Tim Suffield

Am I a Christian Nationalist? This should be a straightforward question, but to answer it we need to make a number of distinctions. This felt like a largely American discourse until fairly recently, but the term is increasingly being used here in the UK as well. The problem is, it’s a big broad sloppy term that means as much or as little as those employing it intend it to.

Am I a Christian Nationalist?

Unfortunately that term means so many different things, so of which are mainstream evangelical, that answering the question isn't meaningful. I attempt some distinctions in this post.

Christianity is practiced at the table We undervalue the importance of hospitality for the Christian life: it’s a central feature of who we are and how we should be behaving because Christianity is practiced at the table. That aphorism is a deliberate double entendre, in fact, it contains two of them. Firstly, when talking about the table, I have two different realities in view. I mean both your dining table in your home that maybe seats four others if you’ve managed to squeeze a medium sized one in somewhere, and I mean ‘The Table,’ the place that the gathered church comes to eat and drink Jesus in the Lord’s Supper.

Christianity is practised at the Table.

That is, your table and the Lord's, and practiced in the senses of 'performed' and 'learned.'

Decreation When God floods the earth in the days of Noah it’s like he turns the clock back on everything that’s happened in the last six chapters of Genesis, and the world reverts to Genesis 1. Before God created and ordered over seven days, the world was water. In Noah’s flood he unmakes and disorders by reverting creation to where it started.

Noah's Flood winds creation backwards.

The World in your Pocket You carry in your pocket a whole world. That hand-sized brick of black glass is a window to anything and everything that there is. You could find out what is known publicly about anyone you meet. You could learn from someone else how they think you should complete any tasks you’re about to do. You could read news or opinion on any thing in the world.

Carrying the whole world in your pocket changes you.

3 Kinds of Forgiveness What do we mean by ‘forgiveness’? If you’re meant to forgive someone, what does this actually mean? I fear that a lot of the ways we talk about forgiveness in the church are slightly out of step with how the Bible talks about forgiveness. While a thorough exegesis of the relevant passages would be helpful, I would like to suggest that one of the key problems is that we (and the Bible) use the word ‘forgiveness’ to cover three different realities that we often conflate.

What do we mean when we talk about forgiveness?

I argue it could be one of 3 different things.

Give them Meat How do we engage young people in the faith? What can we do to keep them in the church? What will they be interested in and how can we use that to tell them about Jesus? How can we keep their attention? We could throw their phones in the sea. Or, if that’s off the table, and I’m no expert in youth work or teenagers, my suggestion is this:

This summer I watched 11,500 teenagers sit on the floor and be fed red meat from the Bible and lap it up.

There's no need to pander: give your people meat. Give them Jesus.

Orthogonal Reading We read the Bible in two directions, horizontally and vertically. Or, because I really like the word, we read the Bible orthogonally. I’m using some of the language here of Michael Niebauer, who argues for these two angles of reading, horizontal and vertical. I depart from him in the below to some extent, but I’m using his terms. Horizontal Reading…

We should the Bible orthogonally.

Which is a really good word.

Training for Ministry Spurgeon’s College has recently closed with immediate effect as its financial situation became untenable. This raises some interesting questions, even for those of us in movements in the UK that rarely use residential training settings. Spurgeon’s had recently become a university, with its own degree awarding powers. It was the only independent evangelical Bible College to have done so in the UK and was being watched with interest by the others.

How are we expecting our successors and future church planters to get trained? Have we considered that might require us to sink energy and finance into those that might do that training long before they start doing it?

When Guides Fall What do we do when those who have helped our theological development take a step in a direction that really concerns us? As I write, there’s just been a bruhaha on X about John Mark Comer changing his mind away from penal substitutionary atonement. To be precise, though little of the storm has been, he expressed movement in that direction in an Instagram story.

When someone we respect or who has shaped our thinking 'falls' either morally or intellectually, how should we think about what we learned from them?

