Category: Christianity

How to Read the Bible — The Inspired and Inspiring Word of God

This series of posts was first a series of sermons I preached at City South Presbyterian and Coorparoo Presbyterian in mid 2026. You can, if it is your preferred medium, watch the video recording of this sermon here (Vimeo), or listen to the audio recording here (Spotify link).

Are you a fan of the inspirational Bible verse?

Old School — in cross-stitches — or printed posters hung on the back of the toilet door?

Or — Inspo 2.0 — daily Bible verses like this on Instagram.

Biblehub.com even lets you generate your own inspo — so you could share this — which sounds great and comes from the Bible — but is the words of Satan. Which highlights a bit of a problem with reading the Bible this way.

My Bible app — YouVersion — interesting name — lets you click for a verse related to your present circumstances, where you can find ready-made graphics.

The Bible is inspirational.

But is this how to read the Bible for inspiration?

In this series we are going to build a bit of a toolkit for reading the Bible — starting with the familiar and moving towards some slightly more challenging concepts. This week our foundational idea is that the Bible is God’s Word — which is why we read it. This means we come to it as though God is speaking, so our job is to listen and respond, not as authorities, but as though he is the Author. So we want to work out what he is trying to say and trying to achieve.

Here is this chapter’s big claim: God is trying to inspire us. So if we are not inspired, we are not reading it right. One of the ways to test if the Bible is God’s Word involves letting it inspire us — testing it on its own terms, seeing if it is life-giving, not just analysing it as words on a page.

So let us dig in. This is one of those verses that might become a poster.

All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.

— 2 Timothy 3:16-17

We will take the second bit first — what does God-breathed mean?

And then the first bit — where Scripture is the words breathed by God. Or — you might say — inspired by him.

You might have heard people talk about the Bible being the inspired word of God — not just the inspiring word of God — this doctrine comes from this verse.

The Bible is God-breathed.

God inspired.

Have you ever thought about where the word inspired comes from? It is about breath. Its origin goes back to the Latin word spirare, which means ‘to breathe’, and the ‘in’ is — well — in.

While to expire is to die. To breathe out.

Spirare is also related to the Latin word for spirit — spiritus — which works nicely with the Bible, where God’s word is spoken, written, and animated by his Spirit — given life and breath.

Spoken words are ‘animated’ by our breath. Try emptying your lungs, then shouting without breathing in again. Words are carried into the world — given life — by breath — just as our breath gives our bodies life — inspired.

This relationship between spirit or breath and word and inspiration is there on page one of the Bible. In Genesis 1:2-3, God’s Spirit — or breath — hovers — filled with potential, and then he speaks. Creation is God-breathed — inspired, then filled with life.

And then humans — who are blessed and told to fill the earth with life (Genesis 1:28) — when the camera zooms in on God making a living image, he breathes the breath of life into dust, inspiring it — filling it with life.

Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.

— Genesis 2:7

The creation story is the paradigm for understanding God’s Word and life in God’s world — it is inspired by his inspired breath.

In the Genesis story, not being inspired can be about disobedience (Genesis 2:16-17), or twisting God’s words — like the serpent saying ‘Did God really say’ then saying something he does not (Genesis 3:1).

Or like adding extra rules — like Eve — God did not say ‘do not touch it’, just ‘do not eat it’ (Genesis 2:17, Genesis 3:3).

Or it can involve missing the point — there are two trees in the middle of the garden, and God only says they cannot eat from one of them. The humans have missed the best bit; the life-giving bit about eating from the tree of life and enjoying life with God, so they choose death. ‘He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever’ (Genesis 3:22).

This was the point — right — they were meant to enjoy life with God, inspired by him — listening to his inspiring word.

This story frames how we understand God’s Word — we will see that in our psalm — God’s word inspires when we plant ourselves in it, with him — and we expire when we read it wrong.

This story is written by humans — in a text — showing inspiration comes from God.

The claim our reading makes is this text was also inspired; breathed by God.

There is a link between Spirit, Word and human image that starts in the beginning and culminates in Jesus, God’s Word made flesh who speaks as God.

We are going to look at the humanity of the Bible next time — how God incarnates his word in and through humans. But here we are looking at this idea of inspiration — that these are God’s words — that there is a link between how we think of God acting in creation and redemption, and in how he reveals himself to us through what Hebrews calls his living and active word.

For the word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.

— Hebrews 4:12

And this inspiration comes through his Word-made-flesh, Jesus.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.

— John 1:1, 14

Who comes baptising with the Spirit (John 1:33); who breathes his Spirit into humans (John 20:21-22); as though we are the dry bones from Ezekiel, waiting to be inspired not just by breath, but by God’s Holy Spirit — his eternal, divine, life (Ezekiel 37:4-5, 14).

The Scriptures — breathed by God — are our invitation into life. They are inspired so we might be inspired, filled with God’s life. This is their purpose from page one to the end. This is the big idea here: for us to be image-bearers who represent God — who are inspired by his Spirit — given life — God’s Word also gives us life. It is inspired so we might be inspired. All Scripture is God-breathed.

But what are the Scriptures?

Through this series we are going to look at some technical stuff — nuts and bolts — to help us read the Bible. And today we are going to do a bit of history to understand how our book — or app — gets into our hands.

The Scriptures are not just written by inspired people but recognised by inspired people as words inspired by God. Inspiration is at work in both reading and receiving through a process within the community of God’s people.

Even though we now recognise his words as Scripture — in the New Testament — when Paul writes ‘all Scripture’, he is picturing the Jewish Scriptures — what we call the Old Testament. It is not clear which books are included for Paul; that is still being established in first century Judaism, and it takes a while for the Church to figure out too. Different Christian traditions — Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant have different answers.

For Protestants, our Bible is a collection of 66 books.

The Catholics recognise 7 additional books in the ‘Deuterocanon’ — plus extended editions of Daniel and Esther.

Various Orthodox traditions rename some and add more — the Ethiopian Orthodox Bible has 81 books.

Our Presbyterian tradition says these books ‘are not inspired’, have ‘no authority’, and should only be used like other human writings.

The books commonly called Apocrypha, not being of divine inspiration, are no part of the Canon of Scripture; and therefore are of no authority in the Church of God, nor to be any otherwise approved, or made use of, than other human writings.

— Westminster Confession, 1.3

Now — I think human writings are actually super useful for understanding human thinking and the world Jesus appears in — the language and imagination and framework the authors of the New Testament draw on, and even quote.

Anyway, here is where we get more technical. Any Scriptures we have are a product of communities copying earlier manuscripts — generation by generation, because paper — or papyrus — does not last forever — and neither do scrolls made of silver.

The Old Testament Scriptures are also a product of human authors writing down spoken traditions, and copying and editing earlier documents as their history unfolds.

At one point, the ‘written Scriptures’ were kept in the Temple. 2 Kings refers to this moment where the ‘book of the law is’ rediscovered during repairs of the temple (2 Kings 22:8), so it is reintroduced into the life of the community.

This is Scripture written about Scripture — which reveals something of the process. This account is recorded after the destruction of the Temple at the end of 2 Kings (2 Kings 25:9).

Your average Jewish citizen exiled in Babylon did not have the whole Book of the Law. They may have been literate and written inspirational bits down. It is more likely they memorised and discussed God’s word in community gatherings — or that they heard a prophet speak.

At some point, after exile, the law and this history are being copied and circulated and recognised. There is a group, or person, responsible for collating, compiling and editing words into a coherent big story spanning from Genesis to 2 Kings — they make connections and making editorial notes. This phrase ‘to this day’ occurs about 50 times, about place names or practices — we do not know which day or days these words are written from, but a handful of them are in 2 Kings, which is finished after the last events it records (the Southern kingdom’s exile to Babylon). The last ‘to this day’ is about how the Northern Kingdom — who were exiled to Assyria — are perpetually idolatrous.

The reflections of the editor give a bit of a picture of their purposes as they compile and decide what is recorded and recognised. Other Old Testament writers, writing alongside these history books — the Prophets, or song writers in the Psalms — often reflect on or quote bits from these texts, so we get a picture of them inspiring the community as the story unfolds.

We do not have original manuscripts of any of these books. We have copies and fragments that show they were recognised and circulated. The number of copies from different times and places reflects their recognition in communities of God’s people. As archaeologists dig up new very old copies or fragments, if there are differences in wording — scholars do what is called textual criticism to work out which words are more reliable — older, more original, or more recognised by communities. There are so many texts circulated so widely that we can be very confident the words we have are accurate — and they get more accurate over time.

But here is our big textual criticism question as we think about what Paul pictured when he said ‘all scripture’ — that explains why different traditions have different Bibles. The Hebrew manuscripts we have tend to be more recent than manuscripts of the Greek translation of the Old Testament. There is question of whether Paul and other New Testament authors picture Greek or Hebrew documents when they say ‘the Scriptures’ — or quote from them — it is probably both.

Through Israel’s history, the language they speak and write changes — from Hebrew to Aramaic — so big chunks of Daniel and Ezra are in Aramaic — and when Alexander the Great conquers the region, Greek becomes the common language.

There is a legend — from this 2nd century BC ‘Letter of Aristeas’ — that the Great Library of Alexandria commissioned a translation of the Old Testament, and 72 scholars took 72 days to produce identical translations, so this translation is called the Septuagint or LXX — roman numerals for 70. It is more likely this letter is propaganda promoting the Old Testament to the Greek world, and the translation probably just happens naturally as faithful Jewish Bible readers wanted the Scriptures in their language — and started writing other books in Greek too, that are part of the LXX — and the Catholic and Orthodox Bibles.

The New Testament writers, who speak and write Greek seem to quote Greek phrasing of the Old Testament, rather than the Hebrew. While the Hebrew documents we use in our translations, the Masoretic Text, was compiled a long time after Jesus — we do have older Hebrew manuscripts that are used in textual criticism for that text.

You might have heard of the Dead Sea Scrolls — a library of Greek and Hebrew manuscripts of Old Testament books and other writings found in clay jars in caves — from the Qumran community, a Jewish group from the time of Jesus.

Even with these manuscripts, whether in Greek or Hebrew, there is no document in any language, with a table of contents for the Jewish Scriptures before Jesus saying which books are part of a collection called ‘Scripture,’ and which are not. The Scriptures were a collection of books reflecting and referring to each other, that were recognised over time as having authority as God’s Word. In the Jewish schema, as it developed after the exile, the Scriptures came in categories — the law — or Torah — Genesis to Deuteronomy, the Prophets, and the Writings.

Jesus sums up the Scriptures this way in Luke (Luke 24:44) — and this is how Jewish collations of the Scriptures tend to organise the books over time as a table of contents develops.

In the Hebrew language tradition, the Old Testament ends with 2 Chronicles — where the last word is about exile ending and God’s people being sent to rebuild (2 Chronicles 36:23). The Greek tradition — translated into Latin in the early church and in our table of contents — ends with Malachi, whose last words are about a new Elijah, who will bring a day of the Lord with salvation and judgment (Malachi 4:5-6).

The New Testament is formed through a similar process. Documents were written and circulated amongst the people of God — and some were ‘canonised’ — recognised as sacred and inspired — because they were connected to an apostle, consistent with each other and the Old Testament, and copied and circulated in the Church. Peter writes about Paul’s writing (2 Peter 3:15) and, though he disses him, compares his words to the other Scriptures — the Old Testament — mentioning that Paul’s letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which unstable people distort as they do the other Scriptures (2 Peter 3:16). So now the Church includes Paul’s words in ‘all Scriptures’.

And while lots of documents could have been included — the major traditions — Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant — all recognise the same New Testament. This recognition happened over a hundred years, as documents were copied and circulated around the early Church — an often underground network in the Roman empire — a community of living people shaped by God’s living and active Word; inspired to follow a crucified king in the midst of the crucifying empire.

These words inspired a different way of life which ultimately turned the empire upside down. The words that give life were the words passed on — and, like the Old Testament — these were words that pointed to life through the living Word; words about the one who gives life — by laying down his life and then by giving us God’s Spirit to inspire us.

So — why have we looked at these nuts and bolts?

First, because when we say the Bible is God-breathed we do not just mean dictated as though God’s word drops from heaven on stone tablets. It comes through inspired humans and is recognised by inspired humans so that it animates the community of God’s people.

Second, seeing this helps us know how to read the Scriptures. If we want to read and recognise God’s inspired and inspiring word, consistent with this process, we would have to treat it as though it is alive and inspiring.

For the word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.

— Hebrews 4:12

Take these two images from Hebrews. If the Bible is living and active, we are probably not meant to approach the Bible like scientists dispassionately dissecting a lion, where we only understand it by pulling it apart — so that it dies.

We want to watch it move and breathe and do things.

And if it is sharper than a two-edged sword — made for cutting — we probably will not understand it breaking it into a parts diagram.

It is made for cutting — not others out there — but for cutting away the parts of ourselves — penetrating our soul and spirit, cutting away the dead bits inconsistent with God’s image — with Jesus — in us — as individuals and a community.

So we should read it so it inspires us — as the community of God, for the things Paul says it is useful for.

And how from infancy you have known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.

— 2 Timothy 3:15

Timothy has been instructed in the Scriptures since he was a toddler, so knows they make us wise for salvation — this is not just about knowing or believing. Wisdom is enacted; it is a way of life.

Blessed is the one who does not walk in step with the wicked, or stand in the way that sinners take, or sit in the company of mockers; but whose delight is in the law of the Lord, and who meditates on his law day and night. That person is like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither—whatever they do prospers.

— Psalm 1:1-3

This is the picture in Psalm 1 — where the blessed, fruitful life — comes from not sitting or standing or walking with other voices — shaped by the serpent, or idols — these lead to expiration. Inspiration comes from being planted in God’s word — the ‘law’ — Israel’s Scriptures when the Psalm is written, including Genesis. Life is found meditating, delighting and applying God’s word — not pulling it apart, but using it for life; seeking inspiration — seeking to be God-breathed humans listening to God-breathed words.

This person is like a fruitful tree planted by water (Genesis 2:8, 10) — like the trees in Eden, planted by water — including the tree of life.

Humans animated — inspired — restored — filled with God’s life — this is what salvation is. And these fruitful, inspired humans give life to the world. And Paul says this is what the God-breathed Scriptures do — through Jesus Christ — the living Word — who gives us God’s life; his Spirit, in fulfilment of the Scriptures.

God’s word is useful as it inspires. We should wield it to teach, to correct, to rebuke, to train in righteousness — to equip us for the work God created us for — fruitfulness.

We can test whether it is inspirational by looking at Jesus, at history, at the lives of the inspired community — and our own life — asking ‘does this work’ — does this inspire me; does it give life to me and through me producing goodness and fruitfulness? And if it is not — you might not be reading it right.

God’s word — fulfilled in God’s Word made flesh — is a tree of life; inspired to inspire; to recreate us as those filled with God’s Spirit, so through us he might inspire others.

August 24, 2026 Add Comment

That dragon, cancer

Ten years ago I played my way through the most redemptively tragic video game that I think will ever be released — That Dragon, Cancer. I wrote about that experience at the time, but the premise is you follow a family through the process of their young son’s diagnosis, treatment and death, with all the feels — including the eucatastrophic hope (that’s Tolkien’s word for ‘good catastrophe’) of resurrection because the family placed their trust in the Lord Jesus through their darkest valley.

That dragon, cancer.

I have, for a bit, been fairly interested in the way a battle with that dragon, Satan, is actually the narrative framing of the Bible from its first page to its last. And the way that — like Eustace in the Voyage of the Dawn Treader — to give in to our baser desires to objectify, extract and consume the world — becoming ‘like gods’ (especially the ancient gods of Babylon with their pet dragons) — is to become ‘dragon-like’ or serpenty.

Reading the Bible through this sort of ‘enchanted framework’ does change the way we encounter and view material reality — not just things like politics or ‘the machine’ — the rapacious individualism driving extractive neo-liberal capitalism to the detriment of the planet and our fellow and future humans, but also things like cancer. And so, for the last month, I have been facing (and continue to face in various ways) the dragon.

I am red-green colour blind. It turns out that being red-green colour blind makes it harder for a person to notice blood in their bowel movements (and another study suggests this is also the case with urine). This means I don’t know when I began having symptoms of a dragon growing in my colon; but at one point there was undeniably blood, and, though I was tempted to ignore it because ‘young people don’t get cancer’ or ‘it couldn’t happen to me’ and also ‘I don’t want people looking at or sticking things up my bum’ — I’d read just enough tragic stories of people in their 20s-40s being diagnosed with bowel cancer and discovering it too late that I went to my GP.

I have heard horror stories of people in similar situations being ignored or sent down the path of various other medical explanations and being again, diagnosed at a much later stage, and so I am thankful my GP sent me off for a colonoscopy.

And — if you’re a young person (or youngish or ‘too young’ or middle aged person), and you have symptoms (look them up), or a colour blind person and you ‘wonder’ if that is a weird colour or mucousy or something — go get checked. Our modern way of life is, for whatever reason, producing more of these tumours in younger and younger people.

So. Just over a month ago, I woke up from my twilight anaesthetic after my colonoscopy to hear the doctor who wheeled me back to the recovery area tell the nurse who would help me wake up “this was a bad one, we found something.”

I spent a harrowing thirty minutes knowing I had cancer lying in a hospital bed waiting to be officially told (and for Robyn to arrive so we could be told together). How was I going to face this dragon?

I spent some of that time — in the absence of much clear knowledge about staging or anything really — facing worst case scenarios. This wasn’t helped much when the doctor told us the tumour was the ‘size of his palm’ — that sounded big. I wondered how I would tell our kids; how we would help them not fear the dragon or be tempted to turn towards the darkness. I wondered how I would occupy a ‘public’ position as a Christian — in both the context of our family, our church family, our neighbourhood and even the Internet — while facing a dragon.

What would I say to the church congregations I preach to? How do I practice what I preach? How would I live out that calling?

How does one be public and grapple with a dragon without being performative while also being, by virtue of a position ‘exemplary’ — I’m not the first, or the last person who will face these questions and there were examples of others I had admired previously, including the Green family who created That Dragon, Cancer, and others closer to home like Dave McDonald, a long-term family friend who wrote Hope Beyond Cure (a book I’ve given people on their own cancer journeys for years).

How would I, in this moment of tempation — heading into a valley — or a wilderness journey — turn towards God and trust him, even if things were to turn towards the grave — rather than becoming miserable and introspective and bitter and angry; or grasping and objectifying and using all those around me to secure the ‘end’ I desired?

How would the way I think the story of the Bible works — full of enchantment and dragons and the push to shed one’s scales and discover true humanity in Jesus, by his Spirit — moving back towards ‘garden like’ life with God shape these next moments? Does the story work?

How would I steward this season with a kind of generosity and vulnerability rather than being miserely, miserable and walled off from others — all my self-protective impulses that would close me off and buffer me from the good, the true, and the beautiful?

And I found the phrase ‘that dragon, cancer’ bouncing around my mind from diagnosis day. And the picture of the Lord as ‘my shepherd’ who would lead me through the valley; the ‘lamb who was slain’ as the one who defeats that dragon, Satan, meant ultimately I didn’t need to slay the dragon but I could trust that he has, and he leads me towards life (it maybe helped that this banger, Shepherd, was one of the songs we sang the Sunday straight after my diagnosis as I kicked off a series on Numbers as a ‘journey with God through the wilderness’).

The last month facing the dragon has been a whirlwind.

In the first few days I found telling people my news an interesting form of processing and catharsis; firstly this looked like clearing my calendar for the next six months of all sorts of commitments “hey friend, you know I said I could do this — I probably can’t. I have cancer…” It was a comfort to simultaneously unburden myself of those commitments so I could face this thing, but also share the burden of knowing. Once I went ‘public’, I sort of ran out of people to tell. I have not had much time to privately stew or ruminate on this whole journey, but this cathartic verbal processing has continued as a way of being simultaneously introspective and extrospective (is that a word); this has largely come in the form of writing up some thoughts and sharing them with my network on social media. I have been inundated with messages from people throughout the wider church offering prayer and encouragement; and hearing stories of others also facing the dragon at various stages. I committed to praying for these fellow travellers at every step of my treatment journey as a way to not be miserably turned in on myself. That has been an incredibly helpful spiritual discipline — and the comfort of knowing others are praying for me has encouraged me to be a better prayer when I find myself out of the valley.

On the day I was diagnosed I was admitted to hospital. This was a surprise, a bonus, and a blessing. We were sent for an immediate CT Scan which picked up some liquid in my bowel and raised the possibility that it had perforated during the colonoscopy. It turned out to be the saline solution used as the tumour was tattooed during the procedure, but admission meant that rather than waiting for a week or two to have an MRI, these tests could be fast tracked by my surgical team while I was admitted. That night was long and dark. I had a cannula in my elbow that was a miserable experience. My ward mate snored. I snored too probably. I ‘dr googled’ bleak bits of information about worst case scenarios. I think this was the closest I came to staring into the abyss and being overcome by darkness, but the nurses and doctors in the surgical team and Ward 2B at Brisbane’s QEII hospital are experienced dragon fighters, and I both decided to trust them and like them — to perform ‘joy’ come what may, in the face of this darkness, and that this was probably the best posture to embrace for Robyn, for my kids, for my community and for me. It also probably wasn’t just performative or ‘faking it till I made it’ but actually an expression of who I would most like to be.

I left hospital the next day having heard my surgeon tell me the cancer had not spread to any secondary locations, and looked ‘treatable, operable, and curable’ — with a suggestion that the lymph nodes around the tumour were swollen and so a probable staging of ‘PT3 PN3 M0’ (the equivalent of an early stage 3), and a tentative surgery date less than two weeks later.

These next two weeks moved very quickly; they were full of appointments where I was pricked and prodded, where I was educated on how to use a stoma (on the possibility I would wake up from surgery and find myself having one), where I was asked to consent to robot-assisted surgery, and where I had to get some of my short term affairs in order. There still was not much time for rumination — I did not ask ‘why me?’ I did ponder the possibility that I would be ‘put to sleep’ for the surgery and not wake up; imagining not knowing that some complication had led to my death. That was as heavy as things got. I had to — and still have to — contemplate the long term implications of a “lower laproscopic bowel resection” on my continence (so far the signs are ok here, thanks for asking).

I had one or two moments of anger or ‘overwhelm’ at the absolute loss of control this all involved, and a kind of grief that no matter what happens in this fight with the dragon I will emerge scarred, and changed — and I have to grieve the version of me who ‘never had cancer’; that me is now gone. I like the metaphor of kintsugi and the idea that we can mend our broken bits with gold and become more valuable and beautiful; and certainly believe God works in that sort of ‘beauty from ashes’ way with all of us as the master potterer — but — I would still maybe prefer an unscarred bowel that is its full length, and a tummy without keyhole scars, and a slightly less painful and scary valley to have to walk through.

In one moment, between diagnosis and surgery, I was picking up dog poo in our back yard resenting the idea that I had to spend any minutes on such a task while my minutes might be so fleeting; I wondered who was really ‘controlling’ my life or my time in this moment — me, or the dogs (or God) — and about whether CEOs or celebrities who think their time is valuable (based on $ per minute or whatever) conceptually ‘bill’ their dogs for this time, or pay others to do the work that is ‘beneath them.’ I like the idea that we humans get the name ‘human’ from the ground (humus) so actually no work, or all work, is really ‘beneath us’ and we’re meant to be ‘humble’ (also from humus). This moment being confronted with my mortality and the picking up of dog poo from the ground was grounding for me in a way I can’t quite explain but that stands out. Perhaps because in my anger — and I feel like it’s ok to get angry at dragons and the anger needs to go somewhere — in my anger I recognised the temptation to become like a dragon, but I decided I actually love my dogs and being angry at them for pooing in the yard was a bit stupid; so too was being angry at my kids for not picking up the poo. I chose, instead, to be angry at the dragon himself.

