Written by T. M. Suffield |
Sunday, November 6, 2022
I think there’s wisdom in the church calendar, I don’t think we need to slavishly follow it—in fact enforcing it is probably against Paul’s instructions (Galatians 4). There is something wise about catechising our people to think Christianly about their lives by shaping what we do across the year (and not necessarily just on Sunday) to fit the shape of the gospel. We will adopt a pattern of annual rhythms as a church whatever we do, it is inevitable, so it seems really strange to me that we would be shaped by anything other than the story of Jesus’ victory over sin, Satan, and Death.

Israel had a cycle of a weekly Sabbath, seven feasts a year, a sabbatical year every seventh year, and a Jubliee year every seventh sabbatical year. Their days were patterned for them, and it was wisdom to follow them.
They function how the Church calendar was designed by our Christian forbears to function for us—now of course that doesn’t hold the same force, it is set by the Church’s tradition rather than the word of God, but it holds some force—each year the story of the gospel, God’s dealings with humanity, are re-enacted for us in our cycle of Advent-Christmas-Epiphany-Lent-Easter-Ascension-Pentecost.
I’m a non-conformist and happily so, but I like the calendar because of what I read in the Old Testament Law. This is good for us to do as well for much the same reasons as them. It’s important to note though that it fits in the category of wisdom and not law. Paul has plenty to say about those who were enforcing the celebration of days and seasons on the New Testament church (Galatians 4).
Of course, almost every non-conformist church I’ve met still follows a church calendar. We follow the academic year, despite this only really being relevant for teachers and those with young children—I appreciate Paul Blackham’s suggestion that since this is irrelevant for the vast majority of any church, we should largely ignore it. Honestly, who cares if it’s half-term? The academic year means more to me than most since I work in a University, but it isn’t that academic year that most churches I know map onto.
We might well do something for Christmas and Easter—most will, but probably avoid Christmas Day due to the reality of not being able to get access to our venues. Which is understandable, but then we assume Christmas is over immediately rather than enjoy the whole twelve-day feast.
Most likely though its other considerations which form our liturgical calendar, particularly the national calendar. We celebrate Mother’s Day in March, Father’s Day in June, and Remembrance Sunday in November. We probably acknowledge Halloween exists by doing something for it, but ignore Ascension, Pentecost, and Trinity Sundays. What particularly makes this weird is that those last three are still baked into our national character—factories are likely to be closed around Whit Week, we still have a Bank Holiday for Pentecost (though it’s now fixed and doesn’t always coincide), and in the upper echelons of society they name their ‘terms’ after these festivals.
It makes sense to me that the national church provides a religious angle on some of these national events—and a bunch more, including the Queen’s birthday—but it’s my non-conformism that means I don’t want to.
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Written by T. M. Suffield |
Sunday, October 30, 2022
It’s a backwards economy, in that what we have grows by spending. It’s a communal economy, in that we can spend what each other have as we share. Yet, to access it, we must reveal our poverty, we must make friendships that are deep enough to hear that your friend has nothing to give, realise you can’t give them anything, and then give them what you don’t have anyway.

Have you ever pondered God’s economy? I don’t mean what is God’s opinion on our economic structures, or a typically American apologia for capitalism as the sine qua non of the Kingdom.
Let’s put such thoughts aside for now—though if you want a typically provocative thought on the subject: I’m queasy about capitalism for Biblical reasons. All the alternatives look worse.
Rather I’d like to speak of the economy of faith, how faith is spent as a currency and how that works. Which you might immediately want to query as being a nonsense, faith isn’t a currency! No, but there is an inheritance (Ephesians 1) that comes by faith, for all it isn’t financial. Faith is more like the wind than what goes in your wallet, it fills your sails, or it doesn’t, but go with the analogy—I trust it will be instructive.
Faith has an economy, and it runs counter to most of our intuitions. It’s more communal than you might imagine. For example, I can ‘spend’ your faith. Have you noticed that?
