Saturday blog-sweep

I was at Wimbledon yesterday and managed to be interviewed on Five live not once but twice ( was also on ESPN and chatted with Pam Shriver). Amazing day. Got a plug in for Barnes:)

Now before fame goes to my head on to the sweep

Let's abolish retirement

Retirement is not as old as you think. According to the Bible, God expelled Adam from Paradise with the terrible words: "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground." And that's more or less how it was until about a hundred years ago. Most people worked till they died. Pensions in the UK date from 1908, and the cost of the first pension schemes was tiny, as the retirement age of 70 was 20 years beyond average life expectancy. Retirement was for heaven – if one
had lived a virtuous life.


Why women still can't have it all


In short, the minute I found myself in a job that is typical for the vast majority of working women (and men), working long hours on someone else’s schedule, I could no longer be both the parent and the professional I wanted to be—at least not with a child experiencing a rocky adolescence. I realized what should have perhaps been obvious: having it all, at least for me, depended almost entirely on what type of job I had. The flip side is the harder truth: having it all was not possible in many types of jobs, including high government office—at least not for very long.


Galatians in 30 Tweets

For starters, here’s a one-tweet summary of the letter:

Jesus’s astounding grace is to be admired and appreciated, not added to. #Galatians

What follows are 29 more designed to walk you through six red-hot, gospel-rich chapters, each with a Galatians hashtag. Grab a Twitter account and help us get #Galatians trending today, if you would.

The World Book of the Year

This year some evangelicals are displaying a pessimistic sense of decline. Internally and externally, Christian denominations are "sore oppressed, by schisms rent asunder, by heresies distressed." Amid despair, Baylor professor Rodney Stark's The Triumph of Christianity: How the Jesus Movement Became the World's Largest Religion (HarperOne) provides long-term perspective. It is WORLD's 2012 Book of the Year.


Afraid of Grace


To accept grace meant I had to first accept the depth of my sin and brokenness. It meant replacing the center of my life with God and his grace instead of me and my effort. It meant God got the credit and the glory, not me.


Fresh expressions


"The proportion of fresh expressions of Church compared to parishes is 38.6%. If compared to the number of churches, which might be a closer comparison, that proportion is 30.4%. Either way, about a third of the ecclesial bodies in the diocesan family are current or recent fxCs [Fresh Expression Churches]." Research Paper by Church Army, Summer 2012.

Beautiful eulogy via Joe Thorn