Cancer is such a picture of the problem the Bible links to the dragon’s entry into the story — the curse of sin and death. Cancer exists to eat and destroy; to extract and siphon off good nutrients in healthy bodies, and convert those nutrients to its own likeness; causing death and decay. Cancer sucks.

Cancer is a dragon.

I long for a time when this dragon is destroyed; not just in my body, but in the cosmos. And I want to line up behind the one who promises to destroy all dragons. I want my kids to do that too. And my church. And my community. And my medical team.

I was facing the dragon, and, on the whole, not giving way to despair.

I had my surgery two weeks ago — it was ‘successful’. I woke up to ‘no stoma’. The pain of laproscopic surgery mostly — it seems — comes in the form of referred pain in your shoulders because you have been inflated; this pain passed. Constant ‘low level’ wound pain will pass too. Eventually.

I had my two week follow up appointment from surgery earlier this week. I no longer, it seems, have cancer in my body — the swollen lymph nodes near the tumour and the other 17 they took to check showed no sign of cancer. This meant a restaging of PT3 PN0 PM0 — or stage 2, and a way better treatment pathway and prognosis. There’s always the chance it has fired off its tendrils in the form of little invisible dragons waiting to emerge elsewhere, and so I’ll enter this period of vigilance (and perhaps preventative chemotherapy).

I am counting my blessings.

One of the biggest ‘killers’ when it comes to this sort of diagnosis comes in the form of complications from ‘co-morbidities’. Since last September I have been on a deliberate (perhaps tumour assisted) weight loss journey. I wanted to prolong my ‘soccer career’ (such as it is). I ended the season with a torn hamstring and back pain (and a grand final victory) and those injuries and pains were both a function of middle age and being well and truly in the ‘obese’ weight category. I lost 22kg prior to my surgery; I had attributed some of the symptoms I was experiencing to a ‘low fibre’ diet and went to hospital for the colonoscopy expecting a diet change — but my weight loss, and desire to work that diet thing out were part of how the cancer was found, and also part of why everything treatment wise is in a lower risk category. This is quite amazing to me.

The tumour was 3mm from perforating the wall of my bowel; that’s a jump from ‘stage 2’ to ‘stage 4′ — and to a much riskier prognosis and treatment pathway. It was so close to perforating that it broke that last wall as the surgeons pulled it out of my body. It was also reasonably close to obstructing my bowel (again, a path to ’emergency’ rather than ‘elective’ surgery). A journal article from the 1980s suggests that aggressive bowel tumours grow 3mm or so in a month. This timing seems providential (and I have to balance this against ‘not getting cancer at all’ is also providential, and God would continue to be my shepherd and provider even if the worst case scenario had eventuated).

I don’t know what the future holds on this cancer journey; it seems — for the minute — this dragon has been slayed (slain?).

It may be that I spend some months later this year undergoing chemo, which may bring its own different despair and pain and misery. It may be that the dragon will re-emerge down the track and I will have to face it again. If not this dragon, then, some other dragon. It may be that I am cured already.

For now I’m pausing to be thankful; thankful for microscopic and milimetre sized mercies; thankful for small and large decisions in the last few months; thankful for the stories of others that prompted me to act, and to pray; thankful for the incredible public health system in Australia that means all this care from all these people has cost me nothing (I know, taxes), thankful for my friends and family who have pitched in to help through this time (my parents are about to arrive to provide all sorts of help at home for the second time in a fortnight), thankful for my church family and those who have stepped in to cover my tasks and to love and pray for our family, thankful for the visits and the phone calls, and the comments and the messages from so many of you, and thankful for my kids and Robyn for the way they have cared for me as we’ve faced the dragon together.

I am thankful that I did not give in to despair or self-pity because I am not alone, and did not feel alone.

I am thankful that it seems like the idea that character isn’t about ‘how you choose to act, or what you decided to do, in a crisis’ but ‘who you habitually become before the crisis’ seems to have worked out — not because I don’t have any sinful or dragony tendencies in this moment. I haven’t been or behaved perfectly — but because this moment too has been an opportunity to deliberately practice ‘habits of the heart’ for the next crisis, or the bigger dragons out there.

I am thankful that this period has revealed to me — and I hope to my kids most of all — that I really believe this stuff about God, and it really matters in these moments. It’s easy to give a kind of lip service to one’s allegiance when that fidelity isn’t being tested (or when you don’t notice how it is being tested in myriad little battles or choices or moments).

And ultimately, I am thankful that the Lord, my shepherd, is a slayer of dragons who will — no matter the outcome of my story in this body — return to make all things new; and to eradicate cancer and other dragons from the cosmos.

That is a good story.

August 20, 2026 1 Comment

The Mechanical Bride of Christ

In yesterday’s post we finished an exercise in description that spanned three posts where we describe the way the automobile, when it dropped into the ‘ecosystem’ of human life, re-wrote the physical landscape, and our experience of being human, and through these changes rewrought church community into something new, in ‘its image and likeness’ so to speak.

I’ve drawn quite a bit on Marshall McLuhan in the last few posts; one of my favourite McLuhan books is The Mechanical Bride, where he articulates the challenges and costs of life as a “mechanical bride” wedded to (or as) machines in the “absent-minded technological world” we have created where we become “the robots who are its very conscious victim.”

The idea that the technology we hold — or mediums we work with — shapes our humanity is not new. McLuhan was drawing on the Old Testament’s critique of idolatry in Psalm 115 — you become what you behold. He also observed this pattern working through human history — so that “in a pre-industrial world a great swordsman, horseman, or animal-breeder was expected to take on some of the character of his interests,” but he saw this amplified with people spending all our time and energy “using and improving machines” more powerful than ourselves.

He describes life ‘wedded to the machine’ as a mechanical bride as:

“The ordinary person senses the greatness of the odds against him even without thought or analysis, and he adapts his attitudes unconsciously. A huge passivity has settled on industrial society. For people carried about in mechanical vehicles, earning their living by waiting on machines, listening much of the waking day to canned music, watching packaged movie entertainment and capsulated news, for such people it would require an exceptional degree of awareness and an especial heroism of effort to be anything but supine consumers of processed goods. Society begins to take on the character of the kept woman whose role is expected to be submission and luxurious passivity. Each day brings its addition of silks, trinkets, and shiny gadgets, new pleasure techniques and new pills for pep and painlessness.”

And, finally:

“The human person who thinks, works, or dreams himself into the role of a machine is as funny an object as the world provides. And, in fact, he can only be freed from this trap by the detaching power of wild laughter.”

In what follows, I want to unpack some implications of the descriptive work from the last few posts, and why we might want to avoid being ‘the machine’s kept woman’, and embrace a heroically different approach.
You could probably just read the headings in this one…

Technology is ‘ecological’ and its introduction changes the habitat in which we are habitually human.

The car impacted the physical landscape of both city and country. It changed the architecture of the city street and the home; and the habits and routines of our lives. This change of habitat and habit (or actions), through repetition, shapes our character; it has a kind of feedback loop into our hearts and minds (I’m especially thinking of James K.A Smith’s work on the relationship between ‘liturgy’ and our loves here).

Cars, by changing our physical environment and how we live in it, change our “social imaginaries.” This is a $2 term from Charles Taylor to describe the physical and experiential ‘backdrop’ where we form our beliefs — it ‘frames’ what we can imagine. Social imaginaries — and the things in them — give us new experiences and metaphors and choices by which to think. So, for example, C.S Lewis’s inaugural academic speech De Descriptione Temporum calls the machine the ‘new archetypal image’ that separates us from all humans who came before:

“Between Jane Austen and us, but not between her and Shakespeare, Chaucer, Alfred, Virgil, Homer, or the Pharaohs, comes the birth of the machines… [The machine] alters Man’s place in nature. The theme has been celebrated till we are all sick of it, so I will here say nothing about its economic and social consequences, immeasurable though they are. What concerns us more is its psychological effect.”

Once we have machines in the world, machines become part of our language and the fabric of reality in which we create metaphor and poetry and articulate ourselves.

A few years ago I was asked to speak on generative AI at a conference for young folks in Queensland; one of the things I did for my presentation was ask ChatGPT to rewrite a poem from the Song of Songs where the metaphor was not agricultural, but mechanical — specifically comparing the beloved to a car.

1.
How radiant you are, my love!
Oh, how radiant!
Your eyes behind your glasses are like polished headlights,
Your hair is like sleek carbon fiber,
flowing smoothly over your shoulders.

2.
Your teeth are like a row of pristine gears,
perfectly aligned and gleaming.
Each one meshes seamlessly with the other;
not one is out of place.

3.
Your lips are like the curve of a red sports car;
your smile, a flash of chrome.
Your cheeks behind your blush
are like the soft interior leather.

4.
Your neck is like a streamlined chassis,
built with precision and grace;
adorned with silver chains,
each one a testament to your elegance.

5.
Your breasts are like twin air intakes,
balanced and symmetrical,
like perfectly tuned components,
enhancing the engine of your heart.

6.
Until the dawn’s first light
and the night shadows retreat,
I will revel in your presence
and inhale the new car scent of your essence.

I share this now because this poem was the source of the generated image on this post — a kind of literal rendering of McLuhan’s Mechanical Bride — and because this sort of ‘poetry’ is not imaginable without cars (so comparing this to the original is an example of a changed ‘social imaginary’, and this vaguely nods towards the next point.

Machine technology (including the car) causes Secularisation

Following Charles Taylor’s Secular Age thesis (and descriptive work) one can mount an argument that technology — the machine — mechanisms — produce secularisation, both in the way they open up the landscape, and create autonomy (and the possibility of ‘not’ being in your local church on any given Sunday), and in the way they impact our imaginations, our habitats, and our habits.  

You can also get here via C.S Lewis, Neil Postman, Marshall McLuhan, Lewis Mumford, and more recently, Paul Kingsnorth.

The machine secularises.

Here’s some ideas from Charles Taylor that might unpack how this works; again, this is more descriptive work — though Taylor’s arguments around causation are a step more abstract than the description of the car’s impact on the landscape of our cities, and the shape of the church.

Taylor follows a thread from a Dutch philosopher Eduard Jan Dijksterhuis, who describes the “mechanisation of the world picture”; tracking the way scientific thought developed from Pythagoras to Newton. Where once the cosmos was viewed as ‘God’s creature,’ shot through with supernatural meaning and perhaps subject to miraculous intervention, over time it became viewed as a “system” of “mutually affecting parts” — a mechanism — designed to “work in certain ways” to “produce certain results,” and we work out ‘God’s purposes’ by discerning “what ends a mechanism of this kind is well designed to serve.”

This shift was aided by the development of mechanisms — like clocks — that allowed God to be conceived of as a “watchmaker”… Here’s Taylor again arguing that mechanistic theories about the universe didn’t just undermine the idea of ‘ideal forms’ (Plato) or ‘inbuilt purpose’ (Aristotle), but the idea of ‘enchantment’ or Spiritual reality surrounding us, “making the presence of God in the cosmos something which was no longer experience-near… God’s power was no longer something you could feel or see.” It now:

“[God’s power] had to be discerned in the design of things, the way we see the purposes of the maker or user in some artificial contrivance, a machine—an image which recurs again and again in the discourse of the time, particularly in the simile likening the universe to a clock.”

Our metaphorical model of the human brain and body has followed this approach to the universe; where once we described them as ‘machines,’ it became popular to describe the brain as a computer… this 2017 Wired article suggests ‘Tech Metaphors Are Holding Back Brain Research,’ noting:

“In ancient Greece, the brain was a hydraulics system, pumping the humors; in the 18th century, philosophers drew inspiration from the mechanical clock. Early neuroscientists from the 20th century described neurons as electric wires or phone lines, passing signals like Morse code. And now, of course, the favored metaphor is the computer, with its hardware and software standing in for the biological brain and the processes of the mind.”

Taylor observed this shift involved no longer simply “observing” God revealing himself through signs and symbols — but becoming participants in the systems and purposes we discerned in nature — his world, and in his Word — “we have to abandon the attempt to read the cosmos as the locus of signs, reject this as illusion, in order to adopt the instrumental stance effectively,” which ‘disenchants the universe’ and so secularises. This process happens through an exchange where we “trade in a universe of ordered signs, in which everything has a meaning, for a silent but beneficent machine”…

Taylor calls this a shift from ‘cosmos’ to universe.

The cosmos had spiritual and material realities where material things had “undeniable meanings”; pointing beyond the material, revealing “higher and lower kinds of being,” while the universe itself is unresponsive, or indifferent, like a machine, “even if we held that it was designed as a machine for our benefit.”

Taylor describes God’s voice becoming “inaudible… against the din of machines,” against a changing backdrop as the nature of society shifted; where the skyline is no longer framed around a Cathedral, but “individual great buildings each monumentalize some corporation or triumphant entrepreneur, while on the other, vast areas of the city form a crazy quilt of special purpose constructions—factories, malls, docks—following each some fragmentary instrumental rationality.”

Ooft. As the young people say.

The technology we surround ourselves with infiltrates our thinking and experience — and tends towards making us think and act ‘mechanistically’ — one can observe the way the automobile has done this in the description of its reshaping of urban and church life, and sense of being human ‘uprooted’ from location in ‘one space’ for our lifetime, and free to pursue our autonomous individual goals and preferences.

Part of how the machine secularises is by creating consumer choices — and shaping us as ‘consuming machines’. The human temptation, since the Eden story, has been to ‘become like God’ via objectification, extractive commodification, and consumption (seeing, desiring, and taking).

We become what we behold. What we habitually hold — living in a machine world — shapes our habitats and habitats; our cities. Our technology rewires us as consumers who ‘imagine’ life via machine metaphors, forms us to be machine-like. This is not the ‘end’ of the church — which is to habituate us into Christlikeness.

Machine technology, after ‘disenchantment’ offers alternative enchantment through ‘magical idols’ that shape us (and our communities) in their image

The other catch is that these machines don’t just alter our ‘altar moments’ — by shifting our imagination and our habituation, machines end up becoming idols; symbols that themselves have quasi-religious, or actual religious, significance. The spiritual world abhors a vacuum. They don’t just secularise; but paganise — with their own mythology, ritual and eschatologies.

An author named Erik Davis makes this case in a book titled TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information, he says:

“By appropriating and re-visioning communication technologies, the spiritual imagination often fashions symbols and rituals from the technical mode of communication it employs: hieroglyphs, printing press, the online database. By reimagining technologies in this way, new meanings are invested into the universe of machines, and new virtual possibilities emerge.”

I’m not suggesting we consciously worship the car — but the shift in values, and architecture, and habits, observed in our descriptions suggest this shift has already taken place at a subconscious level.

Davis saw this ‘TechGnosis’ — a sort of technological religion — being pretty closely linked to what Kingsnorth calls the Machine — also drawing on Lewis Mumford.

“For well over a century, the dominant images of technology have been industrial: the extraction and exploitation of natural resources, the mechanization of work through the assembly line, and the bureaucratic command-and-control systems that large and impersonal institutions favor. Lewis Mumford called this industrial image of technology the “myth of the machine,” a myth that insists on the authority of technical and scientific elites, and in the intrinsic value of efficiency, control, unrestrained technological development, and economic expansion.“

If life ‘mediated by machines’ disenchants, we should consider what happens when church life is mediated to us by machine (the car… or the screen)

If our description was correct — that the car (and the way cars were sold) produces radical neo-liberal autonomous (auto-mobile) individual who values “speed, fun, personal freedom, and individual mobility” plus “choice and identity” in ways not before seen (or possible), this seems at odds with a Gospel that says ‘you are not your own, you have been bought at a price, therefore honour God with your bodies” and encourages us into a life of mutual submission and belonging to Jesus and one another in embodied, gathering, community.

When church becomes a consumer product that people ‘choose’, and ‘belonging’ becomes about what you get ‘as you consume’ — or what you can give in order for the machine to grow and attract (and extract) more from other humans in order to keep feeding itself; you end up with something more like Moloch, Marduk, and Babylon, than like Eden or the New Jerusalem. And a church more like the ‘whore of Babylon’ in Revelation who loves the economic value and power on offer from the beastly military and economy of Rome, than the bride of Christ.

Our task as the bride of Christ is not to be ‘mechanical brides’ who represent the values, practices, ecology, and idolatry of our machine cities; which function as extractive, objectifying, consuming, dominion machines built on perpetual desire and promises of ‘heaven on earth’ arriving through our power; our technologies and techniques — through the machine — our task as the church — the bride of Christ — is to be working out how to be united to him and so mediate his presence and way of life to the world, as a ‘holy priesthood’ — this is what priests do.

We should engage technology and technique critically; not as defaults or norms or ‘inevitable’ goods

If machines — like the car — change our habitats and habits, captivate our imaginations, and can lead to ‘secularisation’ and a mechanical view of the universe; we should critically, not uncritically embrace them into our lives and our experiences — and work at being conscientious and conscious observers of the way the ‘machine’ values of the world infiltrate our lives, our churches ‘ecologically,’ including the ways in which we access and participate in life with God.

We are conditioned, by the prevailing culture, to love technology and technique and pragmatism and the ‘instrumental stance’ in ways that disenchant.

This feels abstract until we consider how faithfulness to God can sometimes feel like it is reduced to ‘serving in a production or program in a Sunday event with well-oiled precision.’

Or, until we consider how we might be made to be ‘located’ and limited in time and space — to participate in the ‘fruitful’ mission of God stewarding (cultivating and keeping) our selves and the space we occupy as places where heaven and earth are meeting, but instead are prone to creating ‘black box’ “non-places” of transience (with sufficient car parking), where artificial lighting amplifies what is happening on stage, and darkness amplifies what happens on screen; as we consume — where we could be ‘any where’ and ‘any when’ — in a drive-in, or at home engaging via a screen.

And, maybe we could also consider that the sacraments — in the Reformed tradition — are not simply ‘pedagogical techniques’ but a participation in reality as it is, anticipating what it will become. They are means of grace, and the elements — the water of Baptism, or bread and cup, teach us about the shape of heavens and earth — and the meaning, significance, or purpose of material reality by doing and being something. While also, the event, or practice orients us — where, for example, ‘discerning the body’ in communion is not just about what’s going on in the bread but recognising who you are connected to spiritually and ‘in the flesh’ in the body of Christ around you and participating in an act of spiritual unity. The physical elements are a picture of the way creation itself is oriented to, or has a telos, aligned with worshipping the creator. Churches are not ‘opt in’ events you drive to; but an organic network of flesh, blood, and Spirit, you belong to — with obligations and commitments beyond consumption; where you have a role to play in the gathering, and as the gathered people ‘in the world’ (not just in an event, or for a corporation).

There’s a risk that church can become about consumption of information produced by workers in the machine (content generators and the ‘evangelical industrial complex’), in programs tailored to attract and retain consumers (sometimes crassly called ‘giving units’) who will fuel the perpetual pushing beyond limits. The machine then exists to create more trinkets and shiny gadgets — church apps — and techniques — to maximise engagement with ‘the machine’ that is the church via our mechanical and digital technologies.

Seeing these patterns invites us to conceive of discipleship differently; as oriented away from extractive, objectifying dominion (the ethos of the machine) towards life-giving, fruitful, generativity as image bearers of the living God. I’ll unpack more of the way ‘auto-mobile’ or ‘machine’ church views discipleship and formation (as tied to ‘serving in, or fueling, the machine’) in a future post. Seeing the way we have become subject to machines — without even noticing — to their mythology and allure — does invite us to unplug; and perhaps some of this requires laughter.

A way to resist involves cultivating a different kind of ecology through different habits, and limitations, around our use of machines

We’re already used to thinking about how we limit the impact of things like smart phones on our psyche (and our bodies). What do healthy limits on cars and ‘auto mobility’ looked like (and indeed, as we’ll see, the use of digital technologies in church communities and gatherings too)?

What happens if our churches take on the principles, practices — the technologies and techniques — of the objectifying and extracting, all consuming cities we exist in?

What does it look like to plant gardens and build houses — little Edens where God dwells with his people — in mechanised Babylon? In an automobile city?

Automobile cities and automobile churches are expressions of the logic of ‘the machine’ (and “the Machine” is Babylon)

Here it’s time to bring back some Kingsnorth Against The Machine… to remind ourselves what it is he observes animating the modern city and the modern citizen (that I’m suggesting animates the modern machine church too). Here’s, again, the animating logic of the machine:

“The ethos of the Machine is expansion, the busting of limits and the consumption of whatever can be sold to us to meet the ‘needs’ of the individual self which the Machine constructed for us in the first place. But all of nature’s functions operate within limits. They rely for their continued operation on a healthy balance of the complex and delicate systems that the living planet brings about.”

His take on the myth of progress is pretty much exactly what C.S Lewis spoke about in his lecture… and what Taylor observes in his secularisation thesis built on ‘mobilisation,’ and ‘disenchantment’ of space and time through the rise of a mechanised concept of the universe.

“Here is where we find ourselves: in a world in which all of our desires, needs, projects and even attempts at resistance end up furthering the progress of the Machine. The values of that Machine are now so ubiquitous that we treat them as if they were as natural as rain or wind. Progress; ‘openness’; an objection to limits and borders; therapeutic individualism; universalism; the rejection of roots, place and history; pure materialism; the triumph of ‘reason’ over ‘superstition’; scientism; commercialism and the primacy of market values: all of these go to make up the unseen and unquestioned value system within which we live, and to which we feel there is simply no alternative.”

Babylon’s creation story, the Enuma Elish gives an account of the birth of the city of Babylon, where the God, Marduk, creates the world out of the bodies of the other gods he violently dismembered; he makes humans to serve the gods, and they make a ‘tower of Babylon’ (from bricks) that reaches the heavens, where the gods will feast, attended by their human slaves.

Babylon’s king at the time of Judah’s exile — Nebuchadnezzar, liked to make young men from captured nations into Eunuchs who would serve the royal court; he built towers to the heavens from bricks stamped with his name (there are examples in the British museum). He feasted on wealth he extracted from the world through his grasping, all consuming, power; his city extracted life from the surrounding nations. The book of Daniel describes him building a golden image (using the same word as the ‘image of God’) and demanding all people “of every language and nation” worship him (a reversal of the tower of Babel). The logic of Babylon is violent extraction — the objectification of others, and commodification of nature, fuelled by the desire to consume. This is how Paul Kingsnorth describes the ‘city’ built according to (or shaping) the logic of machines — the kind of city that begins being ‘the norm’ once cars, roads, and suburbs reshape the landscape and our urban architecture:

“The lesson is old and growing more obvious daily: a city, unlike a village, can never be self-sufficient. A giant city is a kind of micro-empire: it cannot exist without enclosing and harvesting lands and peoples elsewhere to provide for its own growth. One of the great myths of the city is that we go there to individuate—to ‘find ourselves’. It might be more accurate to say that the city removes our agency, deskills us, and toys with us at its leisure. A city’s inhabitants are dependents: they have neither the space, the skills, the time nor the inclination to fend for themselves. A city dweller exists to serve the city. If she is lucky, the city will also serve her. If she is unlucky, she will end up juggling three jobs and trying to scrabble together enough pennies to feed her children.”

This is how the Book of Revelation describes Rome — first century Babylon… in Revelation 18…

When the kings of the earth who committed adultery with her and shared her luxury see the smoke of her burning, they will weep and mourn over her. 10 Terrified at her torment, they will stand far off and cry:

“‘Woe! Woe to you, great city,
    you mighty city of Babylon!
In one hour your doom has come!’

11 “The merchants of the earth will weep and mourn over her because no one buys their cargoes anymore— 12 cargoes of gold, silver, precious stones and pearls; fine linen, purple, silk and scarlet cloth; every sort of citron wood, and articles of every kind made of ivory, costly wood, bronze, iron and marble; 13 cargoes of cinnamon and spice, of incense, myrrh and frankincense, of wine and olive oil, of fine flour and wheat; cattle and sheep; horses and carriages; and human beings sold as slaves.

