Going against the flow
Courage in the cause of truth from Revd Dr William Philip, Senior Minister of The Tron Church in Glasgow, and formerly Director of Ministry with The Proclamation Trust
Dear Church Leaders (and everyone else)
This recent podcast with Revd Dr William Philip, Senior Minister at The Tron Church in Glasgow, is well worth a listen:
At the time of writing, this is the latest episode from “Owl and Badger” — Helen and Tim — who describe themselves as “a couple of Christians applying critical thinking and Biblical principles to the big issues we are facing today”.
Other episodes can be found at the same link.
I first encountered William Philip in 2021 as one of the few UK Christian leaders speaking out against covid, and as a member of the HART group, which seemed to be talking a lot more sense than anyone I encountered via the mainstream media:1
For context, one of his 2021 interviews (with transcript) can be found in this recent post:
More recently, I have been impressed by The Tron Church’s What We Believe statement, and its sermon catalogue, which includes more comprehensive coverage of the book of Jeremiah than any other church I have encountered. Plus there’s even a sermon on Numbers 5!2
I was no less impressed by Revd Philip on the Owl and Badger podcast. He comes across as a courageous truth-teller who thinks carefully about what is actually going on in the world, and how it relates to the gospel of Jesus Christ. He seems prepared to say what he thinks, and to stand up for what is right even when it is costly and inconvenient. And what he says about recent trends in contemporary society is particularly relevant to churches and their leaders.
I have transcribed (below) some parts of the podcast that I found particularly striking, and added occasional other comments and links etc.
On delusion and deception
[from 18:04-20:01]
It is a frightening thing in the New Testament to read just how so often [in the description of] the characteristics of the “last days”…3 the whole era… between Christ’s first and second coming… the particular language that is used is that of deceit.
And even God himself judges people by sending upon them a great delusion, a sort of worldwide delusion… that’s a lot of the imagery… that we see in Revelation 134 for example [and] Paul talks about that very explicitly about that in 2 Thessalonians.5
I think in lots of ways until quite recent times I found it quite hard to conceptualise how the whole world could be utterly deluded at the same time. But I have to say that living through the covid era put it right up front and central — in front of me. We were seeing what seemed like literally the whole world — or the vast majority of the world — being completely deluded, including, as Jesus says, if it were possible, even the elect being deceived.
But what shocked me the most — it shouldn’t have, because of what Jesus says — was that the level of delusion in the church seemed to me to be virtually the same as the level of delusion outside in society. And I think I found that quite shocking, but it was undeniable and real. And it shouldn’t surprise us because that’s what Scripture teaches us. But it’s a very, very sobering thing to come to terms with…
It’s still… a minority I think of Christians who… have come to terms with the fact that we are living in a world where there is deceit and delusion on a scale that we really don’t want to consider, but [that] seems to me to be inescapable.
On the weightiness of sin
[from 22:08-22:40]
In response to being asked about standing for truth and how to push back against those espousing the “environmental gospel”:
…we don’t really take seriously enough… the weightiness of sin. We haven’t yet come to terms with just how depraved the human heart and mind is and can be, given the right circumstances. None of us wants to believe that people can be quite as evil or quite as wrong or quite as foolish as they actually are.
On changes in the UK over the past 50 years or so
[from 23:38-26:29]
In the space of less than half a century, the trajectory of our society’s worldview and the church’s worldview have veered apart enormously. And I think a lot of people — certainly of my generation and older — haven’t caught up with that, and haven’t realised that.
And so we still think that: “Of course the courts in our country are not corrupt like they are in other countries.” Or: “Of course our politicians aren’t corrupt and raking in the money like they are in banana republics.” Or: “Of course our police are people we can trust and only do right, not like in wherever the bogey place is.”
And I’m afraid that the reality is that all of those things that allowed us to assume that was because our society was so greatly suffused with a Christian worldview and a Christian morality. And that is not the case now. And so things are, in many, many ways, much, much more corrupt, much more wicked and much more wrong than people dare to think… and don’t want to think.
