welcoming people in the broad public square, or because we cannot imagine welcoming someone into our lives.
I don’t think either of these thrusts is at the surface, these operate at the level of the stories that we live by, the ‘Social Imaginary’ that describes the space we live in, but that’s why the phrase “welcome requires walls” sounds paradoxical to us.
Tables
I think this is an important concept for Christians to get hold of if we think, as I do, that hospitality is the solution to many of our societal problems. If hospitality should define both the church and the ‘city,’ and is a broad principle that flows to us from the Cross and is encountered at the Lord’s Supper, then we need to understand that tearing down the walls doesn’t help us.
To take the most literal example, if you come into my home then I’m going to do my best to make you welcome. We will eat together and I will endeavour to treat you like you belong. Nevertheless, it isn’t your home, because if it was then I wouldn’t need to welcome you. You must cross the threshold into my world.
My world comes with my rules, even if we’re talking about as mundane things as which items you can stack in the dishwasher after we’ve eaten, or where the teaspoons live. If I’m a good host then I may well try to make you welcome by shifting some of my rules in your direction: perhaps I won’t serve something that I’ve discovered you don’t like to avoid making the threshold too difficult to cross.
You are still crossing into my world. This is always the case when we eat with someone, we enter their world. That’s as it’s meant to be—not least because we learn how to behave at a table by the grand hospitality of God in the Lord’s Supper. We enter his world as we come to eat, which has his rules. We’re invited, we’re welcome, our transgressions are forgiven, but we don’t pretend for one minute that this is our table.
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Written by T. M. Suffield |
Saturday, May 6, 2023
We think God’s job is to make our lives nice and easy and straightforward and most of all comfortable. It’s not, and that’s not the path of joy. There is no joy to be found there, only disappointment multiplied. God instead wants to give us himself, nothing more (as if there were more!) and nothing less. There’s a sticking point, though: the gift of God in the pit is not receiving, which will drive our modern mind mad. It’s longing.

Larry Crabb tells story after story in his book Shattered Dreams of people whose lives have been upended by grief and pain and the unexpected mundanity of living.
Tears have become my deepest form of worship, some reflect. They discover deep desires for God, and then a new hurt on top of the cavalcade of grief: he seems to have disappeared. We don’t know where he is. We can’t find him.
This hurt is, Crabb asserts, a hopeful hurt. We find as we push into the pain that there is joy available in God, even if we aren’t happy at all. How does that work? It works because we learn to long. And longing is the ground of joy, of participation in God himself for his own sake.
We struggle with the idea of unfulfilled desire. Many of us will have been able to get anything we want, until we can’t. Even then we’re surrounded by people who can get what they want, often instantly. Even deferred fulfilment sounds like a wound to our machine-catechised souls.
You’re not a smartphone, you’re a tree. And, as Joel Ansett points out, in his song Tragedy is Not the End, your tears are shaped like seeds. That longing, that unfulfilled desire for a world that’s right, that we treat as though experiencing it is the very depths of Hell, is supposed to be a signpost to something greater. It’s longing that takes our hand and leads us towards joy. As Lewis famously said in The Weight of Glory, if we discover a desire within us that cannot be met by anything in the world, then maybe, just maybe, we’re made for another world.
I don’t mean to be trite; longing is a good guide but the path to joy is lined with daggers and full of hairpin corners. It is no easy road. Nothing worth having is ever easy.
Grief is most often how we first learn to long, whether the dull, weary griefs of older relatives dying, or the sudden sharp griefs of loved ones snatched from us unexpectedly, or the aching absence of the grief of what will never be however much we miss it, or the tiny death-by-pinpricks of the grief of dreams smashed into a thousand pieces.
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Written by T. M. Suffield |
Sunday, April 30, 2023
We’re meant to grow up into Christ (Ephesians 4). And yet doing so will make us delighted children. There’s something so wonderfully restful about the idea of being able to take pleasure in the same thing over and over again. It’s a sign of the way sin has twisted our tastes and desires that we are unable to do so.