14 “They will say, ‘The fruit you longed for is gone from you. All your luxury and splendor have vanished, never to be recovered.’ 15 The merchants who sold these things and gained their wealth from her will stand far off, terrified at her torment. They will weep and mourn 16 and cry out:

“‘Woe! Woe to you, great city,
    dressed in fine linen, purple and scarlet,
    and glittering with gold, precious stones and pearls!
17 In one hour such great wealth has been brought to ruin!’

“Every sea captain, and all who travel by ship, the sailors, and all who earn their living from the sea, will stand far off. 18 When they see the smoke of her burning, they will exclaim, ‘Was there ever a city like this great city?’ 19 They will throw dust on their heads, and with weeping and mourning cry out:

“‘Woe! Woe to you, great city,
    where all who had ships on the sea
    became rich through her wealth!
In one hour she has been brought to ruin!’

Oh yeah, and:

Your merchants were the world’s important people.
    By your magic spell all the nations were led astray.
24 In her was found the blood of prophets and of God’s holy people,
    of all who have been slaughtered on the earth.”

Rome; Babylon — and, in Revelation, ‘that great city where Jesus was slain’ — Rome/Jerusalem/Egypt — the archetypal city of Cain; of refuge for the rebellious — the city extracts resources and wealth, so the rich get richer — it pulls people of all nations away from God with its pomp and ceremony; its golden images and towers — and it slaughters those who will not bend the knee to its extractive power. You’re on the bus or under the bus, so to speak. People exist to feed the machine; life is created by dismemberment, objectification — turning folks into cogs who plug in and serve, until they are discarded — who enjoy the spoils and trinkets while they can.  

Kingsnorth says:

“This is the modern Machine city: global in scale and ambition, bland, homogenised and empty at its heart.”

I fear this could describe the ‘machine’ church — the mega church; geared around consumer satisfaction and consumption; around what will cause an individual to hop in their car and drive to an experience that is ‘fast, loud, and individuating’ with great bells and whistles — differentiated from the other machines, like auto-mobiles offering optional extras or choices of colour.

Kingsnorth describes Plato’s concept of a ‘human scale city’ by contrast. Here are a few quotes,

“As so often, this is a question of scale. Plato, according to Mumford, ‘limited the size of his ideal city to the number of citizens who might be addressed by a single voice’. Everyone should be within hailing distance of that voice in order to ensure human-scale living. Some ancient cities were indeed built on almost this scale, at least initially. There are towns, and city centres, across Europe and Asia today which are beautifully organised, stunning to look at and in some cases thrilling to visit or live in.

Plato’s ideal city, and the real cities of the pre-modern period, were a combination, sometimes uneasy, sometimes harmonious, of ambition and aim. They were religious centres, cultural hubs, marketplaces, dwelling places, loci of power. The twenty-first century city exists mainly for one purpose: profit. Everything that exists there, from schools to art galleries to concert halls to government buildings, is pointed towards this end. You can judge a culture, I think, by its tallest buildings; what it chooses to reach towards is a reflection of its soul and purpose. The tallest buildings in a modern city are not cathedrals, temples, or even palaces: they are skyscrapers, which are homes to banks, finance houses and global corporations.

The pre-modern city and the contemporary metropolis are different not just in scale, but in essence. The city itself ‘becomes consumable, indeed expendable: the container must change as rapidly as its content. The latter imperative undermines a main function of the city as an agent of human continuity. The living memory of the city, which once bound together generations and centuries, disappears: its inhabitants live in a self-annihilating moment-to-moment continuum.”

Machine churches operate with the logic of machine cities — they create dependency, remove agency, promise we will find ourselves but ‘deskill’ and demotivate us, so that faithful discipleship is reduced to participation in the services and programs — and, if you are lucky, they will also serve you. They promise abundance but deliver scarcity and perpetual grasping for more as the machine tries to expand its reach.

Kingsnorth’s treatment of the city — and the human scale — provides an antidote to Babylon, or the machine — a bit like the humble ‘planting gardens, and building houses’ was God’s call to Israel through Jeremiah while they were in Babylon; we are — like Daniel — called to faithful presence and differentiation; to not bow the knee or enjoy the ‘meat’ on offer on the city’s menu.

Nebuchadnezzar demanded people of every tongue and nation participate in the extractive nature of the city; recognising him as the embodiment of Marduk; bowing down and worshipping — on threat of death. Jesus, the lamb who was slain who is seated on the throne of heaven invites people of every tribe, tongue and nation, to come before his throne and join with him as the bride of Christ as he lays down his life for us — the logic of our communities has to be different to the logic (and practice) of those wedded to “the machine,” we cannot simply uncritically employ machines and the logic of the city (or empire) to ‘reach people for Jesus.’

We are not mechanical brides.

May 20, 2026 1 Comment

The auto-mobile church

In the last two posts unpacking Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine as it relates to what I’m calling ‘machine church’, we’ve started building out a bit of a case study looking at the way church, as we know it, is a product of a technology — the automobile — which is embedded in the architecture of our cities, and the structure (and thinking) underpinning our lives — not just urban, but modern (in that this is perhaps even ‘truer’ in rural and regional areas).

We’ve unpacked the car’s impact on cities, and the psyche — now I’m going to unpack the traceable and observable impact the car has had on how we approach (literally as well as figuratively) church (both as the gathering people of God in a discrete community, and the ‘places’ these gatherings meet).

Just to recap, to save you reading those now month old posts, modern cities evolved around roads (and carparks), and have changed shape — and the shape of our interactions with and in them — based on the kinds of cars we invent and drive. The suburb and the ‘CBD’ are both functions of transport technology (and industrialisation); and this reordering of the physical structure of life impacted what Charles Taylor calls the ‘social imaginary’ — shaping the background conditions of our beliefs and habits (our habitats shape our habits, which shape our character).

In the second post we explored what Taylor calls the ‘age of mobilisation’ — the way the incredible increase of ‘personal choice’ and ‘individual expression,’ brought by the automobile, has shifted the religious and political landscape as people live in a more connected world, freed from previous social orders/hierarchies/inherited career paths in family businesses. We considered that ‘auto’ is the word for ‘self’ — and the overlap of the literal ‘mobilisation’ that is extended by a car, and this change in social order — and how ‘consumer choice’ becomes a factor in modern life and the way institutions cater to ‘auto-mobile’ individuals — hinting that this might be a factor with church, and religious belief and practice (Taylor is explicit about this).

In this post I’m going to unpack a history of the modern (machine) church as it relates to the car — but my argument is not that the church is exclusively a product of the car (or the suburbs and conditions of choice created by and around the car), but a product of (often uncritically) embracing machine technologies (and accompanying philosophies, practices, and anthropologies) like a Trojan horse that end up shaping our habitats (‘ecology’ and ‘economy’) and habits — and our ‘ecclesiology’ and ‘missiology’. In a future post I’ll consider implications of this descriptive work, and then how digital technology is reshaping churches in the present the way cars did in the past, but in this one we’ll land on my hypothesis that a ‘church will grow to the size of its carpark.’

In all this, I’m essentially following Neil Postman’s observation in his essay Five Things We Need to Know about Technological Change:

“What I am saying is that our enthusiasm for technology can turn into a form of idolatry and our belief in its beneficence can be a false absolute. The best way to view technology is as a strange intruder, to remember that technology is not part of God’s plan but a product of human creativity and hubris, and that its capacity for good or evil rests entirely on human awareness of what it does for us and to us.”

I’m not yet convinced that there is ‘nothing good’ about the kinds of technology harnessed by ‘the machine’ — but rather, that unless we see the forces (powers and principalities) using the technologies and shaping the technologies through idolatrous humans who want to ‘be like God’ — we can’t possibly treat technology as ‘neutral’ or ‘plunder Egypt and use it to preach Christ’ (to slightly misquote Augustine).

Neil Postman was Marshall McLuhan’s successor in the field of media ecology, McLuhan, wrote:

“Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot.”

So. In this series of observations about the car and the church, we’re trying not to be idiots.

Here’s a passage from McLuhan’s Understanding Media, drawing on Lewis Mumford (quoted in the ‘car-city’ post), and noting the way he (in the 1960s) saw the wheel and combustion engine being replaced by ‘electronic’ technology and screens.

“The automobile, followed by the airplane, dissolved this grouping and ended the pedestrian, or human, scale of the suburb. Lewis Mumford contends that the car turned the suburban housewife into a full-time chauffeur. Certainly the transformations of the wheel as expediter of tasks, and architect of ever-new human relations, is far from finished, but its shaping power is waning in the electric age of information, and that fact makes us much more aware of its characteristic form as now tending toward the archaic.”

This quote resonates a bit with one from Jacques Ellul’s The Technological Society, which, with Mumford, formed something of the basis of Paul Kingsnorth’s metaphor of ‘the machine.’

“Technique has penetrated the deepest recesses of the human being. The machine tends not only to create a new human environment, but also to modify man’s very essence. The milieu in which he lives is no longer his. He must adapt himself, as though the world were new, to a universe for which he was not created. He was made to go six kilometers an hour, and he goes a thousand. He was made to eat when he was hungry and to sleep when he was sleepy; instead, he obeys a clock. He was made to have contact with living things, and he lives in a world of stone. He was created with a certain essential unity, and he is fragmented by all the forces of the modern world.”

This is to say, cars are a form of the machine that begin to rewrite our experience of being human — and our social structures and architecture — including the nature of church communities.

The Auto-Church

So. Let’s talk about the ‘age of mobilisation’ and the car — the annihilation of space — and the impact this has on the modern self, via the impact it has on the modern church.

Now. I like being able to drive (and fly) places. I like choice. I enjoy international food that I would not have discovered but for global connectivity. I am happy to do the ‘Michelin restaurant’ thing (from the previous post), seeking out drinking and dining experiences by car.

And, when it comes to church, I love my church family — and recognise that people in our community, if you plot them on a map of greater Brisbane — live up to an hour’s drive away from one another and the car (and other technologies) mediate genuine ‘unity-in-the-Spirit’ communion between people who have chosen to be part of the same expression of the household of God.

I recognise that there are complex economic forces driving a diasporic experience of ‘household life.’ This includes that ‘affordable housing’ is increasingly available in outer suburbs or satellite cities, and that entry level jobs in various careers requires being uprooted. This ‘diaspora’ fragments communities (and families) across suburban, regional, state, and international borders, so technology (whether mechanical or digital) sustains connections across that fragmentation.

In The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), when wired telephony, television, and radio waves were precursors to the Internet and the mobile phone, McLuhan coined a phrase to highlight how these ‘mediums’ recreate “the world in the image of a global village.” This is part of the ‘ecology’ and the competing effects of different technologies — I simultaneously can feel a room-to-room, screen-to-screen connection with family across the country, while needing to drive an hour to see members of my church community in their distant suburb.

I will almost always choose to drive and park rather than walk, or catch public transport — because — I, dear reader — have grown up in a world, and a church, shaped by the machine.

It is true that at various points — both in my childhood and early teenage years, and then for a short period in my early 20s, I have experienced the joy of living on the same block as the church I attended — and that proximity is beautiful to me, but my normal practice is to drive to church, and in doing so, to drive past other churches and through other suburbs — and people drive to our church by choice because of the ‘service’ we offer and a kind of affinity or preference for that service, not simply to maintain pre-existing relational connections (though also often because the housing constraints in modern life force people to affordable fringes and away from their established geographic roots).

Your normal practice is probably to drive to a church you like too.

It is simply the case that this is a very new phenomenon. Historically speaking. And that it changes the nature of church — both as a gathering people, and our relationship to church as autonomous ‘consumers’ who choose, rather than ‘being given’ a family, community, and story we belong to ‘rooted’ in time and place.

These changes are not all negative, but they are a picture of the symbiotic (or parasitic) relationship between the church and the machine; and our modern obsession with eradicating rather than embracing the comforting discomfort of limits.

In what follows I am going to give an historical account — a description — of the modern machine church — the ‘automobile’ church. I’m going to initially draw on historical sources and an essay, ‘Effects of Auto-Mobility on Church Life and Culture’ by Craig Van Gelder, published in the journal Word and World in 2008, and give an account of the modern ‘mega church’ — a church designed for consumers in the machine age — that again is demonstrably a piece of modern church history (and technological dependence).

We covered the shifting architecture of life around the development of cities and suburbs alongside road and rail — we’re going to pick up the story of the impact of this shift on the church from the late 1800s, when Van Gelder notes “electric streetcar systems” and their stops and stations led to the “formation of thousands of city-neighborhood congregations” serving “a well-defined, three-generational neighbourhood” that “required the development of little or no parking space, an unintended consequence that would later come back to haunt them.”

At the moment I am responsible for two suburban Presbyterian congregations in inner-city Brisbane — one has a carpark the other does not. There are all sorts of ways that inherited church spaces reflect the transportation habits, or choices available, to congregants of the past that do impose certain limits on how churches use those spaces now. In one of these churches, to seek to change how we use the building, our options are severely limited in terms of local government zoning, because we have no designated parking.

My experience in ‘machine church’ is also instructive here; our mother ship is a large suburban church with a large multi-purpose facility, and an exceptionally large carpark — we planted in an inner city theatre with limited on-site parking, moved to a temporary location with no on site parking (and only expensive paid parking nearby) and immediately almost halved in regular attendance, before relocating again to a rented ‘warehouse conversion’ — a black box auditorium operated by a local Pentecostal church who hired another nearby shed as parking space.

The earliest automobiles — available in various (expensive) forms from the late 1890s — did not influence urban church communities; however there is some influence the automobile reshaped regional and rural churches — where communities who had previously shared ‘itinerant’ pastors they might see semi-regularly could now share a preacher who drove from town to town delivering the same sermon multiple times on a Sunday (interestingly this produced a corresponding increase in workload on the pastor; who now had to write a new sermon every week, rather than one a month, and drive from location to location).

Henry Ford began mass-producing the affordable automobile (the Model T) in 1908, through a mechanised assembly process — machines making machines. The rapid uptake of this technology reshaped the city, Van Gelder notes “State highway departments were organized across the country, and road construction, especially paved-road construction, became a boom industry. The first networks of both state highways and U.S. highways were well in place by the early to mid 1920s,” he also notes the uptake produced the “values of personal mobility and individual freedom, which led to the automobile beginning to reshape the social geography.” People were still using public transport until (according to Van Gelder) General Motors bought up and demolished over 100 electric street car systems, before selling buses to those cities.

Van Gelder notes cities like Los Angeles, California, were pioneer ‘automobile cities,’ where physical and social geography was shaped around the car. The re-organisation of cities — whether overtly organised ‘automobile cities’ or not — changed the physical architecture of church spaces (and the land used), so “congregations began to set aside increased space for parking and as newly forming congregations secured locations not tied as directly to fixed-rail systems of transportation.”

Here’s a collection of written responses to the changes wrought to ‘modern life’ by the car from people living in the 1920s. Two articles from ‘The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science’ in 1924 examine the impact of the automobile in this era in rural and urban churches.

In ‘What the Automobile Has Done to and for the Country Church,’ Warren Wilson noted that young people enjoying the ‘speed and vivacity’ provided by the car were suddenly afforded the option ‘not’ to be at their local church. He suggested that unless the preacher could “attract and hold the young” they would “yield to the temptation to go somewhere on Sunday,” while the church could demonise the car in “deploring” the irreligion of the young; while if a pastor was “of fertile spirit and contagious religious purpose” cars would bring a “new throng of young people,” coming as a result of this newly available consumer choice.

James Coale wrote a corresponding piece on the ‘Influence of the Automobile on the City Church,’ he was more optimistic about the impacts of the car — seeing it ‘giving and taking away’ — while people might go on road trips out of the city, rural folks might come to the city at the same time; and “good church members” would attend wherever they were — even in “another city a hundred miles from home.” He believed the car would “be an instrument of blessing” — making very similar points to those made about screens during a pandemic — “it makes possible attendance on the part of the invalid and the aged, who without it could not attend public worship. It facilitates the work of the church in caring for the sick and the indigent.”

Back to Van Gelder — his ‘phase 2’ of the impact of the car spans from 1930s to the 1960s — reflected an expansion of the ‘core values’ produced in the age of auto-mobilisation. Phase 1 included the values of ‘speed, fun, personal freedom, and individual mobility’ — phase 2 added “choice and identity.” It’s interesting that this corresponds with a rapid uptick of the use of the word identity in the fields of psychology and sociology documented in this article in my archives.

His account dovetails with McLuhan’s observations canvassed in a previous post — where ‘mass produced automobiles became increasingly personalised’ with more models, and accessories, and the “personalised automobile culture” described in the 1957 book The Hidden Persuaders.

As the city and the psyche shifted — becoming decentralised from the streetcar network “in all directions” on roads and highways constructed primarily for cars, that connected so-called “automobile suburbs,” where peoples homes were in separate locations to their places of work — “a whole set of new institutional forms was generated to serve these suburban communities, including shopping centers, suburban (one-story) schools, and suburban congregations.” Van Gelder notes:

“The massive migration of population from both the central cities and the rural areas into this new type of housing community generated a lifestyle and set of values that dramatically reshaped both congregational identity and the primary practices for carrying out congregational life and ministry. The suburban success of the churches was quite remarkable, with thousands of new congregations developed to serve the expanding systems of suburban communities.”

This new ‘automobility’ meant membership was transient; according to Van Gelder’s research, seventy percent of a suburban congregation cycled out of the community within ten years, and “this transience required the development of a new logic for fostering congregational identity—a logic that became known as the “program church,” where a shared set of programs and activities under the administrative oversight of a “professional minister” became the norm,” he cites Gibson Winter’s The Suburban Captivity of the Churches, which describes “the commodification of personal identity around the automobile, the suburb and the suburban church epitomized the commodification of the American dream.”

The next ‘epoch’ Van Gelder charts covers a period from 1965 (around the time McLuhan, Mumford and Ellul were writing) to 1995, where we see the rise of the ‘megachurch’ (especially, but not only, in America). Hillsong’s development in the ‘hills district’ of Sydney in the early 80s also tracks with the description in the US.

The megachurch — and its correspondence with the ‘church growth movement’ launched by Donald McGavran, who published Understanding Church Growth in 1970 — are, to my mind archetypes of the ‘machine church’ where technology and technique are embraced as opportunities to maximise the reach of the Gospel in the cultural conditions described, in part, by Van Gelder with the values of auto-mobility “speed, fun, personal freedom, individual mobility, choice and identity.”

None of this analysis of the changing nature of church through this period is particularly new, and in a large part we’re still engaged in the task of ‘description’ — Van Gelder notes that megachurches are typically located in the suburbs, “on large-acreage tracts in close proximity to major freeways, and they usually serve a large regional constituency. Most of these congregations provide “seven-day-a-week” ministries, with scores of programmatic opportunities for participation.” This is, amongst other things, a description that fits my experiences of machine church here in Queensland.

We’re going to detour — or take an off ramp — for a minute and consider the way the automobile was literally at the centre of the development of what many consider to be ‘the first mega church’. And we’re going to use some quotes from an episode of The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, Boomers, The Big Sort, and Really, Really Big Churches, to unpack this history.

It’s a church in California, 40 minutes drive from Los Angeles (the ‘automobile city’), in Garden Grove; a church planted in 1955 by Robert Schuller.

Schuller’s first iteration of what would become the Crystal Cathedral, Garden Grove Community Church began in a Drive In Movie theatre — parishioners could come to church and stay in their cars. A Time Magazine article from 1967 describes a Sunday service:

“As the choir sang Holy, Holy, Holy, the Rev. Robert H. Schuller mounted the pulpit of his new $3,000,000 church in Garden Grove, Calif., and pushed a button. Two 25-ft.-high sections of the glass wall before him separated slowly, leaving only open air between the preacher and nearly 1,500 worshipers in 500 cars parked below him.

Schuller’s nondenominational Protestant parish, as its newspaper advertisements state, is a “walkin, drive-in” church—one of more than 70 now operating across the nation.”

It ends with a pastor joking that he “worries that he will one day mount the pulpit and absentmindedly intone: “Will the autos of the congregation please rise?”

A congregation of cars.

The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill featured an audio clip from Schuller, describing the strategy to provide “seating in the sanctuary and drive-up speakers in the parking lot for people who wanted to continue to worship in their cars.”

“I started because we didn’t have property. I went to the Orange Drive in Theatre… unchurched people came safely in their cars… we had 50 cars that first Sunday and here 53 years later, we had a nice church.”

The podcast ep notes that because people were driving half an hour to work, or half an hour to the shops, they didn’t think twice about driving past 30 churches to the ‘megachurch they wanted to associate with,’ while ‘everything was getting bigger’ — houses, shops, and box stores. Growth enabled by changing “infrastructure, technology and industrial advancement… Cars, highways and interstates, audio amplifiers and sound systems, air conditioning, a staple of the suburban experience in new homes and shopping malls.”

Again, this is simply description — and not new — a Christianity Today article from 2014 argued that the car created the mega church.

“Not only has car culture nurtured an emphasis on affinity, but it has also altered ecclesiology (our beliefs about the church). How pastors preach, what they preach about, worship experience, and church governance are all affected. Cars have put church “consumers” in the driver’s seat like never before, and church leaders are forced to buckle up for the ride…

For many pastors and church leaders, an attractional model of church becomes almost a necessity—subject to forces beyond any one pastor’s control. When parishioners can drive anywhere, pastors are forced to think strategically about how to attract and retain them.”

Van Gelder’s next description also fits my experience as a ‘campus pastor’ within such a machine; we even had ‘multisite consultant’ Wade Burnett do a day workshop with our ministry team articulating the need for campuses to have a clear model, and multisite churches to be both ‘attractional’ (with strong attractors around teaching, worship, community and kids programming) and ‘missional’ (with strong connections to place).

“…most have attracted large numbers of members from other congregations, usually the older city neighbourhood and suburban congregations. Second, those seeking to plant new congregations, apart from the effort to build a megachurch, experienced difficulty in knowing how to develop a ministry and locate its life. Target-focused ministry around affinity networks became increasingly the pattern for starting new congregations, and most of these were started by renting space for their first years, often in schools.”

This is the pattern here in Australia — and the ‘driver’ behind both small affinity churches (like ours) that attract people from across suburban Brisbane, and ‘megachurches’ — is the automobile, and appealing to consumer choice. At least in the first instance — even if this is the choice ‘not to be part of a machine’ (that’s still product differentiation). This description from Van Gelder also fits my experience.

“Constructing a congregational identity around an affinity-based constituency that is regionally dispersed has also placed new demands on pastoral leadership, emphasizing certain leadership personality traits and focusing increasingly on pastoral persona.”

The CT article makes the same point that the ‘auto-mobile’ (self-mobile) centres personal preference, whether choosing ‘big’ or ‘small’:

“Affinity doesn’t apply only to megachurches or only to shallow, selfish churchgoers though. The fundamentalist church down the road and the lifestyle-affirming church in town both play into it. Even the most doctrine-driven Christians likely choose their churches based on that personal value. They don’t really have an alternative.”

Van Gelder’s article also describes my experience coming in to assist a suburban congregation in a property without car parking…

“The older, city-neighborhood congregations fell on even harder times as a result of significant racial and ethnic changes in their communities over more than forty years. Those that continue to survive with some dimension of their original identity, whether based in ethnicity or social class or both, usually have memberships with an average age of over sixty. In addition, almost all of these congregations face the steep challenge of being able to provide anything near the parking required for their drive-in membership.”

His whole article is worth reading as an exemplar of how our habitats shape our habits. Church architecture matters — so does the shape of urban and suburban life — and technology — including the automobile — shapes our interactions with space in ways we sometimes take for granted or assume to be ‘normal’ or ‘good’. I wonder if there’ll be a workshop on church carparks at this year’s Reach Australia conference?