We’re seeing it at the moment… with all the furore about two-tier policing… It’s interesting listening to those with a basic… liberal mindset which is: “Of course that’s not true… by definition.” Underlying all of that is the assumption that human nature and people are basically good. Yes, there are some bad apples, but left to themselves generally people will be good and do the right thing.
That liberal corruption of thinking is something that paradoxically is only possible because of the Christian foundations of our society. But you can’t take away the foundations and expect the building that you like… to just sit there on thin air. It starts to crumble and then all of a sudden there is an almighty crash. And I think that the sad truth is that we’ve been through… a long, long, long time of crumbling away. And in recent times we’ve really been living through the collapse of what’s left.
And so I think that’s one of the great problems that we have. And I think many, many people in the church are still living in a view of the world that is decades out of date. And therefore their assumptions about all sorts of things are very, very wrong. And we need to catch up with the reality of the sinfulness of sin and the real wickedness of evil.
On the broad way and the narrow way
[31:28-34:17]
It’s the perpetual challenge of the gospel… to turn your back on the world and to walk the way of Christ which is the narrow way.
When Jesus talks about the broad way and the narrow way,6 the way I think about it is… like going down one of the bustling tunnels towards the platform of the London Underground at rush-hour time… Everybody is going the same way and you’re carried along in a huge crowd, but if you turn around and start going against everybody you find yourself being battered constantly and pushed backwards… and you have to battle even to stand still.
Well that’s the narrow way. You’re actually going in the opposite direction from the whole crowd. It’s not that these are two different paths going in different directions. It’s one going one way where everybody is going. And you’re going against everybody else. And if you’ve ever tried to do that, you’ll find it’s jolly, jolly hard to do. And the easiest thing to do is to turn round and say I’ll just go with the rest of them. And that’s the call of Christian discipleship… we feel it every day in a hundred different ways… all kinds of different ways and all kind of decisions.
That’s why it’s hard... And there’s bruises. You can’t walk the way of Christ without walking the way of the cross. And we don’t want to believe that. We want to think that… if only Jesus [had] handled things a bit better it could have all gone so much easier. It’s such a common thing, isn’t it? You take a stand for something, and even Christians will say, “You could have handled things better. It wasn’t quite the right way. If you’d only done this and that or the other you would have done fine.”
But the Lord Jesus — I take it — handled things fairly well. The apostles of Jesus surely had the most winsome preaching the world has ever known — apart from the Lord Jesus himself. You hear a lot of this “we mustn’t offend people… we must be winsome with the gospel”. Well, who was the most winsome? It was the Christ and his winsomeness put him on the cross. Every one of his apostles… winsome preachers of the gospel. What happened to them? They were martyred.
There’s a reason why the word martyr is the word martyr, because it’s the word marturia — witness. So how do you find somebody in the Bible who you know for sure has a good witness — a good marturion? Because they’re going be martyred. Look at Stephen. There is a good witness, I presume we can all agree. Well, yes. Look what happened to him.7
On being a church leader early in the covid era
[38:55-43:57]
At the beginning when there was so much uncertainty around… it did feel like a big crisis and I was, I suspect, as much shocked and stressed by it as everybody else. I felt the weight of responsibility to pastor people… if what we were being told at first was true, that this was going to be a devastating pandemic [and] we were going to have vast numbers of deaths, I felt my duty was to prepare our congregation for that, and still to point them to ultimate things.
We talked very frankly about it and said that it could be that many of us are going to die. But the most important thing still that we can be saying to one another and to the world is that in the face of potential death you need to get right with God and get the most important things in place. So that was very much our position at the very beginning.