Let me show you what I mean. Let’s say you’ve been through a particularly trying time, and it is a genuine struggle to summon up the will to do some hoping, or the faith to pray for a breakthrough. Some, perhaps, would admonish you for that, as though your faith is deficient or lacking. I think we can safely discount them as people who have not suffered. The true friend bolsters my faith and reminds me of what’s true.
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Written by T. M. Suffield |
Friday, October 28, 2022
For all there is pain in having lovingly crafted prose torn up, there is purpose to it. We can rarely see our own faults, and since churches tend to work well for their leaders, we can rarely see our church’s faults either. Work with “editors,” be they trusted outsiders or those within the church. Trust their intentions even if their words make it hard, and edit like their lives depend on it. They might.

A much more experienced writer than me recently gave me some writing advice about editors:
He suggested that you don’t always need to make the changes editors suggest—and every writer breathes a sigh of dramatic relief. But you do need to assume that they have spotted something that’s wrong and that section or idea needs attention.
To put it another way, they aren’t necessarily right about the solution but they are right about the problem—or at the very least that there is a problem right there.
I thought that was helpful advice for a wider setting than the one I was being given it in. Let me show you what I mean.
If you receive criticism, and it doesn’t seem to jibe well with your own self-understanding and the other feedback you receive, it is possible to disregard it. After all, that person could be wrong.
Of course, the problem is, so could you. A Christian understanding of sin and the deceitful nature of our hearts should give us pause when we assume that the problem is outside of ourselves. We might be right. Before we decide we are, we should examine ourselves carefully. I found it helpful to think that, like an editor, perhaps my critic has put their finger on something even if they are completely wrong about what that is.
It’s certainly worth consideration and prayer before we decide that they are just flat wrong.
I think we should apply the same principle in Church leadership. All Church leaders have plenty of critics. Everyone has an opinion about how things should be done in the church. Some people have been hurt badly, and some of those by the church, meaning that their complaints and criticisms come laced with pain and can be difficult for church leaders to receive.
As pastors we’re supposed to understand people, so you don’t take the way the feedback is delivered into account and instead listen to the marrow of it.
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Written by T. M. Suffield |
Friday, October 21, 2022
Our churches should act more like tended gardens. We as people need curation. We need a gardener, or we risk turning into human weeds: becoming without arriving. But we need that like plants do, slowly, in the right season, enjoying the timeless delights of growing in the same direction.

I’ve worked in a global corporate company and in some large public sector institutions. Every one of them has gone through some sort of major change programme while I was there. It’s the nature of the beast, nothing is perfect so every five years or so it gets reinvented—usually fixing a real problem by creating a different one.
I’ve never been a change manager but in some of these changes they’ve been things I needed to happen or things I was tasked with implementing. On other occasions they’ve been done to me, which is about as delightful as it sounds.
At my previous University we were early on in a project to implement some changes to teaching that would (all being well) improve things for students. I remember my manager expressing consternation and confusion that those we were needing to change weren’t excited about the potential changes. I know, it was a naïve thought. I looked at her and said, “because all change is loss.”
I think that surprised her, but it’s a truism. The kind of churches I’ve been part of are dynamic and change fairly frequently. This is a great strength and a great weakness. It is always pastorally difficult to help a congregation through a change—even a relatively minor one—because for someone change is always loss.
Incrementalism
Usually for those deciding on the change the loss is a desirable one, which can make it easy to lose sight of the fact that it won’t be for everyone, even if you think it should be. If you’re trying to lead change then people will be resistant to it if there is no tangible good. We have to remember that change usually challenges our underlying stories.
When change is done to you rather than with you that loss is inevitably pain rather than gain. It’s impossible to see the relative goods of the change or understand why its being done if you are a subject instead of a participant. Anyone who has been through a company reorganisation can testify to this.
