“Need prayers to get through this,” is the message from Rick Zamarripa, father of a police officer killed in Dallas, sent from the hospital where his son Patrick was taken.

Father, we bring this father’s request to you.

Whether Dallas, Baghdad, Istanbul or many other places, our world seems to be an unsafe world. Most of us know people who have passed through these cities. Australia does not seem so far away after all.

We know, that it is you, not..

At the theological college where I grew up (my father was the principal) the students would have an annual revue. You know the sort of thing: sketches gently ribbing their teachers, a couple of guys with guitars strumming through a tuneless ditty, even an attempt at stand-up comedy here or there.

One of the sketches has stayed with me since I saw it when I was about 14 years old. It was a pretend preaching class. The trainee preacher was given..

1. The Bible did not fall out of the sky, bound in leather, written in English.
The Bible is not a single book, but more of a complex library, written over some 1500 years, in the languages of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. There were real human processes behind its composition and canonisation which God used to give the Bible to us. First, the composition of many of these texts was a process rather than a single event.

For instance, while Moses..

July 9 marks five years of South Sudan’s independence, when it broke away from Sudan after decades of conflict. But this year, the world’s youngest country has cancelled celebrations as it struggles to contain the civil war that has beleaguered the new state since 2013.

A tentative peace was established in April, when rebel leader Vice President Machar returned to the capital, Juba, after being in exile. He was sworn in as the first vice pre..

Churches that meet in public school halls in NSW on Sundays are under attack for the content of their sermons.

The attack comes from a one-man advocacy group linked to the campaign against scripture in public schools.

Sermons found on the websites of Hunter Bible Church, Maitland Evangelical Church and The Lakes Evangelical Church (all part of the Fellowship of Independent Evangelical Churches) on the NSW mid north coast were the subject of complaints ..

Over at the Centre for Public Christianity, we’ve been doing a lot of research lately into some of the worst bits of Christian history. The Spanish Inquisition. Sectarian violence. Early-modern witch hunts, and torture techniques I didn’t know existed (see: “squassation”). The casualness with which Crusaders massacred peoples not remotely connected with their war aims.

The end result of such disheartening research will, I hope, be worth it: CPX..

In a refugee camp in northern France, a Pashtun man from Pakistan was happy to hear the good news of Jesus in an audio-visual presentation in his own language.

It was an evangelistic audio-visual presentation by Global Recordings Network (GRN) giving an overview of the Bible story from creation to Christ and how to become a follower of Jesus.

“He sat there holding the player while I showed him the pictures,” recalls Graydon Colville, international di..

Australia’s “Christian Values” parties have been left scrabbling for the twelfth Senate spot in three states (SA, NSW and Qld), in the wake of an election that favoured smaller parties. But the protest and conservative voters went to One Nation and Nick Xenophon ahead of the small Christian parties, that include Christian Democrats, Australian Christians, Democratic Labour, Rise Up Australia and Family First.

“We have a very good chance of getting the t..