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Throughout his earthly ministry, Jesus did not simply describe the Kingdom of God—he enacted it. He preached, “The Kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe the good news,” and then he lived it: healing the sick, forgiving sin, welcoming the overlooked, confronting what dehumanises, and laying down his life in self-giving love. This Kingdom—the reign of God—is not removed from the real world. It presses into it. It speaks into how we order our common life—socially, politi

He didn’t lose it all at once. Not rebellion, not even doubt in its louder forms— more like erosion, slow, intelligent, socially approved. A summer once: mud on his trainers, arms raised in a field, a voice from a stage saying God was near. Soul Survivor. He meant it then, or at least he didn’t stand outside it taking notes. University taught him how to stand outside things— how to name belief as construction, trace its scaffolding, keep a straight face while dismantling it.

I asked for Your face, for fire, for something certain enough to hold without shaking. Instead: the valley. Long road. Bad weather. Nights that would not speak. Footprints in the dust I could not tell were Yours or mine. I thought glory would split the mountain, light too fierce to survive. Instead it came small— legs that kept moving, tea made by someone who stayed, morning arriving again without asking permission. You hid me in the cleft of things: rock, grief, the narrow p

He reads it online in the waking light of morning, joining others for prayer with Leeds Minster in the background— stone, candlelight, old memorials to war fixed quietly in the walls, names held still by cold brass and silence, boys once sent out and returned as names. The city is already stirring. Buses cough awake. Shops lift their shutters. Someone sleeps in a doorway beneath a bank’s bright window. Leeds remembers, again, what it kneels to. Psalm first. Then Exodus. Then

Yesterday, I was in conversation with someone stateside about influences—what has shaped my writing and where it’s come from. I think that’s what’s prompted this: a longer pause, a looking back, trying to name some of the threads. Something has shifted, though not all at once. It feels less like a moment and more like a tide turning—something you only really notice when you stop and look back. For many years, my ministry held two spaces together. I was part of a mainstream ch

MISSION, THEOLOGY & MINISTRY FOR THE MARGINS ONLINE Lighthouse School of Missional Theology is pleased to offer the MTMM course, equipping Christians to serve thoughtfully among marginalised communities. Drawing on our experience in theology, mission, and ministry with adults facing poverty, mental health challenges, homelessness, trauma, and addiction, we facilitate a dynamic learning community for both those already working on the margins or feeling called to pioneer in th

A few thoughts …. I may disagree with myself tomorrow but here goes….These are not settled conclusions. They are notes in the margin. A reflection, not a manifesto. Questions, not easy answers. I’m seeking to write carefully because these are difficult waters, but the following may be triggering for some. Something feels fractured in the UK right now. There is a new hardness in the air. You can feel it on the streets, hear it in conversations, see it in our politics. For imm

The Jesus follower is a cultural outsider—a misfit who does not quite fit within the machinery of the world. They live slightly out of step, swimming against the current, hearing a different music, learning to walk to its rhythm. There is something about following Jesus that makes normal life feel strange. Or perhaps it makes us realise how strange “normal” has become. We may dress our faith in the language of philosophy, speak with cultural fluency, and even find ourselves i

Do not come to me now in the rush. Not in the swell of the room. Not in the chase for one more high place, one more moment to prove you are here. I am tired of mistaking intensity for presence. Tired of thinking you must always arrive in thunder, in tears, in the room lifting itself towards the rafters. No. Come as the whisper. Come as the breath that barely moves the dust in the chapel light. Come as that still small voice that does not force itself through the speakers but

I wrote this travelling by train through the Alps from Rome to Paris, after reading John Donne’s Holy Sonnet XIV, “Batter my heart, three-person’d God.” After the Chorus Do not come to me now as soft advice. Not as the bright smile at the church door. Not as the chorus swelling through the speakers, all uplift and upward hands. The room is singing its predictable liturgy — the slow one, the anthem, the key change meant to lift the heart — and something in me lock

Simeon had waited so long his bones had learnt winter. Dust in the folds of his cloak, incense caught in his beard, Rome at the gate, taxes like teeth, the poor bent double under empire. Still he came. Morning after morning to the place where promise thinned the air, where stone and heaven almost touched. Waiting for the consolation of Israel, for a God who would tear the sky open and come down. Not comfort as the world sells it. Not the soft lie that tells the bruised to mov

Yesterday my wonderful wife treated me to a guided tour of the Vatican Museums with an art historian. I am still carrying it round with me. The place is breathtaking. It really is. Marble and gold and pigment and centuries of prayer, power, fear, longing, all pressed into stone. You can feel the weight of history there. Human beings reaching for transcendence. Human beings reaching for power too. And perhaps those two have often been closer than we like to admit. What has sta

Lowered into Mercy- A True Story framed poetically They brought Yosef to Jesus because he could not come by himself. Four friends, backs bent beneath the weight of love, hands in the dust, shoulders learning the grammar of burden. Love is a verb. Costly. It carries. The house was full. Bodies pressed tight. No room at the door. No space for one more wound. So they climbed. Hands through clay. Fingers through timber. Tearing open the roof like grief tears open the heart. And t

It was Easter Sunday. Dawn had only just begun to lift itself over the city. Somewhere lilies were being carried into church. Somewhere a priest was lifting bread with tired hands. Somewhere someone who had slept rough was waking cold under a thin blanket in a church porch. And on the screens the old empire was speaking again. Open the fuckin’ strait, he says, you crazy bastards. On Easter morning. The day we dare to say that death does not get the final word. The day the wom

'Ed used to crouch
 outside Morrisons— not always asking, 
just hoping someone,
 tipsy from a night out, might drop a fiver
and not ask why. He said it was for food—
 but it wasn’t.
 Not really. The city’s full of street kitchens. What he needed
 was the bag of brown
 that quieted the ache
 that never really left.' Extract from Grace May yet Win, Rev' Jon Swales When Hope Shrinks For Ed, hope has become painfully small. Not small in importance, but small in reach. He is not t

Easter Sunday: The Wild Messiah Walks Among the Wounded Night does not leave all at once. It lingers on the streets, in hospital corridors, in the smoke that still hangs over cities at war. The world wakes bruised. Sirens somewhere far off. A helicopter circling above sleeping roofs. A man pulling a thin blanket tighter in the church porch. Empire still stands .Missiles still tear the dark apart. Children still wake to the sound of walls giving way. Mothers still wait for foo

Night gathers early. The room is dim. Bread on the table. Wine holding the last light. Outside, boots on stone. Empire still turns. Now too: Propellers in the dark. A drone circling above sleeping roofs. The long whistle of a bomb. Glass becoming rain. A child waking into fire. Inside, a bowl of water. He stands, slips off his robe, and takes up a towel. No one speaks. The one we call Lord kneels. Hands in water. Water on skin. Dust giving way. This is where kingdom begins. N

It looks alive. Leaves out, green enough to signal blessing. God on our side, favour resting, certainty thick in the air. From a distance it all looks like it’s working. A people fluent in Scripture, a faith wrapped tight around a nation, prayers spoken with the confidence of power. Chosen, they say. But chosen for what? There was once a promise; blessed to be a blessing, a light for the nations, a people through whom the world might taste what God is like. Not where blessing

She moved like silence in a room full of eyes, broke the jar like a prophet breaks the sky. No words, just oil — and the scent of burial. The men coughed, like they'd inhaled scandal. She poured a year's wage on his worn feet, and wiped them with her dignity undone. And the church— still, at times, finds itself in the crucible of pain and suffering. There, it pours itself out— in hostels and prisons, war zones and refugee camps, where the broken bodies of the world become its