Which is to say that if you’re a church leader and you’re changing something in your church’s life (and you probably are, let’s be honest), you need to consider carefully who will be impacted by the change. I would really encourage assuming someone will be rather than thinking they’ll be fine. What’s the story that this change will affect for them? Where will it hurt them, even though that wasn’t your intention?
This means organic or incremental change is easier for people to handle because we’re used to lightly editing our stories as we go along.
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Written by T. M. Suffield |
Monday, October 3, 2022
We need God to unsettle us, to make us dissatisfied with anything but Jesus, and with anything but the age of come. This unsettled longing for an age to come is what the Bible calls joy. It, strangely enough, tends to make contented people, because God satisfies.

There is a gift from God that we do not want. If we’re honest with ourselves, I suspect there are many gifts from God that we don’t want. We enjoy both sin and comfort too much to value all of God’s gifts; we are indicted by our lacklustre enthusiasm for the things of God.
The gift I’d like to focus on is dissatisfaction. There is a spiritual gift of dissatisfaction. And in our comfortable, western, industrialised world we dearly need it.
There’s also something that looks like the spiritual gift of dissatisfaction but is actually the infernal curse of cynicism. I have this one in spades.
Let me flesh out what I mean: if we believe that our world is passing away, that it is in fact groaning in the birth pangs of a better world (Romans 8) then we should compare our lives, our churches, and our societies, with what we understand is coming.
If we believe that the old creation is gone and the new come in Christ’s resurrection (John 20-21), but that the kingdom—the new creation—is also not yet here; that we live in what theologians call realised eschatology and I call the Between, then we must expect to see partial fulfilments of what the world will be like after she is reborn in fire. And we must expect to not see total fulfilments of that pregnant promise.
There’s a sense in which a Christian’s life is orientated towards a future that we only see through a glass, darkly (1 Corinthians 13). Or it’s supposed to be, anyway.
We also desire to see our hearts, our churches, and our cultures, changed and shaped in the direction of the Kingdom here and now before we die. That’s a good desire, and we should expect to see some fulfilments as the Spirit acts on us. As always, God changes churches by changing people. Typically I think he also changes cultures by changing churches—in Leithart’s language “the heavenly city resurrects the cities of men.”
These are good desires. It is good to ask what God requires of us in order to do as we ask. I think there are two criteria for a move of God, one for us and one for him. The requirement that sits with us is found in the logic of baptism in the Spirit. In John 7 Jesus gives one requirement for us to be changed: thirst.
In other words, we must want it. Want requires a precondition: dissatisfaction.
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Written by T.M. Suffield |
Tuesday, September 27, 2022
Tozer said that, “it is doubtful that God could ever bless a man greatly until He has hurt him deeply.” Those are hard words, but how you feel about them probably depends on where you’re standing. They’re a sharp stone to the comfortable, but a cooling balm to the afflicted. 

The American opioid epidemic started because pharmaceutical companies wanted to eliminate pain. Whatever their motives, though we can be sure they were not altruistic, they manufactured situations where if someone told a hospital they were in pain they would be given an opioid painkiller. Pain was a problem to be eliminated.
We can all roll our eyes in exasperation because we know the outcome, but I still think we think getting rid of pain is a good aim. Dear friends, it isn’t possible this side of Jesus’ return, any claim to remove our pain is utopian thinking and inevitably preaching a false gospel.
How do I know it is? Because the real gospel doesn’t promise to remove our pain.
Hopefully we can all scoff, slack-jawed at the audacity of a pharmaceutical company peddling something not that far away from heroin and claiming to eliminate pain. Much like most pushers do.
Except we shouldn’t scoff. In the church we so often do the same thing and turn our preaching into pious pushing. My recommendation is that we stop that. Otherwise, we’ll either end up hooked and doing anything for a fix, or we’ll go cold turkey on the whole thing.
Here’s another way to look at it: trying to eliminate pain makes us Buddhists, not Christians. Larry Crabb makes this accusation in his book Shattered Dreams, saying, “we kill desire in an effort to escape pain, then wonder why we don’t enjoy God.”