But very quickly… because I was trying to follow as much as possible what was happening… what the death rates were… because there was so much fear. That was the thing that was immediately obvious. Whatever it was, it was an epidemic of fear. And very quickly I realised that that that fear was being stoked not damped. It was the opposite of other national crises where the whole focus of government and leadership was keeping people calm and carrying on, you know the The old thing Keep clam and carry on. But it was the opposite of that. And I found myself thinking this is not right this is not strange what is happening here?
And I delved as much as I could into statistics and seeing what was actually happening. And even in the nursing homes… there was just a lot of evidence very very early on that the fear was hugely overdone… Yes, it was sad, and people were dying. But it was very elderly people who were frail already who were dying. And it was perhaps people with multiple illnesses and so on. And so very quickly I felt [that] part of my responsibility was to help our people not to fear.
Firstly don’t fear because life and death are in God’s hands. If you fear God you don’t need to fear anything else. That’s the most important thing. But secondly I don’t think we need to fear nearly as much as we’re being told here. And that became more and more evident but I think that was pretty clear very early on.
And from then on, just more and more and more it seemed to become obvious to me and I think to quite a lot of others who were looking at things and trying to be rational and not even trying to be particularly sceptical — I didn’t feel I was being sceptical at the beginning obvious, why isn’t everybody seeing this
But I began to realise that there was… more and more that seemed to suggest that it was a deliberate policy to keep people afraid… the more and more draconian things that were happening... it just seemed inexplicable as not part of a sort-of deliberate propaganda campaign to keep people in fear.
Very much related:
And very, very quickly it was just so obvious that the responses to whatever one thought about how serious this illness was, the responses were far, far worse. That seemed to me very clear to me to begin with.
So I found myself looking at the evidence in the world and looking at it all through the perspective of Scripture and the reality that people misuse the truth and misuse power and all these things and [thinking] that this is what we’re seeing here.
I became more and more and more sceptical simply because I just saw more and more evidence that pointed to these things. It was quite a lonely place to be in these early times because… the unified narrative of the state, the professions, just everybody, even the church, was virtually unbreakable.
On the disappearance of the church during the covid era
[44:00-47:27]
But again it seemed to me that a huge tragedy was the church’s disappearance from the public arena. The Archbishop of Canterbury disappeared. Nobody knew where he was.8 Everybody was just hiding away.
I remember reading an article in one of the papers by… Simon Heffer… an atheist… the headline was something like this: “Where are the leaders of the church in a time of national crisis?”
I just thought, here is a leading atheist calling out the church for disappearing at that very moment that if you did believe that there was a God and a message of the church, this [was] the time that we needed it.
I found myself getting together with some other pastors… [to] bring a voice for the Christian church in a space that seemed to have been left completely absent by those who really ought to have been doing these things. We wondered if we wrote an open letter to the Prime Minister about damages of lockdowns and so on, whether we might be able to get 30 or 40 pastors who could sign this… Four or five of us put it together and sent it round and we were astonished that within a very short period of time [there] were well over a thousand who were signing up to this. And that did encourage me, because I thought… it’s not like Elijah — “I and only I am left”…
…there’s actually thousands who haven’t bowed the knee, but nobody’s saying anything… There were quite a few more of those sorts of things, and we were getting responses from people saying, “Thank God there is somebody who is standing up and speaking for the church”.
I can certainly echo those sentiments.