The Car Park Theory of Church Growth

While we’ve stuck as closely as possible to description — both of the reshaping of community (rural, regional and urban) life, and church life in the west in the last 150 years, I’m going to tease out some implications in the next post (don’t worry — I’ve already written it — I just excised 3,000 additional words from this one…).

The one implication I want to land on in this contribution to the discussion of machine church is that while it is popular to locate ‘church growth’ in the hands and efforts of a visionary leader who ‘attracts’ with personality, and programs that are spectacular (ie the ‘attractional model’) the dependence on the automobile has created a natural limit; one that serves as a significant push/pull factor in church attendance.

The car park.

I have a pretty solid theory that much like Douglas Adam’s ‘puddle will always grow to the size of its hole’ idea that ‘the way things are account for the way things are’.

You can be the most compelling leader in the world, but if people can’t park at your church — if this is how we’ve conditioned (or discipled) church goers — if they can’t park, they won’t come. And, conversely — if people’s church habits are in part technological, they will come if they can park; and this might be less about your abilities or programs than you think.

A modern church will not grow to the capacity of its programs, ability of its leader, or number of seats in the building — though these are all limits — but the number of car parks. There are, of course, outliers — destination churches that attract people because they are located near transport hubs (especially CBD churches, but some of these historic churches have also invested in car parking via property developments).

And that once it is inconvenient to park, or more convenient to drive a few more minutes for a park close to a different building, people will do that — if all things are equal travel time and carpark wise, then people might decide about other things. It’s simplistic — but it’s also true that it is very difficult to grow beyond the size of your carpark.

My own experiences support this theory. Well, it could simply and legitimately be that I am incompetent and our church is not a product people want to consume — we began with a car park, and grew to its size; we were forced to move locations to a site where parking cost $23 an hour — we shrank. We moved to a location with a car park, and grew, and then moved to our now home, where, we have, once again, grown to the size of our carpark.

This anecdata supports my theory even if I am incompetent — in that people were willing to put up with that incompetence until the parking was impossible.

May 19, 2026 1 Comment

9 things the Bible teaches about the Cross of Jesus

There’s a new Mumford and Sons song Conversations with My Son (Gangsters and Angels) that I reckon reveals maybe preacher’s kid Marcus Mumford has been reading Paul Kingsnorth (Genius.com says he has been). It contains the lyric:

Gangsters and angels
Darling, come and see
The cross or the machine?
It’s always the same choice
The best I ever met
Had nothing and gave it all away

So. Rather than seeing this post as a breakaway from the current series of articles; here’s a sketch of an alternative basis for life in the world built from a term of grappling with the significance of the Cross of Jesus at church. Each of these numbered points was a sermon. Maybe I’ll post them up one day, but I give them to you as a Good Friday reflection.

  1. The Bible calls God ‘the author of life’ — the cross was God’s plan from ‘before the beginning of the world and fulfills the story of the Bible (especially the ‘law, Psalms, and the prophets’ — a catchall description of the Old Testament). If you read history as orchestrated to land on this particular event, and then history afterwards as unfolding in its shadow, it has pretty big explanatory power. The cross sits at the centre of human history in profound and significant ways given it was a torture device designed by an empire that had mastered a certain kind of propaganda and was meant to make a person totally forgettable as a symbol of absolute shame.
  2. God doesn’t abandon Jesus at the cross, at the cross Jesus reveals what the triune God is like — redeeming and restoring humans who were ‘his enemies’ through sacrificial love. When Jesus cries ‘my God my God why have you forsaken me’ he quotes a Psalm where God’s anointed Messiah is heard and beloved.
  3. In a sort of ‘cosmic geography’ symbolism, Jesus goes to the places God’s enemies are sent in the Old Testament — exile (the wilderness where a sacrificial goat was sent on the day of atonement), and the grave (‘sheol’ or ‘the deep’), as the one who is infinitely pure; who carries the purifying light and life of God (represented by his blood) to ‘rescue’ people from that judgment by entering those spaces as God himself. Jesus becomes ‘down and out’ so we can be brought “up” and “in” to God’s presence.

    He experiences the punishment of exile and death, but does not stay exiled and dead, because he goes into those places as the beloved son of God. He is, in a way, both the goats from the day of atonement. The math equation at the cross is not Jesus’ infinite suffering exchanged for ours, but his infinite purity cleansing and bringing forgiveness (like the sacrificial animals in Leviticus whose ‘lifeblood’ cleansed and atoned; a life in the place of death).
  4. Jesus, as he dies, fulfils many images or motifs that run through the Old Testament — one of these is the lamb. There’s a thread from God providing “a lamb” (actually a ram) when Abraham is tested on ‘Mount Moriah’ (where Chronicles says Israel’s temple is built), through to the lambs whose blood is used to spare and claim Israel as God’s ‘firstborn’ in the Passover, through to lambs whose blood is used to consecrate priests, all the way to Jesus being the ‘passover lamb’ who dies at Passover time as “the lamb who takes away the sin of the world.” The Gospel writers, and other New Testament authors, are really keen to pull all these threads together in rich ways.
  5. The Bible tells the story of violent humans spilling blood into earth from about page 4 (Cain and Abel). This blood cries out for justice, and tarnishes humanity’s ability to ‘bring forth life’ from the ground (like gardeners in Eden). Over and over again humanity is told that ‘blood and soil’ lead to exile from God (it’s all through the ‘law’ — Genesis to Deuteronomy, and the prophets — and it’s the reason given for Israel’s exile into Babylon in 2 Kings). Jesus’ blood being poured into the soil by a violent empire is the culmination of this story (and the ‘serpent’ is often standing behind this bloodshed in the Bible’s imagination). When Jesus’ blood is poured into the soil it earns ‘curse’ and exile for those who side with those violent human empires, but also ‘cleanses’ as he sows life into the ground, demonstrating God’s commitment to justice and that he hears the cries. Jesus invites us into a new path of fruitful life-giving image bearing, cultivating God’s presence in the world again.
  6. When humans were made ‘in God’s image’ we were made to “rule” earth on God’s behalf. In the ancient world, the “image of God” was the king, who would make idol statues of himself to spread his image through his kingdom; and then be worshipped as a god either in life or after death (Rome picked up this practice). The Bible says all humans — male and female — are made with this function — as ruling image bearers. But we try to rule without God rather than on God’s behalf, and we are dethroned as a result.

    The Bible promises a ‘son of God’ and ‘son of Man’ who will rule the heavens and the earth (God’s realm and the world). And Jesus, the perfect human and the incarnate “word of God who is God”, is this promised king (messiah (Hebrew) and Christ (Greek) both mean king). The Gospel writers are really keen to tell us that at the cross Jesus is crowned, and ‘enthroned’ on a cross with a sign calling him king. The crucifixion is Jesus’ coronation; the crown of thorns is his crown; the cross is his throne. The crown and throne (and the ceremony of a coronation) reveal the nature of his kingdom.
  7. The ‘big bad’ in the Bible’s story is the serpent, Satan. Ancient empires had snakes and dragons embedded in their mythology and iconography — from Pharaoh king of Egypt with his snake hat, to Marduk the Babylonian Sea Serpent slayer. The empires that oppress Israel in the Old Testament ‘see’ and ‘take’ — and often build literal structures and cities with their names attached trying to bridge heaven and earth; like the tower of Babel (Babylon). In the famous story of David and Goliath, Goliath is presented as a giant serpent (the word for bronze and the word for snake in Hebrew are visually very similar — he’s bronze from tip-to-toe scaly giant. Dagon, the Philistine God is also scaly. Both land on their bellies, in the dust, with crushed (or chopped off) heads.

    Conquest in the ancient world was understood to happen through violence and to be the will of the gods behind the nations doing the conquest (and the defeat of their gods). God defeats the serpent and serpenty nations by the crucifixion (this is the way the story of the world is told in the book of Revelation). This is a subversive vision of victory that does not come through the sword, but through non-violent, life-giving love. Jesus is the serpent crusher; and the victory happens at — and by — the cross.
  8. The cross is our pattern for life. We love to see things we like and ‘grasp them’ for our own advantage (and at best, for the sake of those we love). Jesus ‘did not grasp’ his rights or status ‘for his own advantage’ but ‘made himself nothing’ even dying on a cross. For Paul, in Philippians 2, this is the shape of our life in all our relationships — trusting that the Father won’t turn his face away, but will raise us up in love and vindicate us as he did his beloved son. The language of Philippians 2 shapes how Paul describes his evangelism in 1 Corinthians 9-10 and the life of the church together and for the world in Romans 12.

    Our love for one another in our communities, our love for our neighbours and enemies, and our politics — as Christians — would look profoundly different to the patterns of this world if we embraced the cross as the way God chooses to reveal himself and act in subversive power to save.
  9. The cross is where God creates a healing refuge from death and the impacts of what the Bible calls the curse on the world. Hospitals have crosses on them still because they are a product of the Christian story’s impact on the world (google Basil the Great’s hospital). In John 3, where Jesus famously says “for God so loved the world that he gave his only son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life,” Jesus, just before this, throws back to a story from Israel’s history where God unleashed snakes on the people in the wilderness because they wanted to go back to Egypt, the land of the snake. God invites them to ‘look at a snake on a pole’ that Moses makes and ‘live’, and Jesus compares his crucifixion to this moment.

    In Mesopotamia, there was a serpent God named Ninazu who was the god you prayed to if you had been bitten by a snake. Egypt’s first “medical doctor” was an engineer called Imhotep, who, within a century after his death was deified as the god of healing. When the Greek empire conquered Egypt, Imhotep was fused with their god of healing, Asclepius. In the Greek and Roman world (including in first century Jerusalem), temple-hospitals were called Asclepions. When they were built, they would be filled with (harmless) snakes who would slither around those who came to the temple praying for healing, while statues of Asclepius with his snake-on-a-pole (still a symbol for healthcare) were stuck around the joint.

    All this ‘snake on a pole’/snake god healing imagery in the ancient world forms a backdrop for people as they read the story of Moses in Numbers, and then hear and read the words of Jesus in John 3. He is the one who offers the remedy for the ‘bite’ of the snake; and the cross is the ‘ultimate hospital’ that offers hospitality and refuge from the violent, grasping ways of the world and the consequences.

April 3, 2026 Add Comment

The age of self-mobilisation — how the car shaped the modern self

In the last post I explored the way the car shaped the architecture of the modern city. In this post I’m going to interact (mostly) with Charles Taylor and his work exploring the ‘Sources of the Self’ in the modern world and the ‘Secular Age’ (he has two books so-titled.

My thesis here is that just as cars physically reshaped the architecture of the modern city they reshaped our experience of being human — not just by extending our capacity to travel, but by giving us way more choice. Cars emerged alongside an industry geared towards selling us things (aided and abetted by other forms of technology, like the screen, which we’ll get to). Car-based cities, suburban sprawl, and the ability to drive for work and leisure all formed part of what Charles Taylor describes as a “social imaginary” the fabric of life around us that fuels our imagination of what life is.

Cars drove, in some part, what Charles Taylor calls the ‘age of mobilisation’. At this point, before we dig into Taylor, it’s worth observing that the ‘auto’ in ‘automobile’ comes from the Greek word for ‘self’ — cars fuelled ‘mobility’ as they ‘annihilated space’, opening up previously inaccessible places and opportunities and creating a jalopy panoply of choices for how and where to spend one’s time.

The car also created new markets and commercial imperatives — like many new technologies — and were a product of factory production lines and standardisation, which meant marketers had to sell essentially the same product with differentiation, and often this differentiation appealed to insecurities, identity markers, aesthetics, and ‘felt needs.’ And then suppliers of car related products like tyres and fuel would sell their products by creating destinations that tapped into this consumer choice thing — which is, by-the-by, where Michelin star ratings for restaurants come from — they were part of a driving guide put out by the tyre company to encourage driving to restaurants ‘out of town’ as destinations for discerning travellers to boast about to their friends. The local eateries were no longer enough — and sometimes lost business as roads and bypasses created ways to move further from home.

Anyway — as this unfolds I’m going to suggest that the modern machine church shares some of these qualities — around standardisation, marketing-based differentiation to felt needs, the development of ‘Michelin star’ churches that attract people away from local embodied ‘parish’ life through the annihilation of space, and the triumph of self-expression and self-determination that turns us humans into a certain type of automaton responding to these forces and getting behind the wheel of our automobiles. The triumph of the self, indeed.

Charles Taylor wrote about the ‘age of mobilisation’ in his book A Secular Age, which is a massive account of the rise of secularism — by which he means the rise in the possibility that your average citizen in the western world might ‘choose not’ to believe in God, or gods; a relative historical and cultural anomaly.

Taylor suggests it’s not so simple as ‘science disproves God’ or various other go to arguments, but actually, part of what happened was the conditions for belief changed through ‘disenchantment’ (which one might suggest is a product of a mechanical way of thinking built around technology and technique), and through what he calls both the ‘nova’ — an explosion of available choices for what to believe; including many religious options, fuelled by the ‘age of mobilisation’ — which follows increasing urbanisation and career-based choice about where to live that’s a product of the industrial age, the emergence of the modern ‘machine city’ described in the previous post (and the decline of rural, agrarian life).

In short, technologies — the steam engine (train) and rail lines, and combustion engine (car) and highway, meant you were no longer ‘born into a job’ with the family, but could choose to go anywhere to pursue opportunities, and to grow wealth independent of the hierarchical structures or social order that had previously existed (and that had been held to be a God-given order). For Taylor, ‘a social imaginary’ is all the parts of life — including technology, and the architecture of our cities and practices, that make us behave in certain ways, picture life in certain ways, and believe certain things. Taylor says:

“What do I mean by ‘mobilisation’ here? One obvious facet of its meaning is that it designates a process whereby people are persuaded, pushed, dragooned, or bullied into new forms of society, church, association. This generally means that they are induced through the actions of governments, church hierarchies, and/or other élites, not only to adopt new structures, but also to some extent to alter their social imaginaries, and sense of legitimacy, as well as their sense of what is crucially important in their lives…”

Part of the change brought about by ‘mobilisation’ and ‘choice’ was the rise of the individual choice-maker as agent — when you were just ‘born into’ a job and a town, and limited by how or where you could travel, there were less decisions to make because there were less options. Any ‘moral order’ that we build now — any community of belief and practice (like a church) has become a matter of personal choice because, he says:

“It starts from individuals, and doesn’t see these as set a priori within a hierarchical order, outside of which they wouldn’t be fully human agents. Its members are not agents who are essentially embedded in a society which in turn reflects and connects with the cosmos, but rather disembedded individuals who come to associate together…”

Machines allowed us to be more autonomous and more mobile. This was true of cars, and is true again in the digital revolution.

Previous to this age of ‘mobilisation’ the place you were put, you were put by God, and building a society there — and participating in it was seen as “fulfilling the design of God,” living in a place “where God was present,” in his design. Now, we are the designer — the ‘autonomous’ self, and we shape the world, and our options, through the machines we create (that then create us). And the societies or ‘moral orders’ we build — our social imaginaries (including our churches) reinforce these parts of our autonomy — our self-construction through choice. For Taylor the modern social imaginary contrasts with the “embedded” understanding of human life; the givenness of time and place as constraints and limits to enjoy. Where once the western human’s “relation to the whole was mediated” by the relationship between the state, and the church, and their place within this big system; now we “come together” as individuals voluntarily and as an expression of our freedom and equality. Usually driving to such gatherings in cars from homes spread apart in the suburbs. In short, Taylor and Lewis have overlapping — perhaps out-of-date dinosaur-like views. Taylor, for his part, wouldn’t say we should go back to the future — but we should understand how the present is a product of these forces.

Taylor commented on the way this age of mobilisation played out alongside the splintering of the church via the Reformation, and then various post-reformation forces that made ‘parish membership’ not a matter of geography and conviction (I’m a Presbyterian who goes to my local church) but ‘affinity’ — ‘I go to the church that I choose to go to,’ where “belonging to a Methodist church in America, for instance, which was compatible with almost infinite mobility, the primary locus of Catholic life for rural folk [in France] was the parish.” This shift happened as masses of people moved to areas where there were few churches; to life along rail lines or in the suburbs, “folk religion” as Taylor describes it “was tied to the agricultural context, or related to the customs of a particular community.”

We live — and create lives, communities, and churches in this age of mobilisation — which is, like the modern church, a creation of the automobile. We are mobile selves living life where space has been annihilated and individual choices rule. And the screen is fast replacing the automobile — I don’t need tyres to get to a Michelin star restaurant; I can have whatever international cuisine I wished for delivered by a motorbike rider, typically someone who has moved to our country looking for opportunity who I now control with an app on my phone; an app that will track my purchases and adjust prices, and send me special offers based on what will keep me hooked — and probably sell your data to various other businesses profiling you. This is the Michelin dynamic on steroids.

If Taylor is correct, secularism itself — and its accompanying disenchanting tendency towards technology and technique — is a product of mobilisation, which is a product of the automobile.

We are ‘self-mobile’ — and — Christians have good theological reasons to be suspicious of the self; of autonomy — because removing ourselves from a divine order and being placed in time and space to reflect God and cultivate ‘heaven on earth’ space is basically the story of the Fall. This overlapping of the machine as a system, and the self it produces, is one our conversation partner Paul Kingsnorth drew on in his conversion story, ‘The Cross and the Machine,’ which he recounts again in Against the Machine.

He describes his shift from resistance to the annihilation of space — a sort of desire to ‘connect to country’ and to oppose those who would destroy the land, to a realisation that this impulse was what the Christian story described at the heart of our declaration of autonomy — automobility — against God.

“Years of environmental activism followed. Working for NGOs, writing for magazines, chaining myself to things, marching, occupying: Whatever you did, you had to do something, for the state of the Earth was dire. Nobody with eyes to see can deny what humanity has done to the living tissue of the planet, though plenty still try. There were big, systemic reasons for it, I discovered: capitalism, ­industrialism, maybe civilization itself. Whatever had got us here, it was clear where we were going: into a world in which industrial humanity has ravaged much of the wild earth, tamed the rest, and shaped all nature to its ends. The rebellion against God manifested itself in a rebellion against creation, against all nature, human and wild. We would remake Earth, down to the last nanoparticle, to suit our desires, which we now called “needs.” Our new world would be globalized, uniform, interconnected, digitized, hyper-real, monitored, always-on. We were building a machine to replace God.”

He wrote:

“Early Green thinkers, people like Leopold Kohr or E. F. Schumacher, who were themselves inspired by the likes of Gandhi and Tolstoy, had taught us that the ecological crisis was above all a crisis of limits, or lack of them. Modern economies thrive by encouraging ever-increasing consumption of harmful junk, and our hyper-liberal culture encourages us to satiate any and all of our appetites in our pursuit of happiness. If that pursuit turns out to make us unhappy instead—well, that’s probably just because some limits remain un-busted.”

In short — modern economies are driven by the same zeal that created Michelin star ratings and car advertisements.

And, more Kingsnorth:

“I grew up believing what all modern people are taught: that freedom meant lack of constraint. Orthodoxy taught me that this freedom was no freedom at all, but enslavement to the passions: a neat description of the first thirty years of my life. True freedom, it turns out, is to give up your will and follow God’s. To deny yourself. To let it come. I am terrible at this, but at least now I understand the path.

In the Kingdom of Man, the seas are ribboned with plastic, the forests are burning, the cities bulge with billionaires and tented camps, and still we kneel before the idol of the great god Economy as it grows and grows like a cancer cell. And what if this ancient faith is not an obstacle after all, but a way through? As we see the consequences of eating the forbidden fruit, of choosing power over ­humility, separation over communion, the stakes become clearer each day. Surrender or rebellion; sacrifice or conquest; death of the self or triumph of the will; the Cross or the machine. We have always been ­offered the same choice. The gate is strait and the way is narrow and maybe we will always fail to walk it. But is there any other road that leads home?”

Maybe, also, like with Lewis in the previous post — that road is better walked than driven. Who knows.

In the next post we’ll look more at how the modern machine city, and modern machine self, relate to the modern machine church. The machine church — especially the mega church variety obsessed with technique and built in suburbs with large carparks are, historically and philosophically, creations of the car, and increasingly the screen, and we’ll consider more of how this auto-mobilisation pushes against what might be God-given human-scale limits.

April 1, 2026 2 Comments

The Automating-Automobile City (and the machine church)

C.S Lewis would hate the machine church.

Because the machine church is, fundamentally, a product of the car — and an imagination shaped by mechanics — though it is increasingly becoming a product of the screen.

In De Descriptione Temporum, his inaugural public lecture at Cambridge, Lewis noted that the image of the machine “potent in all our minds, reigns almost without rival,” and that this especially brought with it the idea that the old should not be conserved but superseded with the ‘new’ or the innovative and that “our assumption that everything is provisional and soon to be superseded, that the attainment of goods we have never yet had, rather than the defence and conservation of those we have already, is the cardinal business of life” would be the thing that would most shock people who lived before the age of the machine.

In Surprised By Joy, published in 1955, Lewis reflected, at one point on the automobile. He wrote about being glad that his father didn’t have a car, but sometimes family friends would take him for drives to far off places:

“This meant that all these distant objects could be visited just enough to clothe them with memories and not impossible desires, while yet they remained ordinarily as inaccessible as the Moon.

The deadly power of rushing about wherever I pleased had not been given me. I measure distances by the standard of man, man walking on his two feet, not by the standard of the internal combustion engine. I had not been allowed to deflower the very idea of distance…”

And then…

“The truest and most horrible claim made for modern transport is that it “annihilates space.” It does. It annihilates one of the most glorious gifts we have been given. It is a vile inflation which lowers the value of distance, so that a modern boy travels a hundred miles with less sense of liberation and pilgrimage and adventure than his grandfather got from traveling ten. Of course if a man hates space and wants it to be annihilated, that is another matter. Why not creep into his coffin at once? There is little enough space there.”

The idea that the car annihilates space is something you might get your head around if you imagine the limits imposed on travel by having to use one’s own feet, or a bike, or a horse — the car suddenly makes big distances less imposing — but also makes it significantly easier not to be embedded in a place; a village, or community.

In a letter to his friend Bede Griffiths, in 1946, Lewis had also commented on the way the radio and newspaper had a similar impact in terms of pulling people from the limits of local life and our ability to pay attention to our local neighbours.

“It is one of the evils of rapid diffusion of news that the sorrows of all the world come to us every morning. I think each village was meant to feel pity for its own sick and poor whom it can help and I doubt if it is the duty of any private person to fix his mind on ills which he cannot help.”

C.S Lewis loved limits, embodied life at a human scale and human pace.

He didn’t like cars, or ‘the machine’ because of their impact on our experience and understanding of what it means to be human.

Humans, as creatures, are limited — without technology — to occupying one little patch of ground and moving from patch of ground to patch of ground quite slowly. We, via our senses, have the ability to know what’s going on in the general area we’re occupying unless some time passes and information can be brought from elsewhere in various forms; now, to borrow a phrase, we’re subject to everything, everywhere, all at once — our attention can be on matters on the other side of the globe almost as they happen. And the car was a step towards this present.

Jacques Ellul, in The Technological Society (1954), expressed similar sentiments, but in this case about the plane. His point is that as we introduce changes to our experience of the world that change our habitat, something about us changes through this process.

“Technique has penetrated the deepest recesses of the human being. The machine tends not only to create a new human environment, but also to modify man’s very essence. The milieu in which he lives is no longer his. He must adapt himself, as though the world were new, to a universe for which he was not created. He was made to go six kilometers an hour, and he goes a thousand. He was made to eat when he was hungry and to sleep when he was sleepy; instead, he obeys a clock. He was made to have contact with living things, and he lives in a world of stone. He was created with a certain essential unity, and he is fragmented by all the forces of the modern world.”

