Themelios Volume 51 Issue 1
The latest issue of Themelios – Volume 51 Issue 1 – was published last month.
Free to download, this is a special issue in honour of D.A. Carson.
There are many contributions, including those by Gary Millar, Graham Cole, Peter Orr, Brian Rosner and David Peterson.
It’s available from The Gospel Coalition – here’s a direct link to the PDF version.
Targeted and Engaged Evangelism to the Eastern Orthodox
Archie Poulos reviews and commends Certainty for Life: An invitation to those in Eastern Orthodoxy by John Diacos –
“I have spent most of my ministry seeking to evangelise Greek Orthodox, and in that pursuit John and I have sometimes laboured together and sometimes in parallel with each other. I have great delight in commending this book.”
– Read about it at The Gospel Coalition Australia.
Is a mother different from a father?
“Australia has celebrated Mother’s Day and Father’s Day annually since the 1930s. Some might think that these days are a bit of a relic from the past, when traditional gender roles were more accepted and family structures were much less diverse. Couldn’t we now just have a Parents’ Day instead?
I don’t hold particularly strong opinions on whether observing these days is ultimately positive or negative for us as a society. But I do think that having separate days for mothers and fathers offers an opportunity to celebrate something that is increasingly absent from our community: the recognition that a parent is not just a generic, substitutable role. A parent is either a mother or a father. …”
– Just in time for Mother’s Day, The Australian Church Record has published this excerpt from Jocelyn Loane’s book on Motherhood.
King’s Birthday Conference 2026 set for Monday 8th June
From Two Ways Ministries –
“As in previous years, KBC 2026 will be held on the public holiday Monday, 8 June, from 1:30 -5:00pm at Moore Theological College..”
“Our registration rate will increase on May 25 (10 working days prior to conference) so please register early to ensure a seat in the Marcus Loane Hall; we expect to fill it to capacity, and will have late registrations seated in an overflow room.
For those living outside Sydney who cannot get to Newtown, the Conference will be live-streamed …”
More from Phillip Jensen –
“The topic this year is Prophecy Today. It is a very important topic, which is under such controversy today.
WHY IS IT IMPORTANT?
Biblical Christianity is a prophetic religion – built on God’s revealed word. Therefore, nothing is such a threat to our faith as the lies Satan puts into the mouths of false prophets. Discerning prophets and prophecy is a very important activity.
Jesus warns us to beware of false prophets (Matthew 7:15), while Paul warns us not to despise prophecies (1 Thessalonians 5:20). How do we know the truth and what will indicate the falsehood of prophets and prophecies?
We are commanded to ‘earnestly desire to prophesy’ for prophecy builds, encourages, and consoles the church.
But how are we all to prophesy without causing confusion, and when are we to remain silent?
WHY IS IT CONTROVERSIAL?
At one end of the spectrum, the Charismatic Movement is keen to promote prophecy and prophets who speak in ways that contradict and undermine Biblical revelation.
At the other end of the spectrum, Liberal Christians are promoting as prophets people who preach the ‘correct’ political messages of social justice, and use the references to women prophesying to set aside any distinction between men and women.
And in the middle of the spectrum are confused Bible believers, unsure of what the Bible does teach about prophecy.
The King’s Birthday Conference is always a great time to catch up with old friends, a great place to make new friends, and an important place to bring friends to hear God’s word.”
New thinking on addressing the collapse in ministry recruitment and training?
From Dominic Steele at The Pastor’s Heart –
“In the UK there are serious signs of a narrowing pipeline into ministry recruitment and training. Fewer people are coming forward through some of the traditional routes. Traineeships are under pressure. Residential theological education is changing.
And churches are asking: Where will the next generation of pastors, evangelists, church planters and ministry leaders come from?
In Australia, it is not the same story, but there is a similar question. Geoff Folland has argued that the old model of the young, full-time, residential theological student is no longer the dominant reality. Colleges face rising compliance costs, changing student profiles and tighter finances. And, churches, apprenticeships, parachurch organisations and mission agencies are now doing more of the early work of formation.
So is this a Bible college problem? A local church problem? A recruitment problem? A funding problem? Or an ecosystem problem?
Orlando Saer is Senior Pastor of Christ Church Southampton, Chair of Trustees of 9:38 and part of the team behind the Yarnton Gospel Workers Trust launched last week — a new UK initiative seeking to remove blockages and multiply gospel workers for the harvest.”
