I’m saying goodbye to four colleagues this summer. My wonderful conference manager, Rachel Olajide is going off to have a baby and despite me printing off articles from the Daily Mail about women who return to work 1 hour after giving birth, she is unmoved (rightly!).
Our Cornhill administrator, Becky Hollands is not returning from maternity leave choosing the good option of staying with her newly born son. Good for her! Let not anybody say “she is not coming back to work”. She is working all right. And then some.
My friend Tim Ward is leaving to go to Oak Hill and I will greatly miss his wisdom and contribution. He has kept me on the straight and narrow and I have valued his counsel and input. At the same time Jonathan Griffiths is leaving to go further – Ottawa in fact (a name I have learnt to spell correctly). He has a wise head on young shoulders and our loss is Canada’s gain (where the need is very great).
Partings are always painful. Inevitably one develops working habits where we learn to rely on Christian friends and colleagues. That’s how it should be. We are for each other. And so when partings happen the pain is not simply missing someone, but having to learn new ways of working that will continue to serve others and ensure we are ourselves properly encouraged and accountable.
All of this is not to moan but to observe that this is the nature of ministry in general. People move on. If you are serving in a small church, then the ministry friendships you develop are generally local and even if you don’t move on, others do. In a larger church, there are inevitable changes in staff teams. It means that ministry, in any setting, can be a lonely business. Making and keeping friends requires hard work and investment. It’s too easy to be a loner.
However, there aren’t many people who thrive on being alone. We need support networks and friends, both inside and outside the church. I’m hoping to continue to see my friends, but I have also to be realistic and realise that the decreased proximity means that the nature of the relationships will change. At the same time I need to be building new bridges and friendships to counter the in-built loneliness of ministry.
And you should too.

To finish off the EMA book discussion, we had a number of titles which we really loved but which didn’t quite make it to the stage – mainly for reasons of space. Here are my personal favourites:
Why the Reformation still matters by Mike Reeves and Tim Chester is possibly my favourite book of the year. I think it is a really important read going into 2017 and the 500th anniversary of Luther and the bulletin board. Get your church leaders reading it and using it to help you assess church life.
Greg Scharf’s Let the earth hear his voice is the best book on preaching I’ve read for some time. It is framed in terms of negatives – why Greg’s preaching is not quite what it could be and what he does to overcome that. I think it is now my follow on book to Dave Helm’s Expository Preaching.
Disappearing church by Mark Sayers is the best analysis of the current state of the church in the UK and an encouraging call to keep the main thing the main thing.
Rachel Jones two books 5 things to pray (for the people you love and for your church) are two of the most helpful books I have read (and used) this year. I’m a great fan of much of The Good Book’s output, but these two are especially classy.
Go feast!

You’ll excuse us a day off today as we take stock (code for recover) after the exertions of the EMA. We love this conference and love serving, but it does take it out of our small team. Back next week for the Cornhill Summer School.

If we’re going to persevere in ministry, then we must persevere in our faith. We’ve chosen some titles which will help you keep going with an ever-deepening walk with Christ Jesus.
Psalms by the Day is Alec Motyer’s follow up to Isaiah by the Day. It’s a daily devotional based on the psalms which will encourage and teach you. Surveys repeatedly show how dry preachers’ own devotional life has become, and this title will really help.
Barbara Duguid and Wayne Duguid Houk have written Prone to wander, a book of confessional and celebratory prayers. From time to time we all need help praying and whilst we have to find our own words, the words of others can often be a help, encouragement and teacher as we seek to pray faithfully. Given our conference theme, this is an important title.
Thirdly, today we want to recommend an older book but one which is very useful to those in ministry for the long term. John Piper’s When I don’t desire God is one of favourite of his books with lots of practical and realistic help for those dry times.

All of us are in word ministry of some kind and so we want to highlight some important titles which will help encourage you in this important task.
This year, PT have two new titles in our essential Teaching series. Mervyn Eloff has written Teaching 123 John and Bob Fyall and Robin Sydserff have contributed Teaching Daniel.
Kent Hughes’ The Pastor’s Book is a hugely comprehensive guide for those in ministry containing both theological and practical help for planning pretty much everything that happens in local church life. David Jackman says, ‘it is an invaluable resource for every pastor or church leader.’ We agree! It’s a book to dip into time and time again.
Our third recommendation today is a book that every man should read! Word filled women’s ministry edited by Kathleen Nielson sets out a stall for thoughtful and biblical women’s ministry in the church. It’s a vision that many pastors and leaders need to capture. ‘If only every pastor would read this’ said one of our BookPanel.