Buddhism offers a path of cessation. The grand goal is the end of all pain and suffering, the path to get there is killing desire. Christianity is a path of joy, of roasted lamb, freshly baked bread, and fine wine. God is a God of things. And, because that’s true, it’s always true that escaping from pain is not the aim of the faith. We’re called to die, and then rise again.
So, how about we stop trying to wipe out all the pain?
Like a physical trainer who won’t let his clients actually lift any weights, we’re robbed of the benefit of the terrible trials that life throws at us if we aren’t allowed to feel the sting of them.
If we aren’t careful, Crabb warns, we’ll find the contentment of Buddha and miss the joy of Christ. Jesus did not teach us to deaden our pain and call it trust. He teaches us to allow our pain to deepen our desire for God (Romans 5, 1 Peter 1). There is treasure at the bottom of the pit, in the belly of the whale, in the cold and weary grave. And we worship a God who resurrects the dead.
As Tish Harrison Warren writes in her beautiful book Prayer in the Night, which by-the-by you should buy and read, we cannot trust God (sharp intake of breath before the sentence finishes) that bad things won’t happen to us.
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Written by T. M. Suffield |
Monday, September 19, 2022
Suffering knocks the edges off us. Pain is horrible, but can like all evil be used by God for good ends (Genesis 50). Wisdom grows in the soil of suffering. Woe betide the one who calls themselves wise, but the false humility of assuming we have no wisdom to share does no one any good either.

We should desire wisdom. “Get wisdom!” Solomon tells us (Proverbs 4). We see that eating from wisdom’s tree (Genesis 3) was Adam’s mistake but also the destiny he was supposed to bear. We also see that one of the ways we learn wisdom is by suffering.
Let’s not get this backwards, suffering is not our friend. God does permit us to suffer, the Bible is sometimes happy to use much stronger verbs than ‘permit,’ and God will mature us by testing and by suffering.
Although he was a son, he learned obedience through what he suffered. And being made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation to all who obey him. Hebrews 5.8-9
If the sinless Christ became mature through suffering, how much more do we need to do so?
There were two trees in the garden, life and wisdom. Adam was given one to eat and the other to wait on. It’s a reasonable supposition that one day he would have eaten from it. Piecing together the hints we get around the Bible this seems to suggest that he would have had to ‘die’ much like he died to give birth to Eve (Genesis 2), and been anointed King of the earth.
These two trees—that correspond to bread and wine and the Old and New Testaments—are given to us to eat from too. It’s in Jesus suffering, first his Test at Gethsemane and then his death on the tree, that we are given the wine of wisdom to drink from by the Holy Spirit. We eat from wisdom’s tree, which required suffering to give to us. James Jordan in From Bread to Wine would argue it required us to be broken like bread. For most this happens slowly piece by piece through life, and some enter it much sooner through more dramatic circumstances.
We follow Jesus’ pattern, not in the extremity of his suffering perhaps, but in that our character is made in suffering. Or, more accurately it can be. As Nicholas Wolterstorff describes in his Lament for a Son, times of suffering can brew despair and bitterness, but also make character. Both options are open to us, “the valley of suffering is the vale of soul-making.”
It’s possible for us to fall headlong into bitterness in the midst of dark days. To drink deep the draught of despair found in the foul run-off at the valley’s base. To get lost in Mordor’s dark hills. I mustn’t deny it. It’s surprisingly common.
There is an alternative too though. There’s a test, if you like, hidden within it. Like the one Adam faced, and Jesus faced, and every character in the Bible did in one way or another, sometimes several times.
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Written by T.M. Suffield |
Wednesday, September 14, 2022
The world is a temple, not a machine. This might all sound esoteric, perhaps only helpful when reading the Bible or other works of the past to better understand how they understood the world around them. I contend and continue to that it really matters, and as we start to grasp it everything begins to change.

We think of time in a very distinctive way, which many of our forebears did not. We think it’s linear, we think it’s homogenous—progressing in ordered sections we call days or years or hours—and we think it’s largely ‘empty,’ a container that is indifferent to what we fill it with.