Paul Kingsnorth, whose Against The Machine is still the primary conversation partner for this series, draws a pretty direct line between Ellul’s capital-T “technique” and what he calls the machine. But the idea here is that when our experiences of the world are mediated by machines, this fundamentally changes both the ‘experience’ where the machine is added, and us.

Cars significantly altered the landscape — literally — and metaphorically. They, after the railway, changed the architecture of how and where we live, how cities were designed, and so how we spent time and gathered with others.

The way we organised our lives — our housing — our villages, towns, cities and suburbs was profoundly altered by the rise of various machines.

You can trace some of the automation of life back to the communal clock in the village, which had people working ‘like clockwork.’ There’s a whole rabbit-hole we could go down about how clocks cause secularisation, but… rather than diving head first, I’ll just suggest that change — including changes wrought on our humanity — don’t just happen as a product of ‘ideas’ but also through the deliberate or accidental things we do that shift our environment, or our embodied experience of time and space, which then massage us. Habitats shape habits. Habits are a type of liturgy, or worship. Habitats are a product of how we structure our physical spaces — our architecture and artefacts (like technology). Media ecologist Marshall McLuhan wrote:

“During the Middle Ages the communal clock extended by the bell permitted high coordination of the energies of small communities. In the Renaissance the clock combined with the uniform respectability of the new typography to extend the power of social organization almost to a national scale. By the nineteenth century it had provided a technology of cohesion that was inseparable from industry and transport, enabling an entire metropolis to act almost as an automaton.” — McLuhan

The city became like a robot; coordinating human behaviour so we acted like robots. Machines. Mechanisms in a giant clockwork city.

The clock, the factory — clockwork mechanised production lines — the industrial age, the steam engine, the telegraph, and then the automobile radically reshaped our relationship to space and the architecture of our lives; each embedding the machine more and more into our psyche and practices.  

In Understanding Media (1964) — hands down one of the most prophetic commentaries on technology from the 20th century — Marshall McLuhan hammers home the way small technological innovations create big changes to our humanity — where the media is the massage (not just the message). He wanted us to notice the way technology wrought these changes; not so much because he thought they were negative — but because they could be, and if we never noticed we would assume things are good and natural, when in fact they are artificially directed by those who profit — or by happenstance, without intention.

He points out, for example, that the medieval landscape — physically, and in terms of the social dynamics of power — was radically altered by the invention of a stirrup — which meant an armoured knight could be saddled as a powerhouse, and that the power of the wheel was only truly harnessed with the development of a system of harness and collar that allowed horses to carry much larger carriages, leading to “the development of wagons with pivoted front axles and brakes” by “the middle of the thirteenth century.”

This technology had massive impacts on town life; peasants could live in cities and work in fields. Horse power became the metaphor or measure of the machine. Horse drawn ‘public transport’ changed the game; housing could be developed out of sight of shops and factories; having such technologies in use, and in the imagination, meant the railroad was a natural development when steam engines could produce more ‘horse power’ — housing estates sprang up around train stations; the suburbs were born; shops and community spaces were built around these hubs. Where once a church would be built in the ‘town square’ at the centre of urban life, the suburb decentralised, creating suburban churches. Then came the car, which, McLuhan says “dissolved this grouping and ended the pedestrian, or human, scale of the suburb.”

In his account of the development of the city and suburb around the car, McLuhan says machine-created cities ‘fragmented’ pastoral life; the ‘wheel and road’ made centralised life possible by creating access to geographic margins — like a hub and spokes. He predicted a decentralising chain through ‘electronic media’ —think of how we can now ‘telecommute’, or work from home (thanks Zoom and Covid, and see the current discussions around working from home because of fuel prices). He said:

“All electric forms whatsoever have a decentralising effect, cutting across the older mechanical patterns like a bagpipe in a symphony.”

In a future post I’ll track a decentralising development of ‘electronic church’ against the previous ‘car church’ with the machine church paradigm…

McLuhan, a bit like Lewis, sees the ‘expansion’ of our embodied life by car, and then electronically — and the ‘gain in power’ over space where we “extend our bodies” as an explosion of “the inner unity of our beings into explicit fragments,” an annihilation, if you will, and documented a “growing uneasiness about the degree to which cars have become the real population of our cities, with a resulting loss of human scale, both in power and in distance.” As a result of this unease, and observing a shift in technology — he predicted in 1964, a global village where people would work and shop electronically.

“If the motorist is technologically and economically far superior to the armored knight, it may be that electric changes in technology are about to dismount him and return us to the pedestrian scale. “Going to work” may be only a transitory phase, like “going shopping.” The grocery interests have long foreseen the possibility of shopping by two-way TV, or video-telephone.

William M. Freeman, writing for The New York Times Service (Tuesday, October 15, 1963), reports that there will certainly be “a decided transition from today’s distribution vehicles… Mrs. Customer will be able to tune in on various stores. Her credit identification will be picked up automatically via television. Items in full and faithful colouring will be viewed. Distance will hold no problem, since by the end of the century the consumer will be able to make direct television connections regardless of how many miles are involved.”

So. He was right. Since he was prescient on that front, let’s sit for a minute with a couple more of his observations that got him to these conclusions.

McLuhan pointed out that the automobile both ‘democratised’ — levelling out the middle and upper classes through shared access to locations (including for holidays), and ‘standardised,’ he quoted an American author, John Keats (not the poet) who wrote, in The Insolent Chariots (1958), “where one automobile can go, all other automobiles do go, and wherever the automobile goes, the automobile version of civilization surely follows.” McLuhan points out that this dynamic goes back to “the assembly line,” which produces “standardised culture” where “The car is a superb piece of uniform, standardized mechanism,” that “gave to the democratic cavalier his horse and armor and haughty insolence in one package, transmogrifying the knight into a misguided missile.” He says when the car was ‘new’ it “broke up family life,” it “separated work and domicile as never before,” it “ exploded each city into a dozen suburbs, and then extended many of the forms of urban life along the highways until the open road seemed to become non-stop cities,” creating “asphalt jungles,” and causing “40,000 square miles of green and pleasant land to be cemented over.”

They paved paradise, and put up a parking lot.

The car “refashioned all of the spaces that unite and separate” humans — including churches — and would keep doing so until “the electronic successors to the car” turn up. The risk of this electronic form, for McLuhan, was a greater annihilation of space and time through further extending our reach; it’s interesting how much an extension of reach annihilates and fragments. Reach might not be the best name for an attempt to create communities that humanise…

“What the town planners call “the human scale” in discussing ideal urban spaces is equally unrelated to these electric forms. Our electric extensions of ourselves simply by-pass space and time, and create problems of human involvement and organization for which there is no precedent. We may yet yearn for the simple days of the automobile and the superhighway.”

One of the people McLuhan was listening to who expressed the ‘uneasiness’ around the car was philosopher Lewis Mumford. Mumford also gets a fair run in Against The Machine; a prophet to the prophets, if you will.

In The Highway and the City (1963), Mumford explores how the car physically reshaped cities in Europe after World War II. He called the motorcar a “corrosive” influence bringing “mobility to the countryside” but “congestion,” “frustration,” and “a threat of stagnation and blight, to the city…” The car was taking over. He spoke of his “grim experience,” or observation that “the more facilities are provided for the motorcar, the more cars appear…” and warned that city planners were reluctant to act even though cars make “city life first unendurable and finally impossible.”

He identified four steps to tackle this takeover — and I don’t know if you’ve tracked the politicisation of the debate around ‘walkable cities’ (see for eg this piece, or this one)— but I suspect there’s one side who love automobiles and what they do for individual expression (who don’t think particularly collectively) who would resist these as woke nonsense from the 1960s…

His steps were: “the vigorous restoration and improvement of public transportation,” replanning neighbourhoods to encourage pedestrian movement and restrict the automobile, the restriction of large cars from the city and design of small battery-powered cars using “electric batteries of an efficient type still to be invented” for town use (remember, this is the 1960s), and a decentralising of places of industry, business and administrative workplaces to “outlying subcenters” to deal with “swollen tides of one way traffic” at peak hour.

His love for small cars is interesting; cause he saw his fellow Americans loving ‘bigger’ as ‘better’ and this push as a push towards human scale cars “sized to the human frame, not to the human ego.” I wonder if we applied this same thinking to church size — fitting ‘frames’ not ‘egos’ what would happen…

These were “palliatives” because in the age of automobilisation, people believed in “the right to have access to every building in the city by private motorcar,” which he saw as “the right to destroy the city,” coupled with the “habitual sacrifice” of the special values of the city to “the function of motor transportation, as during the nineteenth century they were sacrificed to the railroad and the factory.”

Mumford observes a similar dynamic to Lewis — while the car has shaped the architecture of cities, he described a “larger order” that had historically shaped our human experience. First, he saw “nature” as a force; a kind of natural law — perhaps shaped by a creator — but the ‘cumulative process of history’ and the ‘human psyche’ as other parts of a dynamic; he believed the developments he described were us turning our backs on these sources “in the name of mechanical progress, for the sake of purely quantitative production, mechanical efficiency, bureaucratic order” which in turn sterilised architecture and the “life that it should sustain and elevate.” He said:

“An age that worships the machine and seeks only those goods that the machine provides, in ever larger amounts, at ever rising profits, actually has lost contact with reality, and in the next moment or the next generation may translate its general denial of life into one last savage gesture of nuclear extermination. Within the context of organic order and human purpose, our whole technology has still potentially a large part to play; but much of the riches of modern tecnhics will remain unusable until the organic functions and human purposes, rather than mechanical processes, dominate.”

Perhaps this means a return to a human scale — and a different understanding of being human than the one that comes from the metaphor of the machine, shaped by life in the machine city.

Kingsnorth notes that only 12 percent of the population lived in towns or cities in 1900, but by 2050 nearly 70% of humans will. This is a staggeringly fast cultural change that those of us who are born into the conclusion, where our ‘social imaginary’ is designed to reinforce the status quo and normalise it, will simply take as the natural way of things. But no, for Kingsnorth:

“A city is, at its heart, just such a ‘relentless collective assault’ on the way that humans have lived for 99 percent of their history; and, maybe more importantly, a collective assault on other forms of life. This is especially true of the modern megacity, with its tens of millions of inhabitants, which bears about as much resemblance to an ancient city as a Reaper drone does to a longbow. The sheer scale of the modern urban conglomeration is mind-boggling, and entirely irreversible.”

“A giant city is a kind of micro-empire: it cannot exist without enclosing and harvesting lands and peoples elsewhere to provide for its own growth. One of the great myths of the city is that we go there to individuate—to ‘find ourselves’. It might be more accurate to say that the city removes our agency, deskills us, and toys with us at its leisure. A city’s inhabitants are dependents: they have neither the space, the skills, the time nor the inclination to fend for themselves. A city dweller exists to serve the city.”

He digs into some Mumford, to articulate a vision — from Plato — of a ‘human scale’ city.

“As so often, this is a question of scale. Plato, according to Mumford, ‘limited the size of his ideal city to the number of citizens who might be addressed by a single voice’. Everyone should be within hailing distance of that voice in order to ensure human-scale living. Some ancient cities were indeed built on almost this scale, at least initially. There are towns, and city centres, across Europe and Asia today which are beautifully organised, stunning to look at and in some cases thrilling to visit or live in.”

“This is the modern Machine city: global in scale and ambition, bland, homogenised and empty at its heart. Plato’s ideal city, and the real cities of the pre-modern period, were a combination, sometimes uneasy, sometimes harmonious, of ambition and aim. They were religious centres, cultural hubs, marketplaces, dwelling places, loci of power. The twenty-first century city exists mainly for one purpose: profit. Everything that exists there, from schools to art galleries to concert halls to government buildings, is pointed towards this end. You can judge a culture, I think, by its tallest buildings; what it chooses to reach towards is a reflection of its soul and purpose. The tallest buildings in a modern city are not cathedrals, temples, or even palaces: they are skyscrapers, which are homes to banks, finance houses and global corporations.”

Some of the machine-church impulse is to compete with these skyscrapers — to be ‘just like’ the significant buildings in our city, and reclaim the space the cathedral tower once held in the skyline.

The possibility of the Plato-sized city is lost — fuelled, in part — by the car — but this does not mean we should not aim for ‘human scale’ communities within the city, resisting some of the impulses of the machine, if, indeed they are massaging us towards particular sub-human ends. We can create Plato-sized, human-scaled, churches. Only, the machine — and the car — work against us.

Kingsnorth also says:

“The pre-modern city and the contemporary metropolis are different not just in scale, but in essence. The city itself ‘becomes consumable, indeed expendable: the container must change as rapidly as its content. The latter imperative undermines a main function of the city as an agent of human continuity. The living memory of the city, which once bound together generations and centuries, disappears: its inhabitants live in a self-annihilating moment-to-moment continuum.”

This is the phenomenon Lewis described — both the annihilation of the things that make us human (limits because we are embodied and located in time and place) and the myth of the machine. That newness and innovation — so we consume more — has become our organising ‘myth’.

What if the city — and its architecture and patterns — don’t just exist to serve cars — our machines — but to form us into cogs that perpetuate the demands of the city itself; the machine? And what if our churches, as communities of formation, imitate the city — even down to our use of technologies — in ways that serve to form us to these same ends?

For many, the technological changes that have shaped modern cities (and houses) and modern life — and the modern church — seem inevitable and almost natural, and if not natural, ‘good’ — but, what if there is a sort of animating impulse behind the ‘machine’ as Kingsnorth describes it that is, at its heart, dehumanising — and, spiritually, a function of the ‘powers and principalities’ that seek to deform us, capitalising on greed; pushing us beyond our creaturely limits and so away from our creator where we want to be ‘like gods’ just like the Serpent promised in the Garden?

Look. This is a lot of words — but — useful, perhaps — and applicable to how churches have been planned and constructed around ‘machines’ and values of ‘the machine-as-entity’, without really doing the ‘human’ work. Here’s the immediate example Mumford gives:

“An organic approach will handle, with equal dexterity, but with greater freedom of choice, every kind of function: it will not automatically reject daylight in favour of a facile mechanical substitute, or fresh air, renovated by vegetation, for a purely mechanical system of modifying the air. But neither will it turn banks into frivolous glass-enclosed pleasure palaces, office building entrances into cathedrals, or churches into airport terminals. On the contrary, purpose and function will provide an organic criterion of form at every stage of the design process; and in the end this will produce, not merely an aesthetic variety and exuberance that are now almost unknown, but even mechanical economies that have been flouted by our compulsive overcommitment to the machine.”

Our compulsive overcommitment to the machine has shaped our cities, our lives, and our churches — in the next two posts I’ll pick up the way we have been massaged by the motorcar in our understanding of our self, and then track the way that the modern machine church — the megachurch — the church for the city — is historically the product of the car, to the extent that I have a theory that a church community will always grow to the size of its car park.

But, while you wait — and with these comments from Mumford about architectured transience that serves the machine… In a sermon series I posted up a while back, on ‘Being Human’, I wrote about the philosopher Marc Auge’s definition of ‘non-places’ — transient architecture with a standardised feel that people ‘move through’ rather than ‘belonging in’ — and about how the black-box church, designed for ‘artificial light’ and screens is a ‘non-place.’ In that sermon I used the example of how our church met in various ‘black boxes’ for our first five years — a theatre, and a rented megachurch — as ‘ideal spaces’ for the kind of service we were creating; and how our mothership painted its interior black and put up blackout curtains.

I think Mumford would say this is a function of a ‘machine’ approach to architecture that reveals our “compulsive overcommitment to the machine,” and that maybe an organic, human scaled approach built on counter formation — planting gardens and building houses in Babylon — is a pathway to resistance.

We’ll track this thread in a follow up post after first exploring the way the “auto” — the Greek word for self — “mobile” fuels a certain view of the self.

March 26, 2026 3 Comments

Mediating Machines

I’ve been trying to get the next instalment of my interactions with Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine finished and posted, but, like Alice, I find myself down several rabbit holes and with a document 10,000 words long. So. I’m serialising this next bit.

The machine church, as I’ve been describing it —runs like a well-oiled machine; or tries to — and works best when people fit into the machine like cogs who keep things turning over; or fuel; whose energy (and money) is used to keep the cogs turning.

But growing a church beyond ‘human scale’ — and a ‘local scale’ much like growing a city — requires machines; and this creates an interesting phenomenon where one’s participation in the church is mediated by forms of machinery in ways that are significant and serve to form our experiences and communities — but also go largely unnoticed. Machines and technology reshape the architecture of our homes, public spaces, and cities — and we don’t always notice, and for some of us the revolution happened before we were born. Charles Taylor talks about how our beliefs are a function of our ‘social imaginaries’ — the things we take for granted as part of our everyday life, including architecture. I’m suggesting here that machine church is mediated to us in ways that are a function of a ‘social imaginary’ provided for us by technologies we have embedded into modern life by virtue of ‘the machine’ and that have shaped church life in ‘machine ways’ without us noticing.

In my last post I began to describe the transition that happened while I was on staff at a machine church from aspiring megachurch to multisite church with ambitions for 200 campuses. This is, ultimately, a well-worn machine move from automobile to screen, or mechanical to digital that mirrors the kind of (r)evolution that Kingsnorth describes in his book, and that other thinkers — like Marshall McLuhan — anticipated.

The modern church is — regardless of shape, size, or philosophy — a product of mobilisation and specifically auto-mobilisation aided by the very real machine that drives us (or that we drive) to the location we gather. It’s significant that the ‘auto’ in automobile is the Greek word for ‘self’. The modern church in the western world will either be shaped ‘by the machine’ that shapes the West, or in resistance to “the machine,” and will have to navigate how it employs or relies on technology that ‘mediates’ our message along a spectrum of acceptance to resistance or refusal. Sometimes we will do multiple things at once, but at least knowing we’re doing them seems important.

Unless your church is either limited to one household, or people who gather travelling by foot, it is a product of extending our limits using a machine. It feels impossible to reverse this — and while I love the romantic idea of the ‘walkable city’ and the ‘walkable church’ (and don’t understand the way they’ve become polarised and loathed by the modern right, except that the modern right loves individualism and engines), they are (as we will unpack in subsequent posts) economically almost impossible to produce without significant disruption and expense.

Utopian ideals might pull us incrementally towards more human ends though (or destroy us, like most Utopian visions), but my goal is to at least ask questions and invite recognition of where we are being de-formed and how we might be re-formed or transformed by non-machine forces.

The machine church is not just ‘out there’ in some other church — this is true of the church I lead, and it just is a thing, and it has an impact — and there are many other physical and environmental factors geared up against human scale church that I’ll unpack subsequent to this post that mean there’s not a simple answer to de-couple from the machine and create an alternative — but unless we name what is happening, the massage of the machine continues unchecked. Marshall McLuhan, the ‘media ecologist’ who coined the phrase ‘the medium is the message’ also wrote ‘the medium is the massage’ — we don’t always notice how we are being pressed and manipulated by the forms and mediums and technologies we introduce into our ecosystems.

I want to zero in on two machines that shape the machine church experience — that are vital to it — the car and the screen — and suggest that if these technologies dictate how our communities are shaped and operate, this will form us in certain ways — and that while both technologies seek to collapse limits — especially time and space — they have, and will continue to, transform the habitat in which we form our habits, and the shape our relationships to place and people in ways that might reinforce, or harden, parts of our humanity that the Gospel seeks to soften and change.

My basic argument, that I’ll unpack across a few posts, goes like this:

  1. We live in, and our life and churches are shaped by what Charles Taylor described as the “age of mobilisation”.
  2. The age of mobilisation is a product of machines (like rail, cars and screens) and “the machine” (like an animating principle), which changes our ‘social imaginary’
  3. The megachurch is, historically, demonstrably a product of the automobile, and the ‘age of mobilisation’ as it involves consumer choice, and conceptually a product of ‘the machine’.
  4. The multisite church (and it’s ‘sister’ the ‘digital campus’) is a product of digital image technology, and a “machine church” heir to the megachurch designed to push past the limits imposed by physical ‘car’ space.
  5. Machine churches — whether mega, multisite, or ‘would be if we could be,’ feel the pull of machine technology to expand reach beyond limits, and ultimately become part of the machine paradigm — and come under its spell — as a result.
  6. Machine churches operate like cities not towns, villages, gardens, or families — they uproot and disrupt rather than establishing connection between people and place, creating a tendency towards what I will call the ‘westfieldification of church’.
  7. In the age of ‘surveillance capitalism’ and the production line, machine churches move towards a sort of ‘globalised’ standardisation and form consumers who become resources for the machine to harvest.
  8. Machine churches compete with each other (and all other churches) for consumers by ‘product differentiation’ — including available carparking space and digital output made for the ‘attention economy,’ and compete with the machine world for the attention of ‘not-yet-customers’ towards this end.
  9. Machine churches turn humans — both staff and volunteers — into ‘mechanical turks’ who serve and are ‘discipled’ through participation in the machine; whose ‘maturity’ is assessed on the basis of conformity and contribution.
  10. There are ‘economic factors’ of modern life caused by the machine that fragment and destroy organic, human scale life and community, and sometimes life in a machine world requires machinery, or radical restructuring. So, for example, housing prices and urban sprawl uproot families and communities geographically and maintaining relationship requires technological mediation (driving or calling).

Hopefully now that I’ve decided to chunk these up, they’ll come out a little faster. Happy to start engaging with the listed ideas above though if you want to enter the conversation earlier.

February 28, 2026 1 Comment

Resisting the ‘growth machine’ with human-scaled limits

The Machine church is geared — and iterated towards — perpetual growth; the ‘human scale’ church is an antidote that deliberately embraces limits to growth.

I plan to tell more of my own story as it relates to machine church in subsequent instalments — but to set the scene for part 2 I need to jump through the story from my first year ‘plugged in’ towards the last.

I want to be clear, too, and I will come back to this — that parts of life in this machine were exciting and some of its ambitions were virtuous. I want the kingdom of God to expand as people find life in Jesus and are united to him, and to his people, by God’s Spirit. I think the church is the means that the mission of the Gospel takes place and so I want the church to grow.

I would like it to grow in ways that are more like a tree or a forest, than like a computer network or machine or monopolising corporation or empire though; and for the growth to be natural and part of cultivating an ecology rather than overpowering and destructive to its surrounds (especially to other church communities). Part of the impulse of the machine, when it comes to growth, is that real growth only comes through the efforts and energy pulsing through the system that is ‘the machine,’ or networked to it, and not in more organic, sustainable and ‘small’ ways; the machine consumes and absorbs competition becomes totalising in part because of the competition for resources to fuel its growth.

I was part of the machine, fully plugged in and ‘complicit’ in perpetuating its growth (and the impact its growth had on humans, for good and for ill). I don’t write this to blame those engaged in the machine with me; or who still find themselves occupying similar positions in a community that has been through significant change since my decoupling from it. This is not an exercise in casting aspersions, but in self-reflecting. I wrote, or helped sharpen, many (though not all) of the words I quote below.

After I establish some of my own story, I’ll turn again to some material from Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine, and an earlier essay on bigness, to draw some parallels between his diagnosis of what is consuming and essentially strip-mining the western world (and the natural world) and a machine-like approach to church growth.

My experience with the machine began first with my recruitment to the machine; I was still a student at theological college (so was Robyn, my wife — that will become important in subsequent posts). We were invited to ‘dream big’ — to join a church where we would be part of a compelling vision; and where, ultimately, I would bring my background in Public Relations to help establish a presence on social media because that was strategic. There were some hiccups in the recruitment process that, again, I will cover in the future, but I began my time ‘officially’ as part of the machine church at our annual staff retreat.

These retreats were vital vision casting moments for a staff team, that over my time at the church ebbed and flowed in size (along with various budget crises) with a high point of approximately 30 staff. At its peak this included as many as six ordained Presbyterian ministers, spread across three campuses, a number of ministry specialists (in kids, youth, and small group ministries), executive and finance managers, support personnel, and a media team.