There’s a quote from G.K. Chesterton I’d like to share with you:
Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.
It’s one of the 16 quotes I have pasted up on my wall above my desk where I’m writing this post. I could think about it endlessly.
I wonder if to some of us it sounds oddly irreverent, suggesting that God is like a child, even though he asked us to be like them (Matthew 18). I think his impulse is right, that sin makes us old—in the sense of decayed—and that the regenerating power of the Spirit is new life in the sense of youth.
We should be careful here, we live in an age obsessed with youth in a way that Chesterton didn’t, and it’s also paradoxically true that we are supposed to mature (1 Corinthians 14) through our Christian lives. We’re meant to grow up into Christ (Ephesians 4).
And yet doing so will make us delighted children. There’s something so wonderfully restful about the idea of being able to take pleasure in the same thing over and over again. It’s a sign of the way sin has twisted our tastes and desires that we are unable to do so.
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Written by T. M. Suffield |
Saturday, April 15, 2023
Essentially, dear sweet people who love Jesus very much think it’s Godly to absolutely crush themselves with responsibilities in and around the church community. It isn’t. Please stop it. This might be motivated by a desire to ‘work’ our salvation or to ‘strive’ towards Jesus. It might be motivated by a sense that we’re supposed to kill ourselves for Jesus (no, we’re meant to kill our selves—harder but less hard work). I think most of the time it’s neither, it’s more likely that they’re good hearted people who take on more bit by bit over time and don’t think it’s OK to say “no” to something.

So often I meet people in churches I’ve been involved in or from elsewhere who are working incredibly hard for Jesus. It’s laudable but it rarely looks to me like the Way of Jesus.
Jesus taught a way of ease, with kind yokes and light burdens (Matthew 11). We should be disciplined (1 Corinthians 9), but we shouldn’t be driving ourselves into the ground.
So often I meet people in churches I’ve been involved in or from elsewhere who are drifting for Jesus. It’s distressing, but I wonder if the church has really done very much to help them get away from it.
Stop Being Martyrs
I think that one of the reasons some people are drifting and others are driving themselves into the ground is because the overworked don’t ask those with no discipline to do anything.
I understand why, ‘ask a busy person if you want something done,’ the business proverb goes. It’s true too, as anyone who has led people knows. They’re competent and do things well and it’s all straightforward. Great, but those aren’t values of the Kingdom. I love it when everything in my church is done really well, why wouldn’t I? But when that gets in the way of asking something else to do anything it’s not a good desire. It’s actually my sinful desire for perfection and it needs to get in the bin.
I don’t think the only problem is that the leaders won’t ask them to do things, they don’t ask because it’s easier to ask the same old people. Which isn’t good, but why do those same old people keep saying, “yes!” with such (fake) enthusiasm? I think it’s because they’re martyrs.
This is especially prevalent in people who helped to plant a church or are on staff, but it can appear wider than that. Essentially, dear sweet people who love Jesus very much think it’s Godly to absolutely crush themselves with responsibilities in and around the church community. It isn’t.
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Written by T. M. Suffield |
Friday, April 7, 2023
The answer to formation is not “more preaching” it’s community. You need to be in thick community with other Christians who you talk to every day. That takes years of work, so you need to start by starting. It’s OK if the good stuff comes for your generation’s children, keep plugging away at genuine community. Don’t assume that a midweek group is this, though it can be a place to get to know people to do it with. If you’re a church leader, your people won’t live this way unless you do.