So it was a mixture of sense of a need to do something and say something but [also] a terrible sadness that the church as a whole had just manifestly failed at a time when, if ever it was needed, it was most needed. And that was true whether you think that this was truly a devastating pandemic, or whether you think the whole thing was massively overblown, or indeed a complete scam. Whichever it was, of all of these things, the church’s voice and the truth of God needed to be heard. And it wasn’t being heard, which is a great tragedy, and [one] that I think has only damaged a great deal further any remaining respect that the church had in this nation among many thinking people…
I feel ashamed in lots of ways as a churchman and as a pastor and as a representative of the gospel of Christ to our society, not just within the walls of the church. I am part of that. I’m not lobbing bricks at others. I can’t avoid being part of that too. That was a big motivation for those of us who thought we must seek to bring the truth of God into the midst of this situation… we must show that there is a church that has something to say here. But is was a painful and difficult time… for lots of reasons…
On pushing back against the huge leaps towards totalitarianism
[48:27- 53:07]
Regardless of the issue itself, and the virus and whatever else, what worried me more than anything else was the huge leaps towards totalitarian control that were being taken. And approved of. That was the most frightening thing, that the vast majority of people seemed to approve these… draconian crackdowns on people and anyone who dared to protest had the full weight of the law thrown at them. People were imprisoned and you had ridiculous things… helicopters chasing somebody if they went out for a walk. And I was terrified by that because I just thought, “What has happened to people?! Has nobody read any history? Can’t you remember…?”
I grew up with what we called the Iron Curtain and we would hear regularly from Christians behind the Iron Curtain and pastors being beaten up and imprisoned and people having house churches underground… I can even remember the names of the people that we would have prayed for in our church prayer meeting. I just thought… “This is the kind of things we were hearing about from these countries… What’s wrong with people? What’s wrong with Christians?!”
And then we moved onto the vaccines which right from the get-go I was highly suspicious of for all kinds of reasons. And that was bad enough, but we moved on very quickly from that to vaccine mandates, to people being sacked from their jobs and not being allowed to work if they didn’t have the vaccine and so on. And that to me was the most alarming manifestation of that whole thing…
At that point we had another very big letter from church people protesting against that, and in particular declaring that we would never disbar somebody from coming to a service of Christian worship because they hadn’t been vaccinated. And that actually got quite a lot of traction, and by that stage… there were a lot of others… who were concerned about civil liberties… for all sorts of other reasons than ours.
Including the NHS100K campaign:910
Which is still active and ongoing e.g. on X (formerly Twitter):11
But how often did we — or do we — hear about the views of those many thousands of NHS workers on the BBC, or indeed on any mainstream media platform?12
[Our concern] was particularly on the church issue, but not exclusively. And thankfully, enough head of steam built up there, and enough others were involved. There were people who said, “This is not the place of the church and this is not the issue for us to be standing on.” But I don’t think that’s right.
I remember, not long before that, reading Eric Metaxas’ biography of Bonhoeffer, and being quite surprised at just how many gospel people — evangelical Christian leaders and so on — were very much against Bonhoeffer’s stand… Those things were all in my mind and I just thought, “My goodness, we’re living through this again and people can’t see where this all ends up, and where this all goes.”13
And of course you’ve got Martin Niemöller who is famous for the saying that “First [they] came for the Jews and I wasn’t a Jew. And they came for the gypsies… and then there was nobody for me”. And of course we remember him for all of that. But what we don’t remember is that he actually was very much against Bonhoeffer in the beginning. He was very much saying, “No, no, no… we should be just toeing the line with Hitler. This will give the church great opportunities and so on.”
I compared the 2020s to the 1930s in this article, which is among the most important on this Substack:
But very few people seem to want to engage with these issues.
And so it just seemed to me that there was an enormous amount of that. And I just thought… if you can’t see how critical an issue something like this is…
Civil liberties and religious liberties are absolutely bound at the hip… If you lose one, you lose the other. A cursory reading of history in our own nation tells you that… [And] it has… often been solely those who have stood for these things because of their Christian convictions… that have been those who have helped others to see it.
We felt very strongly about that but I was again shocked… at just how few Christian seemed to think that these are problematic things. And I am fearful because of that whole thing. I am fearful of the future.
On the medical profession during the covid era
[56:49-59:35]
It comes back to delusion and deceit… what I found perhaps most disconcerting, with my training and background in medicine… I found myself shocked how it seemed to me that the vast majority of the medical profession were among the worst… in the way that they reacted to all this… The most vitriolic opposition I had often came from doctors. And perhaps some of that was a sort of defensiveness because deep down they knew they were acting like idiots.