The Temple of the Holy Spirit — Our embodied future
From Phillip Jensen –
“The commandments of 1 Corinthians 6:15-20 are obvious: flee sexual immorality and glorify God in your body.
However, Paul does not simply give commandments; he gives the rationale behind them. The rationale has to do with the meaning of the body in his thinking in terms of our creation, our resurrection, and our marital union with Christ.
This densely argued paragraph provides for us a Christian understanding of ourselves as well as our motivation to live Christianly.”
Context, Context, Context — Applying biblical thinking
From Phillip Jensen –
“Hard passages of the Bible are great passages. The reason that they are hard is because we are not thinking biblically. Wrestling with these hard passages gives us the opportunity to change our thinking in order to be aligned with biblical thinking.
1 Corinthians 6:12-20 is notoriously difficult, and over the next two weeks, Peter and I are going to try to unravel some of its complexities.
We start today by looking at the context.”
– Hear Peter and Philip discuss at Two Ways News.
AI is coming for your Systematic Theology
Tim Challies warns of the dangers already present –
“A recent article at The American Scholar asks Who Is Blake Whiting?
Whiting appears to be the most prolific scholar of our age, sometimes publishing up to 13 books a week ‘on a host of complex archaeological and historical subjects, ranging from the collapse of Near Eastern civilizations in 1177 BCE to the recent discovery of a huge Silk Road-era city in Central Asia.’ He must be quite the individual!
But as you no doubt guessed, he is not an individual at all. Rather, Blake Whiting is fabricated, and the books under his name have been generated using AI. …
I want you to know about these books because I want you to be aware that this is happening. I want you to know it’s happening because it’s likely that things will get far worse before they get any better. I’ll first introduce you to this slop theology, then discuss the threat these books represent, and then tell you how you can identify them.”
Principles of the Prayer Book
“What I offer here … is not a nostalgic plea for the recovery of a lost golden age, nor a polemical defence of one authorised book over another. Rather, it is an attempt to articulate and reflect on the principles that underlie The Book of Common Prayer, principles which have shaped Anglican worship historically and which continue to exercise normative authority within the Anglican Church of Australia.”
Bishop of The Northern Territory, Greg Anderson, writes at The Australian Church Record –
“I am probably one of a relatively small number of people these days who has been – hard to know quite how to describe it – perhaps a committed participant in liturgical church services from my earliest childhood memories. Perhaps unusually, I was an early and competent reader, so I imagine I was reading and saying the prayers along with everyone else. And since it was the same liturgy every week (apart from the Psalm, which we didn’t always say), you didn’t need to read all that well… well, you could join in from memory. Our church was devotionally warm, scripturally focused, and theologically normal, and no one imagined for a moment that liturgical services sat in tension with any of that.
That is my background. I know that this is far from everyone’s experience. All this is to say that I approach liturgical corporate worship with a long?standing positive experience – something that is relatively rare these days. What I offer here, therefore, is not a nostalgic plea for the recovery of a lost golden age, nor a polemical defence of one authorised book over another. Rather, it is an attempt to articulate and reflect on the principles that underlie The Book of Common Prayer, principles which have shaped Anglican worship historically and which continue to exercise normative authority within the Anglican Church of Australia.
Before turning to those principles themselves, two introductory notes are necessary: first, concerning the place of The Book of Common Prayer in the Australian Church; and second, concerning where such principles are to be found and how they might be identified and ranked. …”
Random Thoughts about Preaching and Being Preached To
Canadian Christian writer and blogger Tim Challies has put together some “random thoughts” on preaching and being preached to –
“There are few matters more foundational to pastoral ministry than preaching, and few matters more common to the Christian experience than being preached to. Most pastors will preach thousands of sermons over the span of their ministry, and most congregants will listen to thousands of sermons over the span of their lifetime. This means we should think about preaching often and well!
In this article, I’ve simply collected some random thoughts on the subject and have alternated them so that half are for the ones preaching the sermons and the other half are for the ones listening to them. …”
Here are extracts from the first four –
“In my experience, sermons tend to grow in quality more by subtraction than by addition. Often, one of the best things a preacher can do to improve his sermon is to strip away 20 or 25% of his content as a final step in the preparation process. …
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Being obviously attentive as you listen to a sermon can be a great gift to the preacher. The preacher gains more than you may think from your looks of appreciation (or disgust), your attentive eyes (or tired ones), and your quiet amens (or groans). …
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The appropriate length, style, and format of a sermon can change over time and between contexts. We should expect that sermons preached at an Anglican Church in Sydney, a Baptist Church in Topeka, and a Dutch Reformed church in Cape Town will differ in many ways. … The challenge of any preacher is to preach the sermons that are suited to his congregation and not some other.