It’s common for people to point out that in the average church you’ve got at best two hours of people’s time a week to use to form them towards Christ—you might get a third of them for another two hours midweek—and everything else that is trying to form them has about six and a half days to do so.
It’s a fatal equation. We start with the fact that we are being catechised by everything we view on our phones, all the TV we watch, the games we play, the ads we see, and a bunch of structural artifacts in the world at large. All of it shapes us.
The classic way of framing it is that the Christian is more formed by their favourite Insta influencer than by their Pastor. That might be true. I think this is a real problem, but to get the shape of it right I’d like to push back in two directions on the way I’ve framed it.
Firstly, the things that are forming us are forming us in lots of directions. Some of them are bad, some of them are explicitly towards Christ, the vast majority are mixed phenomena. For example, it’s not so easy to say that the motorcar is explicitly terrible and should be eschewed by all people, even though it has had a long series of unintended effects on the way we understand and interact with the world and the church, some of which I think are really bad.
It’s not that the content we’re consuming might happen to be Christian, I’m a little leary of the idea of Christian content in the first place, but even if we assume it’s all good stuff my point is that all the other things that form us do so in a variety of directions. In other words, we can formed in ‘good’ directions that Christians can use to form themselves towards Christ by things that are not necessarily forming them towards Christ per se. All truth is God’s truth.
Though, I’m not sanguine about the average Christian’s ability to find dredge gold from the bottom of a murky pond without swallowing a whole lot of pond water. We need training and formation to learn how to do this.
Secondly, I don’t think counting the number of hours we do something is the only way to see the impact it has on us. Preaching, for example, is an act of encountering Christ by the Spirit in the text. It is inherently more powerful than the vast majority of everyday activities.
However, it’s also the case that we think modern devices like smartphones have greater formative effects on us than most technology that existed before them. I say ‘we think’ because everything here is very new and we’ve opened ourselves to a whole world without really thinking it through. The principalities and powers are strongly in evidence.
The problem isn’t as simple as counting the hours—which means the solution won’t be to be ‘in church’ for more hours than we’re outside of it.
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Written by T.M. Suffield |
Tuesday, March 28, 2023
When we use inhuman words to describe ourselves, we slowly imagine ourselves less human. In time we become less human because our metaphors matter. In the church, the great Spirit-filled vehicle of becoming more human as we become more like Jesus, more like the world that sin made us forget, we should be especially careful to use metaphors which advance our shared humanity.

The words that we use create the categories that we think in. Language is upstream of thought.
Which sounds like a completely crazed thing to say, I imagine, though I’ve touched on the concept before when explaining why we can’t be ‘fixed’ and why ‘family’ is not a helpful term to use for the church, unless you actually are one.
The metaphors that we use are often inspired by the world around us, but they come with an implicit set of assumptions that then create categories for us. Almost as though our metaphors are ploughs that run furrows down the fields of our minds. To think across the furrows is difficult work and can sound bizarre to those who thoughts flow neatly and clearly along them.
This is the principle at play in Orwell’s famous novel 1984. Language is tightly controlled, with the dictionary being reprinted regularly, because the words we do and don’t use surround the edges of our thinking like fences that keep the sheep from straying. It’s a rare sheep who decides to play on the other side of the fence anyway—these madmen are sometimes those who revolutionise the way we approach our lives and thoughts, and sometimes they are just madmen.
Language makes an incredible tool of control, and often unwittingly we let forces we are unaware of control us through its use.
You can see this at play in most of our lives. To take a church example, imagine a church is Complementarian by conviction—which means that they understand the Bible’s witness to be that elders or pastors are, by definition, men—like mine is. Then imagine that they are concerned that their application of true Biblical principles can unjustly prevent women from serving in ways that God would call them to: I think this is common, though plenty of Complementarians would disagree with me.
That church then calls women into a variety of ‘leadership’ positions that are not eldership, depending on their convictions as to where they draw those lines. If they start to use the same terminology to speak of all of these various people, office-bearers or not, perhaps calling them all ‘leaders’ generically, then to begin with their Complementarian convictions will be fine.
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Written by T.M. Suffield |
Wednesday, March 22, 2023
The God who spoke the world into being wrote your name in his own blood on his hand. One day, when the heavens are ripped away and the earth remade in fire, you and I can sit with him and look at them together. We will find…our names, written before time, written in time, written forever.