To me, to see senior experienced doctors walking around, apparently telling everybody by what they are doing that a piece of cloth on your face is somehow protective against a virus which, if it exists, is so infinitesimally small [that] it can quite happily jump through this cloth… I just found it difficult to rationalise really. It just seemed… to be an evidence of the sheer power of propaganda and crowd behaviour, of either people really believing it, or not believing it but being unable to not do it because they couldn’t step out of the crowd and the narrative…
Personally… if I had something seriously wrong with me, I would find it very hard now to really trust the advice I am getting from somebody who behaved like that as a doctor, because I would just find myself thinking “I can’t take you that seriously any more”. If any of my medical friends are listening to that, I’m very sorry, but that’s how I feel… There are many things I [have] found profoundly shocking.
Whereas often I found… the least educated person in the street had a much clearer and [a] sceptical view of these things. And I do think that is perhaps connected. It is not that the ordinary person is unintelligent, but [that] the ordinary person who has not been through tertiary education is much less brainwashed. And I think that is the truth. I think [the] people in our society who are most in danger are those who have been to university… [and] in the last several decades the [number] of those has been inflated enormously. They have been exposed to excessive incessant propagandising by false and deceitful ideology, and I think that is a very big factor.
And of course the more brainwashed someone is, the less able they are to see that they are brainwashed.
The covid era woke me up to the fact that I was more brainwashed than I ever dreamt of. And I doubt very much that I have now seen through all the ways in which I have been deceived.
On acknowledging being “taken in” in the context of covid
[1:05:36-1:06:36]
I think many thinking people… honest people who have looked around and begun to see the reality of what’s going on — and have been quite shocked by it — have got over the point of being able to say “Okay, I am willing to come to terms with the fact that I was taken in by a lot of things,” because that’s very hard to do, isn’t it? I have a lot of respect for people who have turned around and said, “No, I realise I too was saying the wrong thing here… and I was wrong.” It takes a big person to do that.
And more and more people I think are seeing these things. I am somewhat optimistic. Many more people have a much better perspective on things now than they did a few years ago. They may not be standing up and trumpeting that and admitting their folly, but I hope that, should we come to these circumstances again, many more will be saying, “No, we’re not doing that this time.” I hope so.
On the role of the BBC and the mainstream media
[1:21:32-1:24:07]
It’s a strange thing to me that Christians — I think most evangelical Christians who are serious about the Bible — will see that, for example, the whole transgender ideology is very wrong and very damaging. But it strikes me as strange that they will then believe what the BBC is saying about a whole lot of other issues when it’s the very BBC that is constantly pumping out and promoting the transgender and LGBT ideology.
If the BBC is telling me [that] X is true, then I want to say that this is the same BBC that is telling me that Y is true. And I know that Y is absolutely not true. So my starting assumption is that probably X is not true.
It seems very strange... We need to say that the people who are telling us this are also the people who are telling us that. And that. And that… [And] put two and two together…
And it is important to consider not only what the mainstream media tells us, but also what it doesn’t tell us.
One contender for the most striking recent example of this was the lack of reporting on the massive covid era protests in London, some of which happened outside Broadcasting House!
If you haven’t seen this six-minute film, I recommend watching at least some of it:
Back to the podcast:
[from 1:22:58] There’s a generation that still believes that the BBC is next to the four gospels in terms of truth. I think that is partly a generational thing and is perhaps waning. But… Christians need to realise that if the Lord Jesus Christ tells us that even the elect can be deceived, he means something. And possibly that means [that] I might be vulnerable.
So where am I taking my bearing of truth coming from? Am I taking it from the Christ and his apostles? Or am I taking it from the BBC and ITV and The Guardian and whoever else it is? Am I shaping my understanding of the Bible comfortably around that? Or is it the other way around? If Paul tells me that there are people who are pushing certain agendas and that behind that lies the deceitful teaching of demons,14 do I believe that? Or am I embarrassed about that? Or is that a verse [that] I don’t want to really talk about because… people might think I am a crazy person?