In the first retreat I was one of many new appointments brought on to support the ‘big vision’ adopted by the elders the previous year. The elders would eventually become a “board” (combined with our managers), a relative novelty in Presbyterian governance, and most of the ordained ministers would be asked not to attend board meetings ‘voluntarily’ (I’ll also write a subsequent post about this; one thing people have observed about large churches is that they encourage ‘fauxnerability’ from those in leadership; I’m going to coin the term ‘fakountability’ — fake accountability — which is vital for machines to throw off limits to growth).

At this retreat we were rallied to the cause — and it was exhilarating. I had come to Bible College two years earlier from a regional centre (Townsville), from a pretty thriving church. My previous experience in Brisbane had been at a large suburban church that was efficiently and effectively engineered (by my father) around clear preaching of the word and a compelling, no-nonsense model of church that produced vitality and steady growth coupled with church planting and revitalisation partnerships with surrounding churches. There are machine-like tendencies in my DNA.

When we arrived in Brisbane as college students, my wife and I found ourselves ministering as students in a small suburban church within the geographic catchment of my former church that was struggling to grow to sustainability despite the faithful energy and effort poured in by the minister, his wife, and a faithful congregation supportive of the church’s mission. It had been a good two years experiencing ministry in a small suburban context, but I was ready to be excited. Before college my career was public relations, and this was in the heady early days of social media; before enshittification and the rampant growth of surveillance capitalism. I genuinely believed that social media could be harnessed for the Gospel — I even wrote articles on this site, and gave guest talks and eventually lectures at the Theological college I attended to that end. I no longer believe social media is an effective tool for evangelism; it is an effective tool for keeping people plugged in to a machine that is designed to deform and strip-mine their data by cultivating habits of attention that use dark patterns. And what you win people with, you win them to…

At this retreat we were, as I say, encouraged to ‘dream big’ — to imagine our church of 600ish as a church of 2,000 — and do everything ‘to that end’ — or, even, as though we were already there; there was a ‘build it and they will come’ mentality. By the next year’s team retreat we were planning to start a 4th Sunday service at the one location. The catch was, we encouraged members aka ‘ministry partners’ to attend twice on a Sunday; once to be served and once to serve — and we counted them twice. The data was always inflated; we were maybe never quite as big as we told ourselves (or others).

The ‘position paper’ adopted by the church leadership in 2011 told “Our Story” in the following paragraph:

“By God’s grace, we are a growing church and part of a growing mission. This growth is testimony to God‘s gracious provision across many years. From the decision to plant in the 1940s, to the decision to relocate in the 1990s, God has been at work growing his church. He has also been at work granting wisdom and strength to make the changes needed to keep promoting the unchanging gospel of Jesus and passing it on to the next generation. This is our gospel heritage. And by God‘s grace we are again growing and considering the changes involved in growing our gospel mission.”

That’s six uses of the words ‘growing’ and growth in one paragraph. That’s what we were about — the vision was to meet our “growth trajectory” which was taking us towards being a church of “2000 people” as a “medium-term rather than a long-term possibility.”

Conversations started, at this point, about what the actual limit to church size on our 15 hectare suburban block was with a smart redevelopment of a facility that was only around 12 years old…

One of our catch-cries, I think at every retreat I remember, was to refer to 1 Corinthians 9 and the idea that we were to become “all things to all people” — that we should use whatever means possible to win as many people as possible to Jesus. Our chosen ‘means’ at least for the first two team retreats, was to be a “large church,” dare I say, a “mega church” — given one definition of a “megachurch” is a church of 2,000 people or more.

By the second team retreat — and after a year where I was on the team and often in the room where it happens, even as a student — we had embraced a ‘2020 Vision’ to “Reach the city and reach the world;” complete with a pretty beautifully produced vision video (so well written and produced, in fact, that a large Anglican church in the hills district of Sydney copied it pretty much verbatim for their own 2020 vision — and when I discovered this and made a bit of a fuss online, this fuss turned out to be verboten because we mega churches like to stick together and pat each other’s backs).

By my third team retreat we had shifted our goalposts (and our focus) to being a multisite church gearing up our ‘infrastructure’ so we could be a church with 200 campuses, or churches signing up for our resources — because, why limit ourselves? That’s not a typo. We were genuinely invited to dream big; to choose the right suite of technologies and techniques to grow big or go home.

Again. Intoxicating — even if back then it already seemed a bit hyperbolic.

Much like in the realm of technology, this pivot from mega- to multisite church involved a shift in thinking towards digital networks not just physical transport and logistics (I’ll unpack more on this below). In 2013, we added a media team — 3 video producers and a graphic designer — to ‘reach the world’ by producing content to broadcast online (including our church services). The conversation around my ongoing place in the team (I was still a student) was that I could be the media/online pastor generating articles and some scripts to pump out; PR for Jesus. Digital reach removed friction (including the friction of face to face human relationships) and maximised bang for buck.

The whole point was removing limits for the sake of the Gospel; to create efficiencies and to avoid the pitfalls of other networks (like denominations) ,which got in the way. I was now going to be the campus pastor of a brand new and shiny city campus — we would spend the money from the sale of an inherited church property in the same ‘patch’ of Brisbane to fund the start up. We launched our first service at the Queensland Theatre Company in 2014.

The idea was you should engineer things as you built them in order for them to scale up rapidly and be easily replicable; you would make better decisions in the beginning; you staff for growth — to be ready to meet the next stage or two stages ahead so that you are always able to expand.

Later down the track, after some multisite misfiring, we spent a day with a multisite consultant from the U.S. He described a variety of multisite models from a denomination, to a network, to a franchise (there were a few other stops along the spectrum). The franchise, he said, was the most efficient. In the U.S, according to this guy, there were churches who had warehouses with trucks fully loaded with the equipment needed to set up a campus, just ready to roll out and set up. Turn on the lights. Much like a fast food franchise leverages the standardisation of the ‘non-place’ so that every location feels the same. This was, for some in our leadership, the dream. It wasn’t mine — and that’s one of the points where the wheels started to fall off. I did not believe in standardisation — the urban context our church operated in, with a community of people gathered by affinity from across greater Brisbane was not the same as the suburban context where our mothership had a large building, and an established ongoing presence in the area that stretched back decades (and a very very big carpark).

Our manual for thinking about growth and the structures to accommodate it — flagged right from the first vision document approved by the leadership in 2011 — was Tim Keller’s paper ‘Leadership and Church Size Dynamics: How Strategy Changes with Growth’ published in 2006. What Keller described; we prescribed and attempted to systematise. It’s an interesting paper — and particularly interesting to read after Keller’s retirement from Redeemer; where the megachurch that had gatherered around his leadership became a decentralised into a ‘family network’ of autonomous churches (a change announced in 2014).

“One decision we have made that encourages me is that Redeemer will become a family of congregations, not one centralised mega-church.”

In the church size paper, Keller wrote:

“Every church has a culture that goes with its size and which must be accepted. Most people tend to prefer a certain size culture, and unfortunately, many give their favourite size culture a moral status and treat other size categories as spiritually and morally inferior. They may insist that the only biblical way to do church is to practice a certain size culture despite the fact that the congregation they attend is much too big or too small to fit that culture.”

Keller ultimately lays out various aspects of ministry across different sizes of church, but in his discussion before the table he makes the following point:

“…the larger the church, the more a distinctive vision becomes important to its members. The reason for being in a smaller church is relationships. The reason for putting up with all the changes and difficulties of a larger church is to get mission done. People join a larger church because of the vision—so the particular mission needs to be clear. The larger the church, the more it develops its own mission outreach rather than supporting already existing programs. Smaller churches tend to support denominational mission causes and contribute to existing parachurch ministries. Leaders and members of larger churches feel more personally accountable to God for the kingdom mandate and seek to either start their own mission ministries or to form partnerships in which there is more direct accountability of the mission agency to the church. Consequently, the larger the church, the more its lay leaders need to be screened for agreement on vision and philosophy of ministry, not simply for doctrinal and moral standards.”

I would say, rather, that the larger the church the more standardised the vision and execution become across other churches of the same size — vision becomes more motherhood and generic; able to be photocopied — or with vision videos that are able to be plagiarised — because the vision simply becomes to grow; to keep pushing beyond limits — and expanding — through technique, as new members are folded in like cogs in the machine — as the mission of the Gospel becomes more and more aligned with the ‘mission of this church’ — and faithful participation in that mission as disciples becomes faithful service to a philosophy of ministry and vision.

We tabulated the Church Size dynamics paper and used this table as a kind of guideline for where our campuses were at in the matrix. We also struggled to map multisite realities of centralised resources and production values with ‘house church’ vibes.

The machine, by its nature, standardises. The machine church has a standard model for blasting beyond limits that it borrows from the corporate world — the world of the machine — for reasons that are historical and ecological; a product of the technologies that birthed the possibilities for growth via the eradication of limits.

Keller’s paper, and this quote from Larry Osborne’s Sticky Teams were referred to in most documents about our trajectory from here on in.

“Never forget, growth changes everything. A storefront church, a midsized church, a large church, and a megachurch aren‘t simply bigger versions of the same thing. They are completely different animals. They have little in common, especially relationally, organisationally and structurally. It‘s not that one is better than the other. It‘s just that they‘re different. Leadership teams that fail to recognise or adapt to these differences inevitably experience unnecessary conflict or shrink back to a congregational size that best fits the structures and patterns they cling to.”

The impact of this Church Size Dynamics paper being applied to our vision to be a ‘mega church’ was that we were attempting to operate as a ‘very large church’ while arguably a network comprising of a house church, a small church and a medium church. And we were trying to fund the infrastructure of a very large church from this congregation; and then, increasingly, from external sources — whether a user pays subscription model to our resources, or via corporate donors from the big end of town who I speculate may have moved on to fund other similar church planting and resourcing networks and initiatives with similar reach-shaped visions.

I think it’s possible that there actually is a size and a structure where a community is ‘a church,’ and a size where a community must embrace the machine and distorts to being ‘no longer a church’; becoming subject to different technologies and techniques in order to continue to grow by overcoming limits. I don’t think church size is spiritually neutral because it seems to me that to become certain sizes one must embrace methodologies no longer consistent with the nature of a human community, choosing instead to become ‘mechanical’ in nature. Where any person draws the line will be arbitrary — some say more than one service in one location is actually ‘more than one church,’ others might say ‘multisite church’ is a contradiction, for mine, provocatively, my suggestion is that this size could be described as a “human scale church,” with all the human relationships and accountability structures and community and collaboration that involves. For various reasons, my inclination is to see this aligning with the ‘small church,’ which caps out at 200 people. Maybe I’m clinging to a personal preference or moralising my ‘favourite’ size. You can decide.

The thing about a vision so big is, well, its bigness — it removes any limits around what this particular local church in its particular locality might justify as its local mission and replaces ‘local’ with ‘growing’ and ‘reaching.’  

To be fair, locality is an interesting concept when it comes to the modern city and the modern church and the myriad choices available to any Christian living in a city to find a community — does one look for church community where one lives, works, or plays? Whatever church we attend is a choice. This is actually relatively historically novel; and aided by technological and social change.

We live in a world described by Charles Taylor as being shaped by the ‘age of mobilisation’ — where we are no longer pinned down in one geographic location for life (thanks to both social mobility enabled by political and social revolution, and technologies like the automobile and aeroplane), or in one vocation (thanks to technological, industrial, and digital revolutions that broaden the career options available and where work happens) — and the ‘age of authenticity’ where we each cultivate our presence in the world chasing our own ‘expression of self’ based especially on consumer choice and performance (also aided by technologies).

Taylor wrote A Secular Age and Sources of the Self after the internet had occurred, but in the very early days of social media and when Artificial Intelligence was the province of science fiction storytelling. The implications for church membership of mobilisation and authenticity (and post-protestant revolution which created brand ‘choice’ or what Taylor called ‘the nova’) is that church is a choice that individuals make and we make them for individual reasons often disconnected from geography and more aligned with affinity to various other things — people, theological vision, tradition, aesthetic — this consumer choice is fuelled by technology; and the mega church is a creation of technology — and, I would say, of the ‘machine’ as defined by Paul Kingsnorth and others.

This isn’t to say that house churches or small churches can’t be ‘machine’-shaped; of course they can; this is our prevailing culture. I’m seeking, rather, to make the case that big-to-mega churches are necessarily machine-driven, mechanistic or mechanical — relying on technology and technique and shaped by the prevailing conditions of the world around us with a desire to eradicate limits and extract resources in the name of perpetual growth.

At this point, I want to throw in a refresh of Paul Kingsnorth’s ‘machine’ definition, and foreshadow here that I’ll land trying to articulate ‘human scale’ church as an antithesis to machine church (whether that’s small, medium, large or mega-).

In my last post I highlighted a quote from Against The Machine where Kingsnorth wrote “The Machine manifests today as an intersection of money power, state power and increasingly coercive and manipulative technologies, which constitute an ongoing war against roots and against limits. Its momentum is always forward, and it will not stop until it has conquered and transformed the world.”

Grow. Growth. Growing. Growth. Growing. Growing. Reach the city, reach the world.

I also quoted this bit: “The ethos of the Machine is expansion, the busting of limits and the consumption of whatever can be sold to us to meet the ‘needs’ of the individual self which the Machine constructed for us in the first place.”

Our machine church with its emphasis on ’52 Excellent Sundays’ where one could receive ‘transcendent worship experiences’ (no sub-par musicians on stage thanks), and TED style sermons with original graphics and companion videos produced on cutting edge video technology was competing with every other church in our geographic pool to attract ‘ministry partners’ who would give their time and become ‘giving units’ “opening their hearts” to Jesus and then “opening their wallets” because “soft hearts give hard.”

Kingsnorth sees the ‘west’ as inextricably linked to ‘the machine’ such that to engage in ‘western’ practices uncritically is to participate in the machine. Its values are growth and profits and expending profits to secure more growth.

“‘The West’ has become an idol; some kind of static image of a past that maybe once was but is now inhabited by a new force: the Machine. ‘The West’ today thinks in numbers and words, but can’t write poetry to save its life. ‘The West’ is the kingdom of Mammon. ‘The West’ eats the world, and eats itself, that it may continue to ‘grow’. ‘The West’ knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. ‘The West’ is exhausted and empty.”

We were an extraction machine — and this included extracting the time, money and talents of the staff. At one point in a giving crisis, staff giving was being monitored, and senior staff (including me) — most of us renting as close as possible to church at great cost (percentage of our income), had a face to face meeting with the executive team (all a generation older, owning their own homes) and told to tithe our salaries, and to stop visibly spending money on things like fast food (because optics mattered). And, through technology and technique we convinced others to invest in the machine; to invest in the machine. Page 2 of one of our vision documents, titled “Investing in the Next Generation” used the word “invest” 12 times on a single page.

A few pages later the document said:

“We need to invest in people, in the precious people God is bringing to us. We need to invest in the next generation of believers. We need to invest in the people God is raising up from among us to send out as the next generation of labourers in his harvest. In all of this, one more pressing need is very clear. High level management is essential to maximize all our other ministry investments.”

We need to invest in getting our techniques right — and we are the vehicle for this mission. This rhetoric would amp up in subsequent years. People giving ‘hard’ to perpetuate the machine; invited to do so because of the urgent imperative of the Gospel — but the ends of the Gospel were totally identified with expanding our reach and growing beyond limits; even if people were chewed up in the process. Soft hearts gave hard.

I would note at this point, that a feature of machine church — with its acknowledgment that people will leave as you grow — crassly expressed by Mark Driscoll as ‘bodies under the bus’ — is burnout and exhaustion. Once resources are extracted from ‘ministry partners’ because in the parlance of pokie machines they have ‘played to extinction’ they are replaced by newer models and discarded. It is instructive that in a quick survey of vision documents from machine church over the four year period described above, around 80% of the members and staff named in the document are no longer employed by or attending the church.

The problem with the machine when it meets church is that it’s more like Moloch than the one who says “come to me those who are weary and burdened and I will give you rest.” Moloch as Kingsnorth describes it (following the beat poet Ginsberg’s Howl).

“What Moloch wants—Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks—is sacrifice. We must sacrifice ourselves and our children to the robot apartments and stunned governments.”

Kingsnorth writes, at some length, about the relationship between the machine and spirituality (and worship). One issue he identifies is that when we embrace the mediums and methods of the machine — the machine forms us (the medium is the message, thanks McLuhan), and it forms us in its likeness and machinations — not as humans, but so that we are extracted and exhausted.

“In a world in which this Machine consciousness is propagated to us daily through digital technology each time we gaze at a screen, the irrational, illogical world of beauty, wild nature and spiritual truth becomes literally impossible for us to experience, for it cannot be quantified—and therefore doesn’t exist.”

He describes our modern experience in terms similar to Taylor’s, so we westerners, entranced by the machine are “Spiritual but not religious, individualistic on the surface yet conformed beneath to the needs of the Machine, spiritually hungry but devoid of guidance or direction, committed to total self-expression yet unsure who or what we even are, suspicious of any limits to all these enslaving ‘freedoms’: this is our world. One that celebrates the free play of individual desire, that spiritualises the individualistic war on limits, and centres and celebrates the use of technology to win that war—in our bodies as well as the world.’”

We were a church that sought to harness technology and technique — the machine — in our models — mega, multisite, and ‘digital producer’ — breaking limits to win a war; but as soon as we fought this way we were losing.

Though he has converted to Christianity in part as a result of observing the consuming power of the machine, and how the cross of Jesus is its antidote, Kingsnorth notices the way Christianity has been co-opted.

“I learned from that experience that my belief in the profanity of technology is not widely shared. While there have been astute religious critics of the Machine—Wendell Berry, Ivan Illich, Jacques Ellul and Philip Sherrard have all made appearances in this book—it appears that many spiritual leaders and thinkers are as swept up in the Machine’s propaganda system as anyone else. They have bought into what we might call the Myth of Neutral Technology, a subset of the Myth of Progress… On and on it goes: the gushing, uncritical embrace of the Machine, even in the heart of the temple. The blind worship of idols, and the failure to see what stands behind them. Someone once reminded us that a man cannot serve two masters, but then, what did he know?”

In my next post I’ll explore the way the mega church — and the idea of perpetual church growth — the blasting of limits — is a product, directly, not just philosophically, of the machine (first the ‘automobile’) — and tease out some implications.

But here I want to nod towards the beginnings of Kingsnorth’s proposed solution; around the idea of embracing limits — and dip back into an older essay of his to introduce the idea of ‘human scale’ church.

Perhaps the first step of resisting the machine — following Kingsnorth — is to refuse to see (or describe) things that are not machines as mechanical; to cultivate a different imagination — and especially to see organisms and communities as organic rather than technologies to systematise or master; to resist dehumanising language (‘giving units’) and, like the good shepherd, know each sheep by name. Kingsnorth says:

“Perhaps central to this is an effort to see the world as an organism rather than a mechanism, and then to express it that way, through art, through creativity, through writing, through our conversations. The last part is the hardest, very often, but maybe the most important too. If we refuse to see the world or its inhabitants as machines, if we are suspicious of rationalisations and dogmatic insistence and easy answers and false divisions, even for a moment, then we are making a start.”

One of the moments in the life of our church where the machine took over was a time where I had not been living within my own limits — or boundaries — in pastoral care; all things to all people became a mantra not just for evangelistic technique but for constant availability to offer assistance of any manner; fuelled by being constantly contactable. This was bad and my family suffered, I suffered, and the people I cared for suffered — but the solution, proferred by the machine, was to essentially remove me from the same sort of ‘face to face’ contact with people; to move me across Keller’s grid, making me less accessible — behaving less like a ‘pastor sized church’ and more like a ‘big church’ where I led leaders. Overnight the vibe in our community shifted. People lost trust in my love and leadership — not simply in my competency (I am quite happy to admit that I wasn’t competently approaching the task). Instead of a human scaled solution we applied a variety of techniques; people were not people with names and stories, but cases to be managed by teams whose interactions were charted in a ‘customer relationship’ database.

Subsequently he writes:

“The Machine seems a Behemoth, a Leviathan, and it is. But it always manifests its own power at human scale, and that is the scale at which we must take its measure. Jacques Ellul once put it like this: We must not think about Man, but of my neighbour Mario… An anti-Machine politics, it seems to me, must spring from this older, grounded tradition. It should operate at the human scale, and not at the scale on which ideology operates…. A reactionary radicalism, its face set against Progress Theology, which aims to defend or build a moral economy at the human scale, which rejects the atomised individualism of the liberal era and understands that materialism as a worldview has failed us.”

I believe there is a kind of church that operates at this human scale; and that part of this is a differentiated approach to growth. My prayer is that God’s kingdom might grow; that many people might join the Lord of the harvest in fruitful life; experiencing the love of God for eternity — but this growth does not have to be subject to my control, or a ‘machine’ we build in our local church; it does not have to depend on technology or technique. It may come from embracing limits and encouraging others to embrace limits and to expand and duplicate in sustainable ways less reliant on technology, technique, and exhausting the human resources who are united to us by God’s Spirit as we act as the body of Christ together. It might emphasise rest and resistance not just output and productivity. It might take steps to not become big — to not act sizes above the present in order to ‘break through barriers’ and ‘reach more people’ but to steward the gifts and the environment we cultivate together in sustainable patterns that duplicate and give life, rather than joining the mechanical extraction of the natural and human environment that typifies the machine — strip mining all other local churches in the area to fuel your own vision and to add cogs to an ever-more-complex production for people to consume as they are consumed.

Church at a human scale actively resists ‘bigness.’ That’s counter-intuitive, I think, but essential. Before Against The Machine, Kingsnorth published a collection of essays Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist. This included his essay ‘A Crisis of Bigness,’ in which he observed the failure of nations and systems that go beyond their capacity to operate well and so turn towards staying alive as an alternative to collapse. His thesis, following the work of Leopold Kohr who wrote The Breakdown of Nations in 1957, was that “wherever something is wrong, something is too big.” Kingsnorth asked, “what if big ideas are part of the problem? What if, in fact, the problem is bigness itself?”

Reading back over old vision documents from our machine church I ask myself the same question. Kohr argued that “small states, small nations and small economies are more peaceful, more prosperous and more creative than great powers or superstates,” I wonder if this is true of small churches?

“Socialism, capitalism, democracy, monarchy – all could work well on what he called ‘the human scale’: a scale at which people could play a part in the systems that governed their lives. But once scaled up to the level of modern states, all systems became oppressors.”

I wonder if this is true of megachurches, where, according to Keller, power centralises in the hands of the senior leadership (away from the congregation), and participation in the hands of employees, as growth happens (attendees consume and feed the machine).  

“Kohr demonstrated that when people have too much power, under any system or none, they abuse it.”

This seems true of the countless stories of abusive megachurch leadership we read almost daily. Many of my own reflections on my experience were shaped by having trauma responses while listening to The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill.

For Kohr, “The task, therefore, was to limit the amount of power that any individual, organisation or government could get its hands on. The solution to the world’s problems was not more unity but more division.”

“To understand the sparky, prophetic power of Kohr’s vision, you need to read The Breakdown of Nations. Some of it will create shivers of recognition. Bigness, predicted Kohr, could lead only to more bigness, for ‘whatever outgrows certain limits begins to suffer from the irrepressible problem of unmanageable proportions’. Beyond those limits it was forced to accumulate more power in order to manage the power it already had. Growth would become cancerous and unstoppable, until there was only one possible endpoint: collapse. We have now reached the point that Kohr warned about over half a century ago: the point where ‘instead of growth serving life, life must now serve growth, perverting the very purpose of existence’. Kohr’s ‘crisis of bigness’ is upon us and, true to form, we are scrabbling to tackle it with more of the same: closer fiscal unions, tighter global governance, geoengineering schemes, more economic growth. Big, it seems, is as beautiful as ever to those who have the unenviable task of keeping the growth machine going.”

In my experience these words apply as much to churches as they do to nations.