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It is good to listen to a sermon with an open Bible … the preacher assumes you will have an open Bible so you can follow along with him. This is difficult to do when you did not bring one or will not open it. …”
– Be encouraged to take the time to read and ponder them.
How to put together ‘an excellent’ funeral
This week from The Pastor’s Heart –
“Not every funeral is great. Sometimes they go too long, sometimes the gospel is not clear, sometimes the content overlaps.
How do you create a funeral service that God would be pleased with, connects well with people, honours the deceased and serves the bereaved?
• David Cook is former Principal of Sydney Missionary and Bible College,
• Sandy Grant is Dean of St Andrew’s Cathedral Sydney, and
• Gary Coleman is former Chaplain to the Motor Racing Industry.”
– Watch here. Some very helpful advice.
Recommended:
At a Time Like This – Some answers for loss and grief by Simon Manchester.
Preaching to Meet the Need
At The Expository Preaching Trust, Bob Thomas remembers the preaching of Graham Miller (pictured) as an example to consider and follow –
“Dr Graham Miller, friend and mentor of many young ministers in his day, and now in Glory, told a group of us once that he never had queues of people lining up at the Manse door to seek counselling or ask questions – and he attributed this to the fact that he was answering their questions in his preaching.
Those of us who sat under his preaching could testify that it was profoundly simple and simply profound, firmly tied to the passage of Scripture he was expounding in careful detail as he preached serially through a book of the Bible, and that it did indeed do what he claimed it did – answered peoples’ questions along the way and to their satisfaction. …”
Photo: Banner of Truth.
(Some of Graham Miller’s audio messages, recorded in 1959, can be found here.)
321: Seeing Life Clearly
From The Gospel Coalition Australia –
“Glen Scrivener’s How to See Life in 321 is a unique contribution to the plethora of evangelistic books available.
In this book, Christian doctrines such as trinity, sin, salvation, and union are given their initial conceptual meaning through simple stories and explanations.
The book and corresponding online course are divided into four sections : ‘Jesus: Our Guide’, ‘God’s Three-ness’, ‘The World’s Two-ness’, ‘Your One-ness’.
Each section comprises two chapters; the first begins with an illustrative story, and the second provides a deeper look at the illustrated idea with personal application.
There is a brief and helpful frequently asked questions section at the back of the book which gives general answers for those who are asking whether Christianity is true. The FAQ answer on divine hiddenness is an important contribution given people no longer assume the existence of God as compared to by people attending a Billy Graham crusade sixty years ago …”
– Jospeh Hewitt enthusiastically reviews Glen Scrivener’s How to See Life in 321.
“If your church is looking a resource to give non-Christians who do not want to read a gospel just yet, How to See Life is probably the pick of the bunch.”
Image: Speak Life’s 321 course.
Australian Journal of Law and Religion — Volume 7
From Associate Professor Neil Foster at Law and Religion Australia –
“The latest volume of the Australian Journal of Law and Religion has been published (and is freely available online.)
The Table of Contents is below – always worth reading! In particular I would like to commend the prize-winning essay by Jacob Carson, a former student of mine, on the important issues around teaching of religion in public schools.”
– Read about it (and download your copy) here.
The liturgical shape of authentic Anglicanism
Original published in The Australian Church Record’s Easter 2026 Journal, Andrew Leslie reflects on authentic Anglicanism –
“When you look beyond the Sydney Diocese at national or global Anglicanism—and you can get a glimpse of this within the Sydney Diocese too—you might imagine that the denomination is so diverse in liturgy, in theology, and in practice, that defining ‘Anglican’ could be like asking, how long is a piece of string? And you’d be right.
In the face of that reality, it might be tempting just to sit on your hands, or throw them up in the air, or perhaps even make a virtue of the increasingly fragmented, almost totally amorphous comprehensiveness of global Anglicanism—as if to be authentically Anglican amounts to little more than ‘everyone does as they see fit in their own eyes’, to borrow from the book of Judges!
Forty or fifty years ago, people would often try to solve the riddle by saying that at least the denomination has some kind of global coherence through communion with the Archbishop of Canterbury. But now even that’s no longer a given. …”
Image: Archbishop Thomas Cranmer by Gerlach Flicke.
What we believe
The message at the heart of Christianity is really quite simple…