On the persecution of Christians in the UK
[1:24:31-1:28:19]
And so I just think we have to take the Bible a lot more seriously… It comes down to this having lived through an anomaly in Christian history. Nobody living in our country in the 17th century had any difficulty believing that, when you read about Jesus saying “you will be persecuted for my name’s sake” and all of these sort of things, he was [not] joking.
People in my part of the world up here [in Scotland] were being murdered and killed for daring to gather in the open air to hear the gospel being preached. There are Covenanter graves all around south-east… south-west Scotland. Their crime was meeting together and hearing the Bible in a way that wasn’t approved by the government.
We know that might happen in Communist China. And [that] it happened behind the Iron Curtain. But [people say] that’s not the sort of thing that can happen in the British Isles, is it? Well it did happen, not that long ago in the scheme of history. And it can happen again.
I sometimes say to people [that] I’ve talked with my wife and family about what might happen if I’m imprisoned because of what I’m preaching, and because of the fact that anybody can go onto our YouTube channel and listen through things that I’ve said. And I would think if you do that through three or four sermons… it wouldn’t take many for somebody to find some reason to accuse me of some kind of crime… thought-crime [or] hate-crime… whatever it might be.
(Actually we had that very thing happening during covid. We had somebody who was persistently looking at things and reporting us to the authorities for things we were allegedly doing that were against the rules…)
Sometimes I say [this sort of thing] to people and they look at me as if I’m about to give the punchline and it’s all a joke. But I go to India every year — I won’t say where because the people I go to be with really are under violence and persecution, and I’ve seen the bruises and the scars on people’s bodies. I’ve seen the pictures of those who have been killed and have been attacked regularly for their faith. That’s normal Christianity for them. And… I find it very salutary. And I come back and I tell our congregation. I want them to try and see that we have lived through abnormal Christianity, but [that] this is normal Christianity. We’ve got no divine right to be exempted from all of that.
I’m not looking for it — don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to go to prison for my ministry… — but the question to me is going to be, if certain laws become passed, am I going to stop doing things that I am doing that I know are right and should be doing, so as to avoid that? Or am I going to be willing to pay the price? That’s the question for me… as a pastor particularly... but it’s a question for every Christian. Are you going to kow-tow and say the thing you’re being forced to say, or not say the thing you’re not allowed to say, because of your job prospects. Or are you going to say, “No, I’m sorry, I can’t do that.”
We all love the stories of Daniel in the lion’s den… and refusing to eat the king’s food and not bowing down… but… coming to a place near you very soon, perhaps.
On courage in the cause of truth
[1:31:10-1:36:32]
We’ve got to be courageous in the cause of truth.
Many years back we had a pastors’ conference… and we had John Piper speaking... his title was “courage in the cause of truth”. And this was exactly his point, that truth is so powerful and so dangerous that it requires courage to unleash it, because it will have devastating and often unpredictable effects. Or maybe very predictable effects! It will provoke great opposition, won’t it?
We constantly want to think that if we are clever enough or sensitive enough or this enough or that enough, that won’t be true for us [and] we won’t have to experience that. But when Jesus says that, wherever you go, sow the seed, somebody is going to be sowing weeds.15 Because we’ve got an enemy. So if you’re sowing the real seed, there will be an enemy who is trying to undo that. And part of the way he will undo that is [by] attacking you. He will use every nefarious means. And he knows the way that will be most hurtful to you. And if your biggest need as a person is the approval of others, he will taunt you with the fact that this will make others dislike you and you will not want to do these things.
The devil knows… the best ways to attack you. He knows your fears and the things you really, really don’t want. And he will attack you with that. And our call is to courage… to put on the Christian armour… because you are being attacked. You’ve got the armour. Be courageous. Put it on. The Lord will help you. Take the shield of faith. Take the helmet of salvation. Take the sword of the Spirit. And go out there, because God is with you.