I don’t want to keep growth machines growing any more — I would love to see more human-scale churches springing up to produce sustainable, life-giving communities as they embrace limits.

January 27, 2026 5 Comments

Raging against the ‘Machine Church’

I want to start this little mini-series by starting to tease out the idea of ‘machine church’ — and the ‘machine’ as I’m going to describe it, with Paul Kingsnorth as my conversation partner. One of the fundamental ideas behind machine church is the inexhaustible inexorable desire to grow beyond limits, rather than receive and embrace them as creaturely gift; the other main aspect, probably (though there are many components) is the reduction of all things to technology and technique (ala Jacques Ellul’s Technological Society). I’m mostly going to unpack the idea of growth beyond limits being the essence of the ‘machine’ in this post, and will pick up the technology/technique line later.

I don’t want to be Don Quixote tilting at a straw windmill here either, so, through these posts, I’m going to ground these reflections in my own experiences of machine church; which lead me to observe the same fundamentals operating in other churches, systems, and church growth systems.

Paul Kingsnorth’s Against The Machine opens with this line from Wendell Berry.

“It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.”

If he — and Berry — are right in their prophetic/poetic assessment of the modern age, it shouldn’t surprise us to find this tendency at work in the construction of Christian communities as a missiological technique or discipleship strategy — it’s simply an outworking of an anthropology (and perhaps an eschatology).

Kingsnorth also describes — with a dose of Tolkien — the perspective one committed to creatureliness of a certain type might bring to the present moment.

“This world, you can see, is on the way out, if it is not already long gone. The one that is manifesting to replace it is a left-brain paradise, all straight lines and concrete car parks where the corn exchange used to be. The future is STEM and chatbots and cashless parking meters and economic growth and asteroid mining forever and ever. There is no arguing with it. You can feel the great craters that it makes in the world, you can feel what is being tarmacked and neatened and rationalised into oblivion, and the depth of what is leaving, but you cannot explain or justify it in the terms which are now the terms we live by. You just know that something is wrong.”

I’ve written, once upon a time (in 2018 even), about how STEM being the basis of human formation is — to my mind — more dangerous in public schools than sexuality education because it trains a certain sort of participation in the machinery of the economy, to fuel perpetual consumption; so it’s fair to say I resonated with this description (while also, admittedly, often loving being a cog in the consumer machine and the convenience of Amazon’s next day delivery service — a product of its vast magical logistical empire, complex global supply chains, and machine-human hybrid where workers are digitally monitored by wearable tech, and codes and machines augment their productivity).

I know of a church, by the by, that realised it could track an interesting stat — either newcomers or new devices — by observing how many unique/new MAC addresses pinged its router during a Sunday service. Big data.

Kingsnorth describes the machine ‘uprooting’ people from traditions (including religious traditions) and place into a kind of global uniformity, particularly expressed in urban life — those one might, following Marc Auge — describe as ‘non-places’ at a metropolitan level (here’s a sermon from my ‘Being Human’ series exploring how church spaces that are basically black boxes designed for artificial light, smoke machines, and video projection, have become non-places, this is a kind of ‘uprooting’ — the antithesis would be, for example, the rootedness of the Ethiopian Church Forest — that’s an old article where I interact with some older work from Paul Kingsnorth).

At some point in my time at machine church the auditorium at our mothership was painted black. Voices who complained about no longer being able to see one another, or the pages of their paper Bibles were told they would be able to better see the stage and the screen. The goal of this design change was to make Sundays more excellent and the media — on screen and on stage — easier to attend to, and more compelling by contrast. The campus I pastored already met in a black box — first a rented black box theatre, and then a Pentecostal warehouse conversion with an excellent plug and play AV setup with more screens than we could figure out how to use.

Here’s Kingsnorth on the uprooting process:

“We could simply call this process modernity, which is not a time period so much as a story we tell ourselves. But I prefer to call it the Machine, because a machine—as the poets showed me—is what it feels like. This process, which has been going on for centuries, of uprooting us from nature, culture and God, leads us into a mass society, controlled by and for technology, in which we have been on course to become, since at the least the Industrial Revolution, mere cogs in a giant mechanism that we have no control over.”

Kingsnorth talks about the impact of the machine on the architecture of the city; describing a movement from cities designed for ‘human scale living’ where everyone could be addressed by a single voice, to global cities. The idea of a ‘human scale’ church is one I’ll pick up in a future post.

“This is the modern Machine city: global in scale and ambition, bland, homogenised and empty at its heart. Plato’s ideal city, and the real cities of the pre-modern period, were a combination, sometimes uneasy, sometimes harmonious, of ambition and aim. They were religious centres, cultural hubs, marketplaces, dwelling places, loci of power. The twenty-first century city exists mainly for one purpose: profit. Everything that exists there, from schools to art galleries to concert halls to government buildings, is pointed towards this end.”

The goal of the machine is growth — unfettered growth — not to serve its users (who, Matrix style, become its fuel), but its owners — maximising profits, or growth, or bums on seats consuming and paying and spreading your content; probably, in machine church — ‘digital content’ served up on screen corporately, and on your individual pieces of glass through the week. Kingsnorth again:

“This ‘growth’ is the overriding purpose of the ‘global economy’ which the Machine has built: everything else is of secondary concern. The growth has no specific aim and no end in sight, and can always be justified by pointing to problems—poverty, environmental degradation—which were in many cases caused by the growth, but which can now only be solved by more of it. It is facilitated by the production and consumption of ‘goods and services’, the desire (or ‘need’) for which has been manufactured by vast marketing and advertising concerns whose best minds are trained in the essence of psychological manipulation.”

In 2023 I wrote a piece with CPX, also published in Eureka Street, looking at the mechanics of poker machines and how necessary limits are in the design of machines. There’s a thought experiment about the need for limits in the tech-philosophy world, the Paperclip Maximiser Machine (originally from this essay) — this artificially intelligent machine exists with the sole goal to ‘maximise the number of paperclips’; and sets about converting all of material reality into paperclips — ultimately including human bodies. Poker machines, like many other tools of capitalism, are designed to ‘maximise profits’ — in industry parlance, to have users ‘play to extinction.’ This is the machine impulse, and the impulse of the forces Kingsnorth describes.

He introduces Allen Ginsberg’s poem Howl, which compares the consuming power of the machine to Moloch, the devouring pagan god of the Ancient Near East (I’ve used this same poem in an AI talk/lecture thing that I gave at an ISCAST conference a few years ago; I probably should turn that into a post at some point).

The payoff for Kingsnorth, later in his book, is that he sees dark spiritual forces — powers — animating the machine; the kind the Bible might name as Molek (Moloch) and Mammon. And, like the machine Moloch of Howl, or the 1927 silent film Metropolis (that’s the mechanical god from that movie at the top of this post), this profit maximising machine bucks against limits and seeks to devour all it can to serve its ends.

“The Machine manifests today as an intersection of money power, state power and increasingly coercive and manipulative technologies, which constitute an ongoing war against roots and against limits. Its momentum is always forward, and it will not stop until it has conquered and transformed the world. To do that, it must raze or transmute many older and less measurable things: rooted human communities, wild nature, human nature, human freedom, beauty, faith and the many deeper values which we all adhere to in some way or another but find difficult to describe or even to defend. Its modus operandi is the abolition of all borders, boundaries, categories, essences and truths: the uprooting of all previous ways of living in the name of pure individualism and perfect subjectivity. Its endgame is the replacement of nature with technology, in order to facilitate total human control over a totally human world.”

In 2016, when Telstra was running it’s ‘communication technology is magical’ campaign, I read (and wrote about) a book by a technologist, David Rose, Enchanted Objects, he described a kind of ‘machine’ world.

“I HAVE A recurring nightmare. It is years into the future. All the wonderful everyday objects we once treasured have disappeared, gobbled up by an unstoppable interface: a slim slab of black glass. Books, calculators, clocks, compasses, maps, musical instruments, pencils, and paintbrushes, all are gone. The artifacts, tools, toys, and appliances we love and rely on today have converged into this slice of shiny glass, its face filled with tiny, inscrutable icons that now define and control our lives. In my nightmare the landscape beyond the slab is barren. Desks are decluttered and paperless. Pens are nowhere to be found. We no longer carry wallets or keys or wear watches. Heirloom objects have been digitized and then atomized. Framed photos, sports trophies, lovely cameras with leather straps, creased maps, spinning globes and compasses, even binoculars and books—the signifiers of our past and triggers of our memory—have been consumed by the cold glass interface and blinking search field. Future life looks like a Dwell magazine photo shoot. Rectilinear spaces, devoid of people. No furniture. No objects. Just hard, intersecting planes—Corbusier’s Utopia. The lack of objects has had an icy effect on us. Human relationships, too, have become more transactional, sharply punctuated, thin and curt. Less nostalgic. Fewer objects exist to trigger storytelling—no old photo albums or clumsy watercolors made while traveling someplace in the Caribbean. Marc Andreessen, the inventor of the Netscape browser, said, “Software is eating the world.” Smartphones are the pixelated plates where software dines.”

His solution was that rather than ubiquitous black glass and code trying to fill every inch of space, we should harness technology’s magical power by imbuing everyday objects with ‘magical’ properties but in a way that contained (or constrained) the magic within physical limits. He suggested pill boxes that glow when medication needs to be taken (like Bilbo’s sword), or ‘portal wardrobes’ sitting in the homes of extended families across the globe that glowed when a motion sensor across the world revealed the proximity of a family member so you could open the door and chat. He viewed this as an alternative to a world of ‘black glass’ — the black mirror — wall to wall ‘smart’ screens.

There was a conversation I had, while working at machine church, about the prospect of people waking up to start the day staring into a smart mirror that both monitored their dental hygiene and served up a daily devotion — content we could produce — including video snippets from sermons; to maximise our ‘reach’ and the integration of our content into the daily life of our followers. The desire to coat the world in black glass — technology — to have us always attentive to screens that can sell us more stuff and harvest our attention — this is both the warped eschatology of Wall-E or Infinite Jest, and the maximising desire of the surveillance capitalism algorithmic machine. But it, too, is the impulse of the machine to fill all space and to maximise the harvest.

There’s a certain type of thinking that turns the content of the Gospel into a thing — data — to be consumed and believed (and perhaps eventually embodied), something reducible to a series of 0s and 1s — that aims to reduce friction in the transmission of that information and to embrace any possible mediums — without question — so long as they are available and effective.

This reduces ministry, mission, discipleship, teaching, and pastoring to technical issues; a matter of technique, to be amplified by available technology.

Sermons become TED Talks — with imagery and definitely no notes — to be filmed and chopped up into social media highlights, or podcasted around the globe with fancy top-and-tails inviting people to give more or spread the reach — but no rooted, relational, context or connection between speaker and audience. Why shouldn’t they be written by a Chat bot, or delivered by one in virtual reality? Really.

Discipleship becomes ‘serving the machinery’ of the Sunday production, or the extension of the content throughout a network, and being ‘fed’ by consuming more of the product.

Questions about whether the media undermine the message are not asked, or not welcomed. Growth and efficacy — or ‘impact’ — are the measure of faithfulness. This thinking comes from the machine, and serves the machine — embedding it into spheres of human life — communities and spiritual practices — where it should least naturally gain a foothold.

Anyway, back to Kingsnorth — his take is that the ‘machine’ is now so embedded in our physical environment and our psyche that we treat it as natural — there’s a fantastic essay by Neil Postman titled ‘Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change’ where — in 1998 — he talked about the way technology aims to be ‘mythic’ — to make us think we ‘can’t live without it’ — that it’s part of the natural order; that progress is inevitable and via the mechanisms dictated to us by the workings of our machines. But the machine isn’t natural — it is disruptive.

We do, by our nature, imagine, invent and create tools and technologies. Tolkien’s neat model for thinking about when we do this humanly, as bearers of the divine image, was to create a distinction between sub-creation — making in the image of the maker (like elves) — and a kind of powerful de-creation at the heart of the machinery impulses of Mordor. In a letter to Milton Waldman, who he hoped might publish his books, Tolkien wrote about the sub-creator’s tendency to fall; to try to protect our own creations from the will of the creator, and how this gives rise to ‘the machine’:

“He will rebel against the laws of the Creator — especially against mortality. Both of these (alone or together) will lead to the desire for Power, for making the will more quickly effective — and so to the Machine (or Magic). By the last I intend all use of external plans or devices (apparatus) instead of the development of inherent inner powers or talents – or even the use of these talents with the corrupted motive of dominating: bulldozing the real world, or coercing other wills. The Machine is our more obvious modern form though more closely related to Magic than is usually recognised.”

C.S Lewis, in his first public lecture at Cambridge, recognised the way the machine had coded itself into our imagination and changed our stories — disenchanting them so that the imaginative gap, or conception of the world, between Egypt and Jane Austen was smaller than the gap between Jane Austen and us. Our imaginations have been mechanised — not just in our stories, but in how we perceive and interact with the world, and ‘progress.’ So, Kingsnorth says:

“The values of that Machine are now so ubiquitous that we treat them as if they were as natural as rain or wind. Progress; ‘openness’; an objection to limits and borders; therapeutic individualism; universalism; the rejection of roots, place and history; pure materialism; the triumph of ‘reason’ over ‘superstition’; scientism; commercialism and the primacy of market values: all of these go to make up the unseen and unquestioned value system within which we live, and to which we feel there is simply no alternative.”

Then, citing Lewis Mumford, he says “The Machine, in Mumford’s words, feels ‘absolutely irresistible … and ultimately beneficent’. Opposition to it is presented as naive idealism at best, and a dangerous denial of its benefits to the needy at worst.”

The machine exists to grow. To defy limits. To overcome. At all costs. By any means. To ‘reach the city and reach the world’ — or just ‘reach’ more people… for the good of, well, its mission — even if we claim that it is in Jesus’ name and for his glory; our methods serve the machine, whose mission is antithetical to Christian discipleship; to formation as humans in the image of Jesus; because it exists to form humans into parts of the mechanism — or fuel for the mission; harvesting our attention, our bodies, our energy and our resources to grow and feed itself and produce profits for its masters.

So, Kingsnorth again:

“The ethos of the Machine is expansion, the busting of limits and the consumption of whatever can be sold to us to meet the ‘needs’ of the individual self which the Machine constructed for us in the first place. But all of nature’s functions operate within limits. They rely for their continued operation on a healthy balance of the complex and delicate systems that the living planet brings about.”

I’m not saying that, under God’s sovereignty, faithful mission carried out this way cannot produce fruit — it can and will; God works despite our purposes and against the powers and principalities in many and varied ways. There are still things from my time in machine church that thrill me; much good was achieved, sub-creation occurred — not just magic — the Gospel was preached, lives were transformed as people repented. But results — this sort of fruit — are not the measure of faithfulness; that’s machine thinking (which, again, serves the machine’s goal — self-maximisation and ubiquity).

My thesis is that there are church growth strategies — and models and systems of church life that are functionally mechanical; that share language, methods, and values with the machine — often with the stated goal of a ‘bigger harvest’ — more converts; more people joining the church machine as cogs in the mechanism.

And, even, that this mode of operation will seem natural to anybody building a church community in the machine culture of west, to reach the machine culture of the west, with a genuine zeal to make disciples.

But, just as Kingsnorth sees the machine as cancerous to human flourishing in the western world, I’m going to try to make the case that the nature of the machine — antithetical as it is to being transformed into Christlikeness — is cancerous to discipleship, to community, and to the mission of the Gospel, and we should, indeed, rage against the machine and extract ourselves from its machinating, masticating, cogs — before it chews up more people.

January 10, 2026 5 Comments

Inhabiting — Chapter Ten — Crafting a rule of life

This was a sermon preached at City South Presbyterian in 2024. You can listen to the podcast here, or watch it on video. Some of the block quotes were on screen and summarised but have been included in full.

Who — or what — is ruling your life?

We started this series in Athens — a very religious city (Acts 17:22–23) — where figuring out the answer to this question was obvious. There were temples and altars where you’d sacrifice time and money to show you were ruled by these gods.

This is where Paul announced that God had called all people to repent and be ruled by Jesus (Acts 17:30) — to meet the God who made us to inhabit time and space so we might find him (Acts 17:26).

We might not have altars and temples, but we’re all sacrificing our time and money in spaces that show what rules us. We might answer the question by looking at where we’re spending money — though everything seems to cost so much at the moment — or looking at where we’re spending time: more time than we need to, so we’re sacrificing other things. It could be work… or family… or the gym… or church… it could be what we’re working for that we don’t have yet.

We’re still very religious. We still sacrifice our time and money for whatever or whoever rules us — even if we rule ourselves.

But hopefully, for most of us, the answer to the question “Who’s ruling your life?” is Jesus.

And I guess I want to ask: how would you know?

Can you spot the difference between your life with Jesus and without Jesus? Does your life look different to your neighbour’s? Are you inhabiting space and time differently as someone who has found God?

Sure — we might hang out here once a week, or a couple of weeks a month, or once a month. And we might go to growth group, or even have a few spiritual practices we’ve incorporated into our daily rhythms, and we might try to do good stuff with a sense that God’s in the mix somewhere…

But are we living in a different economy — with different objects of worship and a different approach to time and money?

If we’re not, how are we meant to resist the pull of the idols of our age — resisting the rule and the promises of dead gods?

It may be that Jesus is ruling one part of our minds — the rational part — while our lives are playing catch-up… or still running the show.

Right back at the start of this series we looked at this idea of our minds being like a rider — the rational bit — and an elephant: our deeper, emotional self — our loves and identity and attachment and belonging.

And the elephant isn’t formed by knowing more, but by experiencing love and belonging and joyful connection that brings us into alignment with whoever or whatever it is ruling our hearts.

Who’s ruling your elephant?

Are we ruled by the patterns of this world — like the idols and architecture, the habitat, in ancient Athens — or by Jesus renewing our minds? If we want to be ruled by Jesus, we should probably set up our lives expressing that rule. This is where the idea of a rule of life comes in.

To be a disciple — to be ruled by Jesus — is to practice what he teaches and commands (Luke 6:46), and to come to him to learn his ways: to throw off the heavy burdens of self-rule, and self-justification, and sacrificing on altars of deadly gods… to find life in the one who sacrifices himself to give us life and rest (Matthew 11:28–29).

A rule of life is an expression of being ruled by King Jesus — the king of rest. Finding life in him, not the idols and temples of this world — not because you have to, out of some sense of legalistic obligation to earn his favour, but because he has given you his life and invited you to come to him and learn a way of life that is good and beautiful and gives rest to your soul.

And so, as we wrap up this series, I want to encourage you to carve out space this week to start building a rule of life — a guideline that shapes your habits in time and space — or to keep building on what’s already established.

We’ll recap some ideas, and it’d be great to turn those ideas into practices: to write some things down, schedule them in your diary or calendar, take notes on your phone — start the work of establishing, or building on, habits that show you belong to Jesus.

I’ve got some tips here from the world of habit-building.

First: start small. Don’t try to pull off a massive revolution of your life all at once. We know what it’s like to make big resolutions and then have them drop off a week or two later.

Second: start with habits you’ll enjoy. There are lots of disciplines that will feel hard and restrictive. These are good. But if we’re building a rule of life from scratch, let’s start by adding a thing that will bring joy — that we’ll want to stick to. This will be different for each of us because we’re all wired differently, and in different stages of life and circumstances, with different rhythms we’ve already established both to survive and to grow.

You might love the idea of solitude and a quiet time with God. Quiet times are an evangelical sacred cow. But I hate them. I want a noisy time. I want to talk about the Bible with other people. I chucked a little two-page thing about how different personality types resonate with spiritual practices differently in the Facebook group earlier this week.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t ever establish hard habits, or disciplines that hurt — but…

This is where tip three comes in. There’s this idea of stacking habits: connecting new habits to established habits. We all have habits already — regular routines. When we link new habits to existing ones, they act as cues. Something like: “When I get out of bed in the morning” — that’s a habit — “I’ll make my bed straight away.” But we can connect spiritual disciplines to these moments too: “Before I get out of bed each morning I’ll pray.”

Then, as you’re ready to add something new into your rule of life, we can build it on the last habit, or on another regular routine.

“One of the best ways to build a new habit is to identify a current habit you already do each day and then stack your new behavior on top. This is called habit stacking.” — James Clear, Atomic Habits

Tip four is kind of from the series already: habits follow cues — which often come from our habitat. Energy or effort we invest in controlling the environments where we want the habits to happen, to prompt these habits, will pay off by reducing the energy involved in fighting to make a choice.

“Instead of summoning a new dose of willpower whenever you want to do the right thing, your energy would be better spent optimising your environment.” — James Clear, Atomic Habits

As we craft a “rule,” remember: this isn’t about legalism. It doesn’t save us. You don’t have to do this. This is about carving out space and time to know Jesus and become like him.

It’s also not a self-improvement exercise, where we’re discovering the realest and truest and best version of ourselves, or getting better at self-rule. It’s a discipleship exercise where we’re seeking to come to Jesus and learn his ways.

This means we’re not just deciding who we want to be, but discerning where we’re not like Jesus, and where we think God might want us to grow by his Spirit. And that happens in community, not in isolated introspection. You might want to talk with a trusted sibling in Christ about what this will look like in your present season of life.

And this isn’t self-improvement that we discern together, then do by ourselves. We live and belong and are formed in community: the household of God — which operates in our households, and in our growth groups, and as a church. We’re also practicing the teaching of Jesus who turns us out from ourselves and commands us to love God and love our neighbours as we love ourselves (Matthew 22:37–39).

So the first step in this process will be reflecting on how you want to become more like Jesus.

Do you want to be more loving? More patient? Is there a fruit of the Spirit you want to cultivate? Is it something in how you see him speak or treat others — closer to our Father in heaven? More shaped by his word? More self-controlled? Wasting less time — resting more? Using this season well? Giving an inheritance worth something to the next generation?

Is there a habitual sin — an act of disobedience to Jesus — that you want to replace with a habitual obedience, where you can interrupt and redirect that process?

Identify how you want to become more like Jesus, and then pick a small step to take to head in that direction.

Picking the small step to get you there might be tricky. You could look at someone else who has this characteristic and examine their lives, or dig into the Gospels and see how Jesus does something. There are stacks of practices you might slot in here.

We’re going to recap some of the ideas from this series, and as we go you might want to take note of ideas you could bring into your daily, or weekly, or yearly rhythms — and ways you might reshape your life. The ideas that resonate most with you. The low-hanging fruit.

As we recap, one of the other things we did back in week one was imagine how life might have changed for Dionysius and Damaris — these two citizens of Athens who met Jesus through Paul’s preaching (Acts 17:34) — and how they might have started to embrace the rhythms of the early church we see described at the very beginning of the church in Acts 2 (Acts 2:42).

There’s nothing radically new in any of the practices we’ve covered this series. They’ve mostly unpacked the way of life described for those who have repented and found life in Jesus’ kingdom, under his rule.

If you pick a habit from Acts 2, you probably won’t go wrong — whether it’s being devoted to the apostles’ teaching — the Scriptures — to the breaking of bread (which I take to mean participating in the body of Jesus and remembering the gospel together at our tables), and to prayer, and to generosity: to living a common life and sharing our possessions and wealth — what God has gifted to us — with each other and the world in a generative, life-giving way (Acts 2:44–45), habitually meeting together and praising God — gospeling each other (Acts 2:46–47). And look: as the church community takes on these habits, their life overflows to others. It’s contagious (Acts 2:47).

So here’s a chance to jot down some areas you want to build something different: where you might establish a new regular routine — a way of life where you’re seeking to be ruled by Jesus as you inhabit space and time.

You may not have picked this up, but across the series we thought about inhabiting space and time — and we started small in each category and expanded.

So — in space — the smallest thing that belongs to you, that is ruled over by you (or whoever rules you), is your body: your life. Jesus calls you to build your life like a house — to build wisely — by hearing his words and putting them into practice (Luke 6:47–48).