3 preaching rules I have 3 rules for preaching; I thought I’d share them with you. These are my first ports of call for assessing my own or someone else’s preaching. There is lots more that could be said and fed back on, but this is the centre of what I think we should be aiming for in our preaching. If we miss these, we’ve…

I have three fundamental rules for my own preaching. They're always my first port of call for assessing how I did.

Practising Disconnection We live in a deeply connected world. There are some signs that geopolitically that might be changing, but individually it’s as true as ever. The distraction devices in our pockets keep us connected to each other, people with our specific interests, what’s going on in the world, things somewhere we should be anxious about that will never affect us personally, and an unending swirl of banality.

What I found when I turned my phone off:

Order and the Charismatic Paul in 1 Corinthians 14 is keen to express to the Corinthians that worship should be orderly. Yes, you can have a flow of charismatic life with everyone bringing their prayer, tongue, Bible reading, prophecy, and the rest, but you must also have some order. At the very least you need to take it in turns, it should be understandable, languages (heavenly or earthly) must be interpreted, prophecies should be weighed by the elders at the time and responded to (that’s my understanding of 1 Corinthians 14’s statement on women, it won’t be everyone’s reading), and we shouldn’t have too much of any of it.

How do we embrace both the order and charismatic life that 1 Corinthians 14 encourages? It has a lot to do with Genesis 1.

High and Lifted Up There is no one who is higher than the Lord Jesus. He is Yahweh, God of gods, King of kings, Lord of lords. He is seated on the throne in the heavenly temple and the train of his robe fills the place. There are winged fiery lightning snakes that attend his person and serenade him, sinless beings of terrible might, who have a whole seat of extraneous wings for the single purpose of ensuring they never look at him because he is too wondrous for their sight (Isaiah 6).

Jesus made himself low in order to lift you up.

Maturity Will Hurt If you want to mature, you’re going to have to suffer. Actually, that’s not quite right. You are going to suffer, that’s the nature of life under the sun. Some of that will be petty, some of it will be serious, and (heaven-forfend) some of it will be so psychologically scarring that you’ll be getting over it for a long time.

Maturity will require suffering, one way or another.

How to Read Books I love to read. That’s probably not a big surprise, it’s an unusual writer who doesn’t. I read more than most—honestly the stats on how much the average person reads make me sad. This YouGov survey has around three quarters of respondents saying they read a book last year, but the median number of books read a year is 4 (the mean is 10, but obviously stretched at the top end by outliers like me).

How to read (more) books.

An old post of mine that challenged me to think again what my reading habits look like in a new phase of life.

On Baptism I’ve argued elsewhere that the Sunday gathering is for worship, but as the priests gather in the Temple they find that the Lord comes to them. The occasion is worship, but we encounter God as he comes to us. As one of the four ‘events’ when God meets us as we worship him, Baptism is part of a normally ordered Sunday gathering, even if we might not have people to baptise each week.

Water is thicker than blood; a few thoughts on baptism.

Slow down The Church isn’t in a hurry. Neither should Christians be. You can apply this in so many directions in our hurried world, but I’d like to think about our questions. Questions require time. Fast answers are usually trite ones. Some intellectual curiosities can be settled quickly by a swift Google, but real questions can’t be. The very biggest questions—Why did they die?

Is your church slow enough to allow people to consider their questions?

Magical Thinking Evangelicals love magic. On the face of it that doesn’t sound like a true statement, perhaps you remember the mild panic over Harry Potter in the early 2000s, or the much bigger panic over Dungeons and Dragons in the eighties—witchcraft remains something we are inherently nervous about, sometimes leading to absurd extremes. Which is true enough, and yet we engage in magical thinking all the time.

The Bible isn't a magic book. Prayer isn't magic. Repentance isn't magic.

We live in an age that loves magic, especially in the form of the black glass devices we keep in our pockets, so we tend to forget this.

What is the ‘Land of the Living?’ “He’s no longer in the land of the living,” we say with great solemnity as we pronounce that our friend has fallen asleep on the sofa. It’s a phrase we use fairly commonly, either to mean prosaically, “they’re dead”—which is actually uncommon because we prefer cleaner euphemisms that hide the reality entirely—or to refer to someone who is asleep. We get that idiom of death and sleep being related from the Bible, though it plays the other way around in the Old Testament, with the dead being referred to as asleep.

