Imagine waking up and only you had heard of The Beatles. That’s the conceit behind the latest movie from director Danny “SlumDog Millionaire” Boyle and screenwriter Richard “Love Actually” Curtis, Yesterday. Yesterday is shaping up to be the feel-good movie of the coming northern summer, in which a talented, but spectacularly unsuccessful musician, Jack Malik, wakes […]
When Matisha moved into the retirement apartment next to my Mum last year, things got ugly. Very ugly. Very quickly. Matisha took an instant dislike to Mum. Only my Mum. All the other residents she was fine with. Chatted with them. Spent time with them But there was something about Mum that she took an […]
Dutchman Johan Cruyff was perhaps the greatest footballer/soccer player ever. Brazil’s Pele might pip him in some polls; George Best was a brief shining superstar. But as the leader of the Ajax FC and Dutch teams’ “total football” approach in the 1970s, plus a glittering playing and coaching career with the famous FC Barcelona, Cruyff, […]
Six years ago today, after several months of meeting as two household groups, our church, Providence Church Midland, decided to do a public gathering every fortnight, and household on the other weekend. We rented an old building in Midland, the old Midland bank: About thirty or so of us turned up (no visitors despite a […]
Golf is having its God moment. Or, to put it another way, its Blockbuster Video moment. And it’s happening with the same generation of people that the church has been struggling to engage with in the West – the Millennials. 22-37 year olds have lost interest in the game. Golf courses, which are expensive to […]
Although I have heard of evangelical mega-pastor James MacDonald, I am not familiar with any of his books. Or his sermons. Or his broadcast messages on Christian radio. And I didn’t know his church, Harvest Bible Chapel, had 13 thousand members and numerous affiliate churches. I didn’t know MacDonald’s church was in Chicago, however there […]
There’s an App for every occasion, and now there’s one for your final occasion. WeCroak.com offers an app that reminds you – often – that you are going to die. It’s based on a Bhutanese folk saying that to truly be happy we must contemplate our mortality five times per day. With its funky frog logo […]
The new Gillette ad We Believe is causing quite the stir around the world (well, around the rich Western world where men can afford razors with multiple blades). And it’s divided people just as sharply as a well honed cut-throat razor would. The company is unapologetic for hitching its wagon onto the #Metoo movement, and obviously […]
In hard secular times we imagine that the people of God will nobly knuckle down and stand firm in the face of the Sexular Culture, the post-Christian social experiments that continue to defy physio-logic, and progressive officialdom’s push to purge the public square of any Christian voice that does not play the “renaming” game. In […]
I don’t ever see it going back to what it was like before. Before you came into our lives. You’ve got to hand it to Netflix. Putting on Marie Kondo’s Tidying Up straight after Christmas and the New Year was a masterstroke in scheduling. By now, in a frenzy of new year’s resolve and […]
Jared C Wilson gets five out of five stars for his review of the state of Christian movies: Why Christian Movies Are So Terrible. He nails it, especially the first point, that Christian movies are made, not by artists, but by propagandists. Wilson states: Christian movies are more akin to propaganda than art, because they […]
Contemporary is out. Liturgy is the new black. A recent article in The Times confirms what I’ve been hearing anecdotally, and been witnessing among our own congregation: many Millennials returning to church are often not headed towards the large pentecostal churches, or the “pentecostal-lite”, or even the “evangelical-lite”, but towards liturgy. Now the article above is […]
What would you do with up to three months off work? Does that sound like a dream? Well, I have almost three months off, combining annual leave, some long service leave, and a slow taper back into two roles in March. And it sounds like a dream. Sounds like it. I just don’t want it […]
It would seem that the only relationship that isn’t respected by those rolling out the Trojan horse program Respectful Relationships into our schools, is the relationship between parents and their own children. Once Christmas ends, the first billboards from Officeworks are up, reminding parents that it’s back to school in only four weeks time! Four […]
Two world’s ran into each other on New Year’s Day near where I live. It was a hot morning down at the river where I was heading to do the New Year’s Day 5km Woodbridge parkrun event. There were about 160 other people milling around warming up. I’d gotten up early, for a warm up […]
Tomorrow, the second last day of the year, and the last Sunday, eight of the young people in our church will be baptised. Eight young people ranging in age from six through to 23 will be plunged into a better story; the story of God’s work in the world. Eight young people will gather around […]
But I tell you that everyone will have to give account on the day of judgment for every empty word they have spoken. (Jesus in Matthew 12) Well it’s finally been admitted. Billionaire tech inventor Elon Musk, has come out and said that whatever you say about someone on Twitter doesn’t count cos you said […]
There’s every chance that 2019 might just be a great year for evangelism in Australia. Every chance a wave is coming in. Every chance indeed. There are some telling signs. I was listening last week to the always excellent This Cultural Moment podcast, and Mark Sayers was observing that while it seems that the tide has […]
Saw the new Spiderman movie last night. Loved it. What a way to freshen up what was threatening to become a stale franchise. Spiderman: Into the Spider-Verse sloughs off the tired old exoskeleton and wriggles free to create new webs of intrigue. Its use of animation, mashed up with some real life footage, and a montage […]
Well, it’s that time of year. The winding up time of the year for lists etc. Strava kilometres runs, books read (or claimed to have been read), calories burned, Facebook activities liked, angry emojis given in lieu of actual passive aggressive comments, stuff like that. So here are the top five articles read on stephenmcalpine.com […]
The late political cartoonist Bill Leak observed that his job was becoming more difficult each year because the parodies he once drew were becoming realities. When cultural and political life is a joke, where do you go from there? Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the parody of life that has become actual life: the […]
Hey teacher in Christian school, if you want to continue your long and well documented tradition of discriminating against gay students in your school (deriding them, expelling them, pointing them out in the classroom, the sort of thing they’ve been doing up to this point with impunity), then you’d better get a wriggle on. For […]
It’s a hard truth, but it’s been the painful things in ministry that have shaped me most. I wish it were not that way, but it is. I wish the conferences and books and teaching series had been the biggest teachers. They’re all great things, and I appreciate them. But I suspect many are nodding […]