Recently, my wife’s Step-Grandmother died. Along with a plethora of other things, we inherited from her house stuffed with treasures a very large Bible.
It’s about the size of a PC tower—they don’t make them like they used to. It’s the Step-Grandmother’s family Bible, it has all her family’s names written in it going back many generations, culminating in her name at the end.
There’s space, we’re quite tempted to add our own names. Which got us thinking. You see, it’s sort of scandalous for us to write our names in this Bible. Not because it’s old or because it’s a Bible or because you shouldn’t write in books (I prefer a pencil, but if you don’t write in a book how do you carry on the conversation the author started?). It feels scandalous because it’s not our family.
There’s no blood relationship between us and her, and she married into the family after my mother-in-law had left home, so there’s not such a strong familial relationship either. We’re connected on a family tree, related by law, but it’s a relation that feels estranged and technical rather than real.
But we could write our names in, because she is family, despite it all being a bit nominal. Writing our names in could mean we join the family.
Which, by way of analogy, is what Jesus has done for us.
Jesus & His Book
In Daniel 7 we are told a magnificent vision of the Ancient of Days, and that he opens ‘the books.’ What books? By Daniel 12, the mighty Michael is poised to deliver all whose names are found in the book. So, it’s a book of names.
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Written by T. M. Suffield |
Saturday, March 18, 2023
Firstly, we read the Bible and then we read it some more. Pay attention to the patterns and shapes we find there. These are the patterns and shapes of the way God moves in history. Does God do a new thing (Isaiah 43)? Yes, but in the shape of his purposes, given to us in a book that teaches us to read our lives. Keep reading the Bible. Secondly, we (you’ll never guess it) read the Bible in community. Our friends who are also attentive to the Bible’s patterns and God’s ways help us read events. 

I’m the sort of person who spots patterns and thinks in patterns.
That’s not by itself better or worse than someone who thinks in a different way (or doesn’t have a typology for how they think—which is the hallmark of a pattern-person), it’s just a thing. It has strengths: I can see that these three pieces of information we have coalesce like this and actually connect to these other four things which together gives us… you get the vague idea.
It has weaknesses, not least that for most people if I filled in the gaps above (the connection between the wool industry and expressive individualism, perhaps?) I wouldn’t take most people on the jumps with me. That doesn’t make my hearers dumb, it means I didn’t explain it well.
Or, the bigger weakness, is that when you think in patterns you see patterns including where they aren’t. It’s a problem when you have three pieces of data that fit a compelling narrative that indicates a bad thing, but that bad thing turns out to not be true.
Your pattern spotting was off, you did 2+2=5 without having to be in Room 101. We all do it, we make assumptions that seem reasonable enough based on the data we have, which tends to include all our previous experiences, but in this case that wasn’t the right pattern. It’s a thing everyone has to be aware of, but especially those of us who are particularly prone to pattern thinking.
Hearing from God
One of my tendencies is then to expect God to work in patterns too. Which can sound like crazy behaviour: we’ve all met the person who reads the hand of God into every single instance of their lives in ways that seem over-the-top to the rest of us. Maybe you being late this morning was simply because you got up late rather than all-out assault by the forces of Hell?
And it can be detrimental to us, we see a sequence of events that if only God did this thing next it feels like it would be fitting or redemptive, and we’ve had some vague prophetic words that appear to confirm us in that direction. It’s easy to start to read the pattern as though it were the hand of the Lord when all that’s really happening is we’re overlaying reality with our wish fulfilment.
I’ve been burned that way in the past.
Except, God does work in patterns. It’s hard to read the Bible and think otherwise. We might call it typology—where an older person or office or object or event prefigures or consciously images a later one—but it’s essentially a pattern or shape to the story.
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Written by T.M. Suffield |
Wednesday, March 15, 2023
Lamentations describes Yahweh in the language of enemies time and time again, and goes back-and-forth with the appropriateness of this designation. It asks us difficult questions about whether God did this terrible thing to them, and even though it’s clear that it’s deserved, it questions whether it’s gratuitous and causes us to wonder what we think of a God who wounds his people.