What does the Bible mean by the phrase 'the land of the living?'

I argue it may not mean the same thing it does in English.

Put up walls so you can welcome Sounds paradoxical, doesn’t it? We think we know that to welcome is the very opposite of having a wall up. We’re wrong. Ivan Illich taught that the welcome of hospitality requires a threshold. By definition, we need to move over a threshold in order to be welcomed. If there is no threshold to move over, I can’t welcome you.

"Welcome requires walls"

Being Eucharismatic Churches should embrace the life of God in the Spirit in all its fullness. That means both charismatic spiritual life and the sacramental life of the gathered church. ‘Eucharismatic’ is a term coined by Andrew Wilson in his excellent book Spirit and Sacrament, a portmanteau of eucharistic and charismatic. His book lays out his thesis, but I haven’t seen it picked up and practiced by anyone in the circles I run in.

What does being a eucharismatic look like?

Last Words Once a day dawned dark, the clouds hanging limp like wisps of smoke that clog the lungs after a fire has burned beyond its life. Tear-stained faces watched a man displayed, his torn body nailed to a tree torn from the ground and weeping over its foul fate. His face contorted with pain as his laboured breathing slowed, blood from a hundred tiny wounds staining the wood he lent against.

"Once a day dawned dark, the clouds hanging limp like wisps of smoke that clog the lungs after a fire has burned beyond its life..."

3 phrases to live by I currently have three quotes on the wall in my study at the church building. I suspect that this will change with time, but each phrase is a reminder to me and I hope will shape my ministry over the next few years. None of them is from the Bible, which perhaps itself is surprising. My desk at home has plenty of the word of God displayed to warm and guard my heart.

A philosophy of ministry in 3 phrases.

Isaiah’s trees The Bible exists in a symbolic world where particular images are common: trees, tables, bread and wine, mountains, the sea and its denizens, the creation week, and many more. These have specific meanings developed across the canon that they take with them (progressively) and that can be read backwards to fit texts within the Bible’s wider story. Each tree participates, to some extent, in Eden’s two trees, the New Jerusalem’s two-trunked tree, and the Bible’s pivot as Jesus hung on a tree for our sake.

Isaiah is a book bracketed by trees. We too are trees, but which kind?

Why is Sunday the Sabbath? Or, to put the question more accurately, why did Sunday become the Lord’s Day rather than Christians continuing to keep the Sabbath? There is some debate in the Christian tradition about whether we should continue to keep the Sabbath, but now on a Sunday, or whether we should keep Sunday, but as the Lord’s Day—more a matter of invitation to worship than strict rules about rest—or not really care at all and enjoy all seven days for work, rest, and worship as the mood takes us.

Why do we worship Jesus on a Sunday?

Directionality in Worship Worship has three, or maybe five, dynamic directions. There is a gift and receipt dynamic to it. It looks a little bit like this: Worship goes up, it goes out, or sideways, and it goes in. What I mean by this that the primary direction of our worship is towards God, or ‘upwards.’ We worship the sovereign Lord of heaven and earth because he is worthy of our worship.

Christian worship has three dynamic directions.

I think it would be worth asking the question 'is it relevant that it's grain, specifically' but the answer would have to be in the flow of the passage and deepen the meaning rather than reveal a hidden meaning. I don't have any particular ideas!

It's also important this remains speculation!

Sure. They sometimes call it the sea of Galilee, maybe it wasn't the clearest weird choice on my part. I wouldn't sweat it.

We've also got the 153 fish as a big indication, the laws around fish in Leviticus (so different kinds of fish carry different meaning), and that everything else he ate is freighted with meaning.

The base assumption I'm working with is that there are not incidental details, I'm a maximalist. In that frame, the very fact that we're told Jesus ate fish is intriguing, hence some musings on it.