I’ve been reading Charles Taylor’s massive and thoughtful, A Secular Age. One of the first distinctives he pulls out when comparing 1500 to the year 2000 is the way we think about time as ‘homogenous’ and ‘empty.’
Once upon a time… people spoke like that, for a start. Taylor demonstrates that people thought of time as knotty and a bearer of meaning. The word ‘secular’ comes from the Latin saeculum which means an ‘age’ or ‘century.’ It’s a term, originally, about time.
It was used to describe those who weren’t ‘religious.’ Though probably not in the way you think, saeculum was used to describe priests who weren’t monks, because they lived out in the world in ordinary time, rather than having turned away to live nearer eternity. Secular time is roughly what we think all time is. There was also a higher time, such a medieval thinker could think two things that sound whackadoodle to us.
Firstly, that Abraham’s near sacrifice of Isaac  and the Crucifixion are closer to each other in time than they are centuries apart—in God’s time these two events happen at the same time as they are drawn into eternity.
Secondly, that Good Friday 2022 is closer to the Crucifixion than to the day you’re reading this post. (I’m following Taylor’s argument on 54-61 in these paragraphs.) Neither of these seems obvious to us, we don’t think of the Universe like that at all, and why that’s the case is what Taylor unpacks over the next thousand or so pages.
The medieval conception doesn’t have time as a container, indifferent to what fills it, but instead elevated (and perhaps also demoted) by its content. I don’t necessarily want to argue for the metaphysic that underpinned this different way of viewing the world, but I think we can pin some of the symptoms of our modern malaise on these features.
Two themes in my writing have been the importance of rest and our inability to actually rest. I named the blog after this problem, nuakh is the Hebrew word for rest. One of the reasons that we struggle with rest, thinking it means the same thing as relaxation and that to slouch on a sofa watching TV could have anything at all to do with resting, is that our sense of time has slipped.
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Written by T. M. Suffield |
Sunday, September 4, 2022
I’ve yet to talk to a Christian who doesn’t think community is inherently good for us. We’re meant to be a people. The local church is supposed to be the household of faith—something different to our modern concept of family but in the same broad arena—where everyone fits and is loved and is able to develop deep and abiding relationships with others. We can still do that, but if because never seen it modelled, we find it hard and sometimes oddly unnatural. I write not with solutions but to highlight a problem. I’ve never met a church that doesn’t talk a good talk about community, whatever language they choose to use. I’ve met plenty of churches full of people who find that community difficult to access. Modern life makes it hard for us.

Everybody loves community, or they say they do at least. We live in a land that is parched of the life-giving water of friendship and stripped bare of many of the settings that used to make this easy for people.
Robert Nisbet in his book The Quest for Community argues that what he calls a strong associational life that would have been found in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the home, the village, and the church has been slowly replaced by a weak associational life. His examples for weaker associations are the union, the workplace, the political party, and the state.
To put it in language we’re familiar with, the settings that used to provide the ability for community to grow have changed and morphed over time, but these newer settings provide a thinner context for bonds between people to grow.
Or think of this way, where do people make their friends? Compared with a century or two ago the settings we have for making friendships that are strong and lasting are not as good at that as they used to be.
He was writing in 1952. Unions and political parties do not have the strength that they used to, and our connections to the state have weakened in the last fifty years. Bonds formed in the workplace are probably still as strong, or at least they were pre-pandemic. The rise of remote-working, which is here to stay at least short-term, also reduces the way the workplace can form these associational bonds.
The western workplace, especially for so-called knowledge-workers in office jobs who make up around a third of the workforce in WEIRD nations, is ephemeral. We do stuff on computers that has weak connections to physical things. I’m not sure that’s bad in and of itself, but it does tell us a story about ourselves—that everything is ephemeral, if you’ll forgive me to quote Marx out of context, that everything that is solid melts into air—which I think makes physical community more difficult. Even the way that the annual appraisal process in so many workplaces suggests that only this year matters truncates our view of reality—we then treat our relationships the same way.