Lamentations is a difficult book. I’ve been reading through it with my Bible reading group recently and it’s heavy going.
There’s much to gain, but when you read through it in your mornings you can slide through it fairly quickly. When you spend a few hours per chapter slowly chewing it over around a table the emotional weight of it starts to settle on you like a heavy blanket, and the challenging questions it raises cannot be ignored.
For all it’s been challenging, I’ve been particularly struck by the echoes of the rest of scripture we’ve pulled out together. It’s a poetic book that heavily references the prophets, the Psalms and the Torah, so in that sense it’s replete with intertextual references, but it’s the New Testament echoes that I’ve found most interesting.
In chapter 2, a chapter that expresses the destruction of Jerusalem and particularly the Temple in biting anger, there are some fascinating Christian readings available that open the text to us.
We might read verse 12 in light of the Lord’s Supper, or verse 13 a call for healing from the dragons Jesus slew at the cross, but it’s 14-16 I’d like to call particular attention too.
In the narrative the poet has enumerated the desolation of the city and the Temple in excruciating detail, and they move on to explore three potential healers, none of whom can heal the city or the people because the Lord has done what he purposed (verse 17).
We were discussing the way Kenneth Bailey thinks that Mark deliberately echoes this section of Lamentations in Mark 15.29-30, which I find persuasive, and my friend Elly pointed out that it sounds like the parable of the Good Samaritan.
I’m not sure that Luke had Lamentations 2 in mind as he retold Jesus’ parable, but I think Elly is right that these texts can be read fruitfully together. Let me show you what I mean.
The Parable
A man is travelling from Jerusalem to Jericho and he falls foul of a group of thieves and robbers. He’s left beaten and bloody on the roadside. We’re told he’s half dead, and without help he will be wholly dead before long.
His situation is not that different from the sort of language the poet in using in Lamentations’ second poem. Three people pass the traveller by. Three groups are presented as healers for Jerusalem, at least one of whom is said to pass by.
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Written by T.M. Suffield |
Tuesday, March 7, 2023
The age to come is the one which is breaking into ours, it’s the one where Christ’s kingdom rules and reigns triumphantly, the one where death is defeated by the hand of Life riding a white horse. We are saved for this glorious revisioning of the cosmos.

I suspect most of us give little thought to time. It’s simply something we move through, or exist in, or bemoan the passing of as the years slowly strip away the vigour of our youth.
The fact that what time is amounts to a philosophical question that is notoriously tricky and nevertheless vital to any sense of trying to live a good or harmonious or flourishing or blessed (delete as appropriate) life, is a fact that passes most of us happily by.
Afterall, philosophers are a notoriously unhappy bunch, so contemplating their tricky questions is unlikely to contribute to our sense of a good life, right?
That may be, and yet the Bible has a lot of things to say about time as a broad concept and as something to be inhabited well. Our theology, at least at the popular level within our churches, leaves these questions alone most of the time. It sounds esoteric, irrelevant, and impractical.
While I would want to mount a spirited defence of the relevance of the esoteric and impractical, today is not that day, and my introduction is already long and meandering enough to have lost you.
Here are five theses on time.
We Are Saved from Time
In Galatians 1 we are described as being delivered from the ‘present evil age.’ We are saved from a time. We tend to think of salvation either psychologically (rescued from the guilt or shame of sin), ontologically (union with Christ), spatially (rescued from Hell or the earth for heaven), chthonically (rescued from the powers of evil and death), or in terms of dominion (transferred to the kingdom of light).
All of those are Biblical, though I would suggest that spatially is not the best way of describing that particular set of realities. Rarely do I hear anyone speak of salvation chronologically (or kairologically?). We are saved from time.
There are lots of things to bemoan in our age, and there have been in ages past too. The Bible would see these as a weave stretching back to Eden: not several ages but a succession of sin’s dark marring written across the face of the world. We are rescued from this age, so we do not have to face its consequences if we choose not to, we are free to call it evil where it is and should do so, and we do not have to live according to its rules or principles.
In other words, we’re free from the curse of this time.
We Are Saved for a Time
Positively we are rescued for the age to come (Matthew 12, Ephesians 1, Hebrews 6)—that time after our stint in the presence of Christ in what we often call ‘heaven’ as shorthand. By the age to come we mean the time after the resurrection of the dead and the triumphant and everlasting victory of Jesus the Christ over all powers and authorities.
The age to come is the one which is breaking into ours, it’s the one where Christ’s kingdom rules and reigns triumphantly, the one where death is defeated by the hand of Life riding a white horse. We are saved for this glorious revisioning of the cosmos.
This time is breaking into our time because Christ came at the end of time (1 Peter 1, Galatians 4, Matthew 26, Mark 1, John 7). We now live in the collision of two epochs, the time between the times.
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