Today, The Palace announced that His Majesty has been diagnosed with cancer. Scripture teaches us at all times to pray for The King (1 Timothy 2:1-2). And as Pentecostals, when we hear the news of sickness, our reaction is to bring it to the Lord, trusting that He is the One who can heal. So we plead the blood of Jesus for our King and pray for his healing. Here is a prayer which may help: Almighty & all-merciful God, Who by the cross and resurrection of Your Son, our Saviour, Jesus Christ, makes all things new and pours out by Your Holy Spirit gifts of healings as foretastes of t ..read more

Pastors usually have lots of responsibilities. There are people to be visited, sermons to prepared, events to be organised, meetings to be chaired, finances and charity compliance to administered, and lots, lots more. And in the midst of all that we want — or need — our pastors to do, it can be easy to forget that a vital aspect of his calling is something we don't see at all.  When the first deacons were installed in the early church, part of the reason was so that the apostles could devote themselves “continually to prayer and to the ministry of the word” (Acts 6:4). This is the hear ..read more

Pastors need to pray lots. And pastors need lots of prayer. So whether you are a pastor, or whether you have a pastor and would like some help and encouragement to pray for him, here are seven points of prayer from David Torrance's essay ‘Sharing in the Ministry of Christ’ (published in A Passion for Christ: The Vision that Ignites Ministry), to which I've added some comments and explanation. 1. Pray every day for the gift of love. ‘He who does not love does not know God, for God is love’ (1 John 4:8). On the night on which He entrusted the ministry of the Lord’s Table to His apostles ..read more

Many churches spend some time in the month of January in prayer and fasting. I know that the whole of the Apostolic Church in Ghana, for example, spends three weeks in prayer and fasting at the beginning of each year. My own local assembly is spending some time over the next few weeks in prayer and fasting too (despite being in Wales rather than Ghana). And so it’s a time of year when lots of people have questions about fasting. A couple of years ago (during the lockdown) I made a few videos with some Scriptural teaching about fasting to help give a clearer biblical picture of what it’s all a ..read more

We Pentecostals are good at praying for God's healing of the sick. But sometimes we need help to pray for those we love in the last moments of their pilgrimage here below, when the time has come not to pray for healing but to commend our dear brother or sister in Christ to the Lord in the hour of death. Often the Lord leads us in these times by His Spirit and our knowledge of His Word. Yet sometimes we can find ourselves at a loss to know how to pray. So here are some prayers to help us in such difficult times, when we really do need to pray (drawn and adapted from the wisdom of Christi ..read more

Today my colleagues said farewell. In a month's time I will be giving up the life of a theological college lecturer. (And I've still got plenty of marking to do in the meantime.) But today was the traditional tea and cake in the dining hall at morning coffee time for a departing member of staff. And this time I was that member of staff.  College made the official announcement of my departure a few months ago, so this is probably not really news to a lot of people. But a few of you might not know, so I thought it would be worth mentioning. After half a decade (including a pandemic, seve ..read more

I've got a new book out today about the Breaking of Bread, called The Lord’s Supper: Our Promised Place of Intimacy and Transformation with Jesus (Minneapolis: Chosen, 2023). Christians are very familiar with the Lord's Supper. We eat and drink at the Lord’s Table (hopefully) every week. Yet, maybe we don’t talk about it all that much. And when we don’t talk about it, then sometimes our ideas about it end up being picked up from traditions (or even from believing the opposite of what we think we’re not supposed to believe), rather than from God’s Word.  Whether you’ve given the Supp ..read more

It is easy to read without getting much benefit. Our eyes can skim over lots of pages and barely take much in. And so we can easily be able to say “I've read that book!” without having learnt anything from it.  Andrew Murray realised this, and so, at the beginning of a book he wrote for new Christians, he gave some advice for how to read a Christian book well and profit well from it. “The great bane of all our converse with Divine things is superficiality,” he wrote. “When we read anything and understand it somewhat, we think that this is enough. No: we must give time, that it may make a ..read more

I was one of the guests on All Things Considered on BBC Radio Wales today for a special programme taking to Jonathan Thomas about the Holy Spirit in the lead up to Pentecost. If you want to hear, I talk about the Apostolic Church, Pentecostal worship, speaking in tongues, healing, the resurrection of the dead, and, well, Jesus! You can listen to the programme here. Today’s other guests on the programme were Catrin Williams (Professor of New Testament Studies at the University of Wales, Trinity St David), The Revd Dr Gareth Leyshon (a Roman Catholic priest and Director of Adult Education in th ..read more

The office of the Teacher (or, as it used to be called in older English, Doctor of the Church) doesn't get talked about all that much. Pastors and Evangelists are (hopefully) quite visible, so we have some sort of idea of who they are and what they do. Apostles and Prophets might sound a bit more exotic (in some parts of the church at least), so people keep writing books about them. But lots of people get confused when I say I'm a Teacher (and even more confused when they realise I don't mean school teacher!). So what actually is an ordained Teacher?  Well, first, we need to recognise t ..read more