Chalmers' Blog

Saturday Snippets (January 30)

As well as reading a lot of books, I also read a ton of articles every week. Here are some of the articles that I’ve read recently and have found interesting, helpful, challenging and encouraging. I hope that they will be the same for you, my dear readers…

To ‘seminary’, or not to ‘seminary’

This may sound a bit weird if you’re coming to this post completely out of the blue. Allow me to give you a bit of context. A few days ago on Twitter I came across a tweet from Ed Stetzer, which peaked my interest. Stetzer said “I don’t know who need to hear this, but doing a PhD is probably not what you need unless you plan to be a professor. And, I don’t know who need to hear THIS, there are a LOT of people getting PhD and very few professor jobs”. This tweet got me thinking, as did some conversations that I saw following on from that, about academia and ministry.

Fear, Final Words and a Doctor…

I know, it sounds like the beginning of a bad joke. I apologise.

I enjoy reading. I also enjoy writing book reviews for you folks to read. I do this to highlight helpful books that you could be reading and so that you can hopefully know if a book is worth your time or not. Not everyone has the time, nor desire, to read that many books. Here are a few of the books I’ve read recently that I thought I’d share with you 🙂

Saturday Snippets (January 23)

Don’t Substitute Your Pastor For A Screen

I know, I do see the irony, we are all on screens at the moment. However, there has been a problem with this whole thing way before COVID was an issue. The problem is that many Christians are very quick to make famous pastors ‘their pastors’. Whilst there are many great things we can learn online from people like Alistair Begg, John Piper, Mark Dever, John MacArthur, Ligon Duncan, they are not your pastor.

Books for kids, teens and families. Something for all ages.

Finding good and biblical reading material for children is really important, whether they read it themselves, parents read it to them or it’s read as a whole family. We need to make sure that we’re investing just as much time in teaching children as we would in teaching adults. The materials should be exciting, pleasing to the eye and understandable for the target age group. Here are some really helpful books for kids, teens and for whole families to read together. I’ve put them in age order, starting with small children and going up to family devotions.

Saturday Snippets (January 16)

The Lone Ranger and The Couch Commentator…

The Lone Ranger, the person characterised by the catchphrase “I work on my own terms”. The couch commentator, the one always sitting on the sidelines but always has an opinion on how things should be done. We laugh and joke about these generalisations, but they are real and they are dangerous…

Let’s Talk About Sex

Sex: it’s a really interesting topic in the Christian world; it’s either never talked about and is a bit like a taboo or it’s talked about too much and is a bit like an obsession. Historically the church hasn’t done a great job of talking about and teaching on sex. This has changed in the last and now more books on sex are being released for Christians. I do worry though that we may be on the road to talking more about sex than the world, but that’s a rabbit hole for another post. I don’t often read books about sex because they can all be very similar. But here are three that I’ve read recently and I thought I’d share them with you.