And — in the context of “courage in the cause of truth” — presumably also the belt of truth which is the first item in what Paul describes as the “armour of God”.
Courage isn’t lack of fear, is it? Courage is feeling all the fear and the terror and the cowardice, but doing it anyway. If Christian leaders won’t do that, we’ve no right to expect anyone else to do that. That’s the burden on us. If I as a pastor am a coward, I cannot expect a congregation that is courageous. If I [as a] father am a coward, and ashamed of the gospel, I cannot expect my children to be more spiritually courageous and mature than I am. In God’s grace and mercy perhaps they might be, but I can’t expect that, can I?
(the very first post on this Substack)
Christian congregations need to pray for their pastors to be courageous. They need to encourage their pastors to be courageous. When they make a stand and it’s costly and they are getting beaten up for it, they need you to drop them a note or drop them a text or drop them an email and say “I’m proud of you. Well done. Thank you. Keep at it.” Because it’s hard. It’s really, really hard.
But you won’t be courageous unless your leaders are leading in that way. And they can’t be that courageous unless they know they have got your support to do that. And so we need to mutually encourage each other… in that courage. There’s no other way really to be strong in our witness, because that is what genuine witness is always going to bring — opposition.
But greater is he who is in us than he who is in the world.16 We have got reason to be courageous. That’s why it’s called the gospel armour, because it is the gospel that arms us. And it’s always the same, it’s coming back to the truth of the gospel. Christ is not defeated. He will build his church. Not even the gates of hell can prevail.17 Jesus the Lamb wins. Read the book of Revelation. You can read through it and find all kinds of unnerving things… but… one thing comes through: we know who wins.
And so whose side are you going to be on? The one who we know wins? Or the one who we know in the end is going to be destroyed? It seems a whole lot better just now to go that way, but we know it’s not where the story ends. It all comes back to the gospel, the true gospel, which is an eternal gospel, which is not just about comfort in the here and now, but is about the glory of the world to come. And when you put it that way, it’s very, very simple, but it’s very, very hard. Because every other thing in this world will say, “No, it’s not. It’s about now. It’s about comfort. It’s about here and now. It’s about safety. It’s about blah blah blah.” So it’s very simple but very hard... But that’s our calling. And the Lord will strengthen us.
Whoever has ears to hear, let them hear.18
Dear Church Leaders Archive; some posts can also be found on Unexpected Turns
The Big Reveal: Christianity carefully considered
This is still true in 2024!
A somewhat puzzling chapter of the Bible on which I have never heard anyone speak
e.g. in 2 Timothy 3:1
NB it is important to exercise care and caution in the interpretation of such passages, particularly in a book of the Bible like Revelation that is rich in symbolic imagery
It is particularly worth thinking carefully about that 2 Thessalonians passage in the context of the past few years
Stephen was the first Christian martyr
Though Justin Welby was — like many other church leaders — not shy of speaking out when it came to promoting covid injections
Clicking on the link to the website https://www.nhs100k.com gave this message (when I got anything at all):
But I doubt that the reason for the appearance of this message relates to any real threat to my personal or financial information.
I am reminded of getting the same message when trying to access this link…
Searching for “nhs 100k” (probably the most likely search query?) gave these results on Google, DuckDuckGo and Brave:
NB a search of the above search engines, including Google, for “nhs100k” (i.e. with no space) does find the NHS100K website.
But when I searched the BBC website, I found only one article, and that article only mentions NHS100K once (in a caption):
When I searched the BBC website, I found only one article mentioning NHS100K:
Alas, Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York — formerly led by renowned pastor and author Tim Keller, who wrote the foreword to Metaxas’ Bonhoeffer biography — was reported as segregating congregation members based on covid vaccine status (although Keller maintained that “the restrictions were imposed by landlords”)
cf. 1 Timothy 4:1