We want to highlight three books to help you get kids reading. This is an area that many in ministry rarely consider, but is essential to the life and health of the local church.
Every child should start with Bible stories and that’s where we’ve got to get the younger members of our congregations reading. There are lots of different options, but we’re particularly keen on The Gospel Story Bible by Marty Machowski which gives faithful renderings of Bible stories together with their setting in the overall Bible story pointing to Jesus.
Everything a child should know about God by Kenneth Taylor is a newly illustrated version of an old classic, helping young children aged 3-6 learn key gospel truths. It’s a ‘great tool to complement children’s Bible stories’. For slightly older children, The Ology by Marty Machowski and Andy McGuire is a wonderfully illustrated book of truth. Importantly, those who use it say that the children are as captivated by the illustrations as adults.

Please do pray for the Evangelical Ministry Assembly this week. We’ve got about 1,300 people coming from about 750 churches. Some 250 have never been before and we’re especially praying that they will feel at home and encouraged. Please do remember to pray for our main session speakers – Simon Manchester, Don Carson, Vaughan Roberts, Jonty Allcock, Alasdair Paine and Dick Lucas. But more than that, please be praying with us that God would sovereignly use these few days together to encourage all who attend to persevere. Thank you for your prayers.

It’s the EMA next week and each year we announce a missions project that we are hoping delegates will support. It’s absolutely vital that we keep looking outwards and avoid introspection and so a gathering like the EMA is an opportunity to express our gospel generosity matched by gospel vision.
This year, we’re sending resources to Kenya. Kenya is a large country with a huge proportion of the population self-identifying as evangelicals (some 25 million). But there are also 80,000 churches with untrained leaders and the prosperity gospel teaching is rapidly taking hold. Kenya is increasingly looking outward (much as Nigeria has in the past) and so there is a real risk of this false and dangerous teaching overtaking both Kenyans and many in East Africa who look to Kenya for Christian leadership.
We’re partnering with our friends in iServe Africa to distribute two key resources to help brothers fight in this battle. The Gospel Coalition International Outreach has generously given us copies of their new book on this pernicious teaching Prosperity? Hodder and Stoughton have matched this with low cost copies of The Proclamation Bible. This important resource contains an NIV Bible text and 120,000 extra words of essays, introductions and how to which will assist Kenyan brothers in preaching faithfully.
If you’re coming to the EMA, please consider giving generously to this project. If you’re not with us this year, you can still support this initiative by contacting us in the office.
On behalf of brothers in Kenya, thank you, thank you, thank you.

According to my newspaper, we now have the Emoji Bible. It will help millennials read the Word apparently. I am working on the assumption that this is a spoof, or at least a very light-hearted attempt to create a news story. For example, inserting the anger emoji into strANGER is just plain daft. But it did get me thinking. I imbibe my Bible (is that the right word?) in different ways.
I use an audio Bible when out and about, especially walking or the rare occasions I commute to work on public transport. I love letting the text sink in as it does with audio books. I am listening to words.
I use an eBible to study, actually a big user of Logos software. I find it’s a great way to interact with lots of resources, original languages, Bible versions etc. I don’t buy paper commentaries anymore unless there is no Logos equivalent, enabling me to build up a portable, usable and extensive library. I am working with words.
I use a paper Bible to read and preach from (and make notes in). For sermon prep I print off a passage and write all over it. I am perhaps old fashioned in this way – but this is me: I love taking notes in meetings by annotating a PDF on my tablet, but my favourite writing instrument is a Pelikan fountain pen! I am reading words.
But in each case, it is words. Not pictures or emojis. This raises all sorts of questions, of course, especially around translation into limited languages or for those with limited understanding. Nevertheless, exceptions aside, the Word is made up of words. That is how it has come to us. That is how we must continue.

When we moved the EMA to the Barbican, we had a major rethink about the Bookstore and, in particular, I gave some time to thinking through why ministers of the gospel should read. I guess we had, perhaps subconsciously, always thought in terms of providing a ministers bookstore. But what does that actually mean? The result was that we came up with our three categories of books. Some of these are more natural selections than others. I think we tend to use our limited time to read for ourselves, and often not for our own personal walk, but rather for ministry.
That’s certainly an important category, but not the only one. Here’s what we came up with.
We aim for the Bookstore to serve you in three different ways and have chosen titles for you:
– as followers of Christ: books that will help us understand what it means to take up our cross and follow Jesus (Mark 8:34)
– as preachers and teachers: books that will assist Bible preachers and teachers to correctly handle the word of truth (2 Tim 2:15)
– as leaders of congregations: books that will be good for our people as we seek to shepherd them wisely (1 Peter 5:2)
In fact, ministers of the gospel who are not reading in each of these areas will be at risk of being seriously deficient.