Perhaps if he was writing now, Nisbet might include the Facebook page, the Discord server, and the MMO. Which, because they’re disembodied, are forms of ‘weak associational life.’
I think this sort of thing should concern the church. Not least because it sounds remarkably like C. S. Lewis’ vision of Hell in The Great Divorce where everyone is constantly drifting apart over the millennia.
It’s not good for us as a society, for all we don’t need to go backwards, we will need to strengthen community settings if we want our communities to flourish.
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Written by T. M. Suffield |
Saturday, September 3, 2022
We also learn by hearing the struggles of people who are still in the pit, describe the nightmares they’re living through, and tell us how on earth they’re continuing to worship God despite it making no sense at all. I learn as much, if not more, from these gnarled saints. Their struggles teach, and you don’t have to be out of the other side of your struggles to have learned wisdom. You see, treasure lives at the bottom of the pit, and like the inverse of Plato’s cave, those who have suffered much and still love the Lord can teach the rest of us how to live. Which shouldn’t surprise us, the Christian life is one of death and resurrection, after all.

When Christians suffer, when we experience pain, it often gives rise to doubt. We begin to wonder if it’s meant to be like this. One of the most quoted reasons to disbelieve in God is what’s usually called ‘the problem of evil.’ For most of us though it’s not the existence of conspicuous evil that’s the problem, it’s the pain in our lives and the lives of those we love. There’s a reason that C. S. Lewis formulated the challenge as The Problem of Pain.
Why does it make us doubt? I’m sure there are as many variations as there are sufferers, but broadly because if we truly believe that we are the beloved children of the most high God it raises some questions when, as best we can tell, he could improve our lot but hasn’t done so.
These questions are then painfully pressed on in many churches Sunday by Sunday as we preach a Christian life that sounds remarkably pain-free—this is certainly true in my charismatic tradition, but I’ve seen it much more broadly across evangelicalism in the UK. We preach what amounts to a prosperity gospel, where Christians are promised nice middle-classed lives.
Some readers might want to object that they haven’t heard this sort of preaching in their church, and thank the Lord if that’s the case, but for clarity I don’t mean that this is explicitly taught in the sermon, though that can happen. It’s often preached through the stories we share, through those we platform and those we don’t, through the questions our preaching does and doesn’t address, through the words of the songs we pick to sing, through so-called vulnerability that sufferers see right through, and through the reactions to those who are in acute pain.
We speak like the grand plan is that we’re all free from pain right now. Which, dear friends, it is not. You can quote Psalm 27 all you like but that isn’t what it means. There will be no more pain after the resurrection of the dead (Revelation 21), and that is a promise worth gripping to until your hands bleed. One day every ounce of existential dread, every lash of life’s cruel calumny, and every private howl you flung into the uncaring heavens, will melt in the face of the Lord Jesus as he smiles and embraces you, his little brother or sister.
And when I say it will melt, I don’t mean that as a nice verb to describe ‘going away.’ When the eyes of Jesus the consuming fire (Hebrews 12) look upon you tenderly, they will look on the root of Hell that has afflicted you with the force of a thousand suns and it will die.
One day our pain will go. But not yet. We aren’t promised that. In fact, the Bible tells us that our pain still has work to do—for suffering produces character (Romans 5). But even that can be a weight to bear, we are not responsible for ensuring we have achieved anyone’s definition of ‘adequate growth’ through our trials than the Lord’s.
Pain is required for growth. Ask any athlete. We immediately might have questions about how that death or that vile sting will cause us to grow, and it’s important to face them. They do not have clear and simple answers. Our struggles teach us.
I think I could be misread here. We often hear stories of challenge in our churches, and invariably they are told once those challenges are over, the people involved aren’t feeling the rawest edge of the pain, and it all sounds a bit neat and tidy.
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