You might want to build a habit of engaging with God’s word in a way that leads to reflection and practice. Maybe “no Bible, no breakfast,” or “I’ll read the Bible with my household each evening at dinner,” or “I’ll listen to the Bible on my commute.” Or you could download the Lectio 365 app and start an ancient practice of reading, prayer, and reflection.

We don’t live alone. Some of us might be sole occupiers of our homes, but we live in a household: the household of God (1 Timothy 3:14–15). And we’re formed by relationships. Ideally, we learn to grow up connected to God and one another in relationships of joyful attachment and hesed — committed love.

Our brains are shaped by joy, which, according to the science, is transmitted through our faces and eyes as we experience others being glad to be with us. Not all of us grew up with this, but you might habitually introduce joyful connection within your relationships: make time and space for eye-to-eye, face-to-face connection.

“Our identity is built and formed by joy-bonded relationships. The identity center in our brain grows in response to joy… If joy is transmitted primarily through our faces and eyes, we need to practice letting our faces light up with each other.” — Jim Wilder and Michel Hendricks, The Other Half of Church

We thought about shaping the physical spaces we occupy as habitats for true humanity.

Like tradies who have jigs for repeated actions, we can rejig our spaces — and I know some of us already have. If there’s a sin you feel ruled by, that you’re habitually struggling with, what are the environmental prompts that cue up that behaviour or enable it? How can you act to remove or cut out the source — the cue — and replace it with something that prompts godliness instead?

Part of being deliberate about our environment, and about pursuing love and good deeds, is about filling our environment with people — especially people who will encourage and spur us on.

Habitually meeting together to share the good news of Jesus with each other (Hebrews 10:24–25).

This life together in our spaces sets us up to live in spaces we don’t control — a world, like Athens, where the architecture, art, and culture primes us for false worship (Acts 17:22–23).

As we learn that this architecture expresses and enforces misfiring parts of our human search for God, we can reorient our response from being conformed, or taking offence, or culture war, to our calling to be living images of God — those pointing others to life, those engaged in culture care: bringing beauty into this shared space.

What’s a habit you might embrace of cultivating towards what’s good and beautiful?

“Culture Care is a generative approach to culture that brings bouquets of flowers into a culture bereft of beauty.” — Makoto Fujimura

It might even be time in the garden, praying and growing things that delight you. It might be a habit of generosity and hospitality: habitually living as someone who’s received a good and beautiful gift from God, who shares at his table. Volunteering in a community. Making space for others. Baking for your colleagues. Delighting in God with an eye to what you might bring into the spaces you move in.

Our shift into time meant considering how we’re ruled by the clock, or the calendar — learning to number our days so we live wisely (Psalm 90:11), redeeming the time (Ephesians 5:15–16).

This means — at least in Ephesians — carving out time each day to remind ourselves that we live before the throne of God, as those raised and seated with him. Making space for prayer and worship: praising God for his goodness, knowing God, living in his presence so that each moment becomes holy.

You might rethink how you structure your day — like the psalmist (Psalm 119:164) — and many Christians through history who carve out regular moments for prayer. There are apps for this, like Every Moment Holy; they can act as prompts. So can daily reminders in your calendar app.

Now, if this flood of ideas feels overwhelming, remember: we’re just trying to pick one or two.

When it comes to the shape of your week, as one following the King of rest, you might want to carve out deliberate time to do this with a practice of Sabbath (Matthew 12:7–8): setting aside time to stop, rest, delight in God, and worship.

So we learn to resist the pull of our version of Athens and its altars that demand sacrifice — or our version of Egypt and its slavedrivers — or even from living as slave-drivers in what the Nap Bishop, Tricia Hersey, calls “the violent culture” that views our bodies as machines.

Carving out time to know God and receive rest for our bodies and souls will mean we work differently. It will mean we can approach the good works he’s prepared for us — and everything we do — as though we’re working for God.

“…this violent culture that wants to see us working 24 hours a day, that doesn’t view us as a human being but instead views our divine bodies as a machine.” — Tricia Hersey

Habits of time are trickier when it comes to seasons — but maybe as you figure out what habits to embrace, you might ask “When am I?” How does serving God not just in this moment, but in this period of life, look different?

We’re all working out how to make every moment count as heavenly: to always give ourselves fully to the work of the Lord, in every season, because the resurrection means this work is not meaningless (1 Corinthians 15:58).

You might have a lifetime of great habits so this all seems silly — but have never stopped to consider how life in this season, where you’re older and more mature and facing ends not beginnings, can be used as a gift — and how to keep growing towards eternity as it feels like you’re finishing up.

I love the idea of the church being like a time machine that teaches hope as we come together in different seasons.

You — or us — older folks might help us — or you — younger folks navigate living in time in seasons that are present for us but past for you. Us younger folks — and especially our babies and kids — might help older folks focus on what inheritance we’re investing in leaving behind.

But all of this is about learning to see time differently: as eternal, and revolving around Jesus. So we might embrace rhythms across our year that embed us in the story of the gospel.

You might start following a church calendar, or a lectionary, or a Bible-in-a-year reading plan — even at the end of life — to learn to see that time isn’t getting away from us, but always going somewhere: taking us somewhere.

Which we saw means working to store up treasures in heaven; living as heirs who inherit eternal life as the household of God (Titus 3:6–7). So our habits now are about us seeing the long term, and building on becoming the people we’ll be forever, with the people we’ll be with forever.

Our relationships with each other aren’t temporary, but eternal.

So, as we build a rule of life, this is our horizon. Which means each moment, each step — they’re not urgent. But each habit we build — the lives we build together — that God builds by his Spirit — they’re important.

Important enough that I reckon it’d be great for you to spend some time this week making a start… building some habits as part of expressing Jesus’ rule in your life, and becoming like him.

You might want to take up one or two — or some daily and some weekly. But make them manageable. And when they feel routine, add another.

Take the time to set up your environment to make this something you do. Ask your growth group to check in. Take up a habit together. Put reminders or prompts into your phone, or your diary.

If this doesn’t feel like enough… if you want to go bigger… some of our growth groups have been working through the Practicing the Way course this term — which is where that video came from. They have an online rule-of-life builder you could try out.

But we don’t just want to think about our individual rule of life, but how we live together. Whether that’s in households — whether they’re biological or spiritual households — or in growth groups, or even here together.

But let’s start in our homes and where we meet together in homes, and ask what it looks like to have regular rhythms and routines where we cultivate joyful connection to God and each other, in households bound by God’s love.

For us to be deliberate, and calibrate what we do with our time: what we do routinely, how we meet together as those ruled by Jesus — to explore how.

We’ve covered a lot of ground in this series, and it would be overwhelming to do it all at once. But the goal has been for us to see our lives in time and space, minute-by-minute and centimetre-by-centimetre, be more and more ruled by Jesus, so minute-by-minute and centimetre-by-centimetre, we become more and more like him.

King Jesus promises to give rest for our souls, as he reconnects us to our good Creator who gives us life and breath and everything else — and promises to do this forever. Let’s be ruled by him together.

December 16, 2025 Add Comment

Inhabiting — Chapter Nine — Generating Eternity

This was a sermon preached at City South Presbyterian in 2024. You can listen to the podcast here, or watch it on video. Some of the block quotes were on screen and summarised but have been included in full.

It has been a bit funny throwing up this graphic every week of this series — a blueprint with the idea that we inhabit space and time; a habitat. Because the Campbell family was about to move out of home. While we worked through this series we were also working on plans for our house.
Well… when I say “our house” — it’s complicated.

Families are complex, and all of us have different stories and different things we’re juggling. But for us, we’re kind of in a season of generational limbo. We don’t own our home; we hope one day to inherit it. In our circumstances, we’re in this stage of life where it’s natural to think about our own inheritance, and also what we’ll leave our kids as an inheritance — how we might care for ageing parents, and how we’ll help our kids navigate a housing market (or make space for them). And all that gets folded into planning a renovation.

The idea of inheritance is complicated for lots of us — not just because it always involves death: the death of someone we love, or our own. It’s complicated whether we’re thinking about stewarding intergenerational wealth from a family system that has built and benefited from intergenerational advantage — and doing that with generosity and justice and love, battling temptations towards greed — or if we’ve already inherited all we’re going to get from our parents, materially or in the form of baggage we carry. Or whether we’re at the stage of life where we’re really deciding what it is we want to leave behind.

This whole question of inheritance challenges some of the way we want to think about — or not think about — time.

One of our challenges as a family — and maybe as a culture — is this sense of living moment to moment; paycheck to paycheck. Whether that’s because we’re in a sort of hand-to-mouth season in a cost-of-living crisis, or just swept up in an age of instant gratification… to stop and think longer term — about what we’ll inherit or leave behind — is not something everyone has the privilege to do.

So much of our habitat — our environment — is set up to have us live in time moment to moment, or to keep us there while others get rich.

This isn’t new. There’s a book from the 70s — Future Shock — that described a society-wide shift into an era of temporary products made by temporary methods to serve temporary needs. Future Shock is the changing experience of time caused by this super-fast change in environment — society and culture. Some of us lived through this moment… and then things got faster:

“We are moving swiftly into the era of the temporary product, made by temporary methods, to serve temporary needs… Future shock is a time phenomenon, a product of the greatly accelerated rate of change in society.“ — Future Shock, Alvin Toffler

So a more recent book, Present Shock, says we now live in this constant state of being pulled in every direction all at once, in one moment. Future Shock was about one big change; Present Shock is about everything changing all the time to keep us fixated on right now.

“Our society has reoriented itself to the present moment. Everything is live, real time, and always-on… It’s not a mere speeding up… It’s more of a diminishment of anything that isn’t happening right now.” — Present Shock, Douglas Rushkoff

In present shock we don’t plan for the future or think long term, or about our inheritance — unless, like the prodigal son, we want it now so we can live fast.

Some of us, though, resist this pull. We think obsessively about what we’ll leave behind for our heirs — our super balance. We’re storing up security; wealth — delaying gratification — avocado on toast — to build something for ourselves, or for others.

Whichever camp you’re in, it’s like we’re in the marshmallow test. Have you seen this test? You put a marshmallow in front of a kid and tell them if they wait until you get back, you’ll give them another one. It was meant to be this test to show that delayed gratification leads to success… and it appeared to. This is what you might’ve heard about it.

When later scientists tried to replicate the test and actually asked the kids who grabbed the marshmallow why they didn’t wait, it turned out rich kids would delay gratification because their parents had demonstrated that adults could be trusted. While kids from poor families had learned it was rational to seize an opportunity that might not come again. And the positive outcomes for the kids in the first experiment wasn’t so much about wisdom and delayed gratification, but about what they were inheriting from their family.

If these better outcomes come from generation after generation delaying gratification and passing on opportunities and advantage… then just focusing on the present feels unwise — we’re kind of stuck. Especially when we’re also spending our kids’ inheritance when it comes to natural resources and the climate; pushing us to think really long term — sometimes in ways that distract us from needs in the present.

So how are we meant to live beyond the moment, with the long term in view?

We’ve thought about inhabiting our days and weeks and seasons. How do we expand our horizons to the bigger picture, and think about generations — and leaving an inheritance worth something for those we love? No matter what we inherit from our families, what kind of inheritance do we want to pass on to our heirs, whether they’re biological or spiritual?

I reckon we find some guides for long-term thinking in our two readings that shape how we live in the world in the present.

The sons of Korah in Psalm 49 have advice for both the rich — those inheriting and leaving an inheritance of material value — and the poor; those who’ve inherited forms of economic disadvantage. Wisdom for everyone who’ll listen (Psalm 49:1–4).

The Psalm kind of expects those who are wealthy to be wealthy through exploitation; that they’re wicked deceivers (Psalm 49:5–6). Now, this is complex, right? Wealth can be a blessing that follows wise life in God’s world. Intergenerational wealth and privilege is tricky to track — in my family history there are fortunes lost and found, and made through the colonial project here in Australia. But the Psalmist doesn’t have much patience with the idea we should trust wealthy folks who boast in their great riches in evil days; certainly not that we should fear or revere them as though they’ve got something to offer.

Because the reality is: we all die. Basically.

Their wealth can’t buy you out of the grave. They can’t go to God and ransom you — or themselves. There’s no payment, this Psalmist reckons, that’s enough to get a life out of the grave so someone can live forever (Psalm 49:7–9). Nothing the rich can do. The wise die. And so do rich fools — leaving their wealth to others (Psalm 49:10). And this sort of inheritance doesn’t lead anywhere good; it’s a speck in space and time.

We might worry heaps about how big and flash our houses are, but we’ll spend much more time dead and housed in our tombs — and his point’s not to buy a good grave or coffin (Psalm 49:11). No matter how significant we are — we could have a city or a street named after us — but we still die. Just like the beasts (Psalm 49:12). This is all very Ecclesiastes. Except the Psalm has a little upbeat note: the rich can’t ransom us from the grave and give us eternity, but the sons of Korah are confident that God can, and will. That he will redeem people from the grave and take them to himself (Psalm 49:15).

And the wise who hear this advice bring this perspective to life — a different sort of long-term vision — so we don’t get overawed by others growing rich (Psalm 49:16). And presumably the assumption is just that we aren’t going to spend our lives pursuing that sort of wealth if we know we can’t take it with us. Pursuing wealth without this understanding is pointless. As the Psalm says, we can all see everyone dies, and what we amass in our lifetime we leave to others.

So the question’s not just what do you want to live for, but what do you want to pass on? What do you want to leave behind?

Is it just that we want to pass on more wealth and comfort to a generation who might benefit — might get a better job if they don’t take the marshmallow, might have a nicer house — but they too will end up not taking it with them; our heirs will also end up in the grave.

So maybe we should be passing on something else.

Something that lasts.

To people who’ll last.

When Jesus teaches this same sort of wisdom in the Sermon on the Mount, he says, “Don’t store up treasures for yourselves on earth.” You can’t take that stuff with you; it’ll die, or break, or get stolen. But instead, store up treasures in heaven — permanent stuff — and where our treasure is, there our hearts will be also (Matthew 6:19–20).

This is a long-term investment strategy. If we can’t buy our way to eternal life, it makes sense to invest with the one who can. And there’s something about becoming a disciple of Jesus that’s about investing in others — passing on an inheritance in his family, in our households.

Which is what we see in Paul’s letter to Titus. This letter’s a lot like 1 Timothy, which we read earlier in the series — there are some overlaps.

Check out how Paul describes himself at the start of the letter: a servant of God — a slave, even — and an apostle of Jesus. He’s invested to further the faith of God’s elect — his ransomed people he’s bringing to himself (Titus 1:1–2).

Paul’s investing in people knowing the truth that leads to godliness — to the sort of life we’re looking to live as we inhabit time and space as God’s people — “in the hope of eternal life.” This is a time idea. He’s not writing to people just to keep them fixed in the present, but to keep our eyes on the long term in ways that shape how we live in the present.

He says God — who doesn’t lie — promised this eternal life before the beginning of time, and in this appointed season — another time word — he has brought to light this promise and its fulfilment through Paul’s preaching (Titus 1:2–3). Just think about what Paul’s saying about time and its meaning here: before the beginning of time, God planned to give eternal life to people. Paul’s kind of saying that to make sense of all time, we have to keep this long term in view, and act accordingly in the moment.

He’s writing — like with Timothy — to someone he considers family; his son in the faith (Titus 1:4). He’s given Titus a job in Crete: to appoint elders — leaders of the church — specifically “managers of God’s household.” We saw in Timothy this was about spiritual parents: people who shape the inheritance left to a household, and steward what has already been inherited.

And just remember — because it’s fun — when we see the word “household” in the Greek, especially with this idea of managing, we should think “economy.” Paul wants Titus to appoint leaders who’ll manage time and space and build and pass on an inheritance that isn’t about treasures on earth, but eternal life (Titus 1:5–7). The managers of this economy — the parents in the household — are to steward resources differently. Paul lists these values or virtues to be passed on: don’t be overbearing, or violently angry, or drunk, or greedy for wealth that comes dishonestly. Instead, wealth and homes are made for sharing in hospitality; as folks cultivate love for what is good — self-control — the ability to delay gratification, or choose not to be gratified but to be holy, upright… disciplined (Titus 1:7–8).

Titus has a job: he’s to teach what actions are appropriate to sound doctrine (Titus 2:1). And look, this passage is full of head-scratching moments, and we’re barely going to touch on them — and I’m sorry. I’ll do my best not to leave stuff hanging in ways that trouble you. But we’re glossing over some of the substance to see the nature of the relationships — what people are doing for each other here with the long term in mind.

Paul’s expecting older folks to create an inheritance with the long-term view in mind: passing on treasures in heaven to younger folks while they’re alive — not amassing wealth or passing it on, but cultivating godliness and loving relationships — joyful connection with God and each other — as the basis of privilege and advantage in God’s economy.

So “elder men” are to be temperate, worthy of respect, self-controlled, sound in faith, in love and in endurance (Titus 2:2). In the same way, “elder women” are to be reverent — living towards God — not being slanderers, or drunk, like the overseers in chapter 1, but to have self-control and teach what is good. They’re to pass this on to the younger generation: teaching younger women — if they’re married — to love their husbands and children (Titus 2:3–4).

I’m in the sort of camp that thinks Paul’s envisaging way more than he lists here — a sort of network of relationships where the old invest in the young becoming godly because this is how you live with the long term — eternal life — in view. But there’s a list of ways these women might do this through their example and teaching: helping younger women to be self-controlled and pure; busy at home; kind; subject to their husbands (Titus 2:5).

Now — couple of red flags there, right? We hear “busy at home” and think “oppression.” But in the first century, households were family businesses — economies. This isn’t about dishes; it’s about contribution to the shape of the household. And being subject to their husbands has to be read with everything Paul says about mutual love and respect, and wives and husbands belonging to each other, and the call for husbands not to be violent and domineering patriarchs, but those who lay down their lives like Jesus does rather than raising their hands and ruling harshly.

But I want you to see the pattern of relationships more than the content: experienced women of character investing in younger women. And the purpose of these particular behaviours is that nobody looking on will malign the word of God (Titus 2:6). It’s part of bearing witness to the world that this economy is different, because we’re living with a different vision of death and the future.

Titus and the elder men are to do the same with younger men: encouraging them to be self-controlled — to delay gratification; choosing the eternal over the momentary; eternal life over the marshmallow. Setting an example by doing what is good; showing integrity and seriousness and soundness of speech that can’t be condemned (Titus 2:6–8). Again, especially so opponents outside the church will be ashamed because their way of life is so visibly good:

“…so that those who oppose you may be ashamed because they have nothing bad to say about us.” — Titus 2:8

This is all a sort of picture of apprenticeship within this household structure: this community embracing a different economy — building an inheritance that will be passed on from generation to generation.

They’re thinking big picture, but the response is to do the hard work in their own lives of cultivating goodness and virtue — godliness — in order to pass it on through relationships. They’re not driven to abstraction, but to the very concrete.

There’s another really tricky bit here: slavery in the first century isn’t the slavery we picture in America or the British empire. It’s not that it wasn’t awful for many slaves, but slaves were part of households — often part of the family. Paul’s also called himself a slave of God. In these newly ordered households, as the economy is upended, there are ways Paul’s encouraging slaves to live with the heads of their households — again, super uncomfortable for us.

But what’s Paul doing? Telling them not to play the short-term game — stealing, instant gratification — but building trust, again so that their witness to God our saviour will be attractive (Titus 2:9–10). There’s a different view of this short-term pain and indignity that comes if a person has become an heir to God’s promises and you’re banking up treasures in heaven.

This long-term view — this vision of the grace of God — the perspective on time that comes with eternal life — God offering salvation to all people — Paul reckons this teaches us, over time. And with these examples, as people invest in us, over time we learn to say no to ungodliness, to worldly patterns and instant gratification, and instead to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives — the lives modelled by our spiritual parents; the lives we inherit from those passing them on living with the same vision of time — while we wait for the future, the long term, to become the present when Jesus returns (Titus 2:11–13).

Jesus, who did give himself for us to redeem us and purify us as a people who are his own — people eager to do what is good (Titus 2:14). No one can redeem the life of another or give them eternal life using our own wealth (Psalm 49:7). That’s beyond what money can buy; the things of earth can’t deliver.

But Jesus does.

And he invites us into a new economy with a new sort of inheritance.

It’s lovely to be able to meet the material needs of your heirs, your household — both biological and spiritual. What a privilege it is to give and receive generosity and hospitality and security. But like the Psalm says, wisdom comes in investing in the long term. Like Jesus says, wisdom is found in storing up treasures in heaven — and we do this by helping one another become more heavenly; more like Jesus. Because it’s the bits of us that become godly that’ll last for eternity, as all else gets left in the grave.

In the next chapter of Titus, Paul says God has brought us into this life — saving us through the washing of rebirth and the renewal of the Holy Spirit. God, our heavenly Father, poured this out on us generously through Jesus Christ our saviour (Titus 3:5–6). Having been justified by his grace, this gift — this is our inheritance — we now have life with him; eternal life (Titus 3:6–7). This is our view of the long term, and what we’re invited to receive from each other and pass on to each other as something of great value.

This view of the long term, Paul says, is meant to see us carefully devoting ourselves to doing what is good — this is the economy of God; the pattern of his household (Titus 3:8). Life with the long term in view is about cultivating this goodness and hope, this inheritance that is our gift through Jesus, and passing it on.

We can get distracted by marshmallows; by wealth; by visions of the long term that pull us away from those around us — by the idea that security comes in the form of a bigger house, and that love looks like passing on wealth and advantage to those we choose to give it to.

But if you’ve found life in Jesus, you’re now part of a family who inherit this life together, and you’re invited to pass it on from generation to generation — to become the sort of person, bit by bit, who has something to give.

This long-term view means carefully devoting yourself to doing what is good — modelling that, teaching that, generation to generation. I reckon churches can get obsessed with quick fixes and fast growth — especially pastors. We hunt for silver bullets and want to see hundreds of converts, which would be amazing. But wanting hundreds of disciples, not just converts, requires something different in this model. It requires households of people committed to modelling and forming and practising and passing on an inheritance of this sort of godliness.

One of the things I love about the church of Christ is the idea that some of you have been in community for longer than I’ve been alive. I’d love our church community to think long term rather than short term about our mission — to imagine not just hundreds of people joining us, and us having to plant new things or do things differently — but to imagine little Hazel Jean, the newest member of our family, born last week, and the other newborns and toddlers and kids and teens. Imagine still being connected to them in five years, ten years, twenty years, fifty years — as older, wiser family in Jesus — invested in them inheriting eternal life.

This is the new economy — the new family — we’re invited into, where we get to both create an inheritance we leave for this generation and those that follow, and to learn to live in our own inheritance: the security of eternal life that has been given for us.

If you’re a parent, imagine this being the inheritance you’re building for your own kids — that this is a bigger and better investment than real estate or a bank balance.

Whoever you are, this is the most important inheritance passed on to you that you will steward. It produces bigger and longer-lasting advantages than the sort of wealth that means your kid will ace the marshmallow test.

What changes in the way we think about church and relationships if we think about the long term together and start living, loving, and relating to each other remembering we’ll spend eternity together?

How might this sort of time scale shape your rule of life; your practices; and the way you’re depositing into their lives in ways that’ll hopefully compound and produce something better than wealth that we can’t take with us?

December 16, 2025 Add Comment

Inhabiting — Chapter Eight — Seasons

This was a sermon preached at City South Presbyterian in 2024. You can listen to the podcast here, or watch it on video. Some of the block quotes were on screen and summarised but have been included in full.

I have a rule with preaching that I do not do sports illustrations.

It is not because I do not love sports. I love sports — but I am aware others do not like sports; or sports illustrations. They are alienating. I am making an exception because I do like weird DIY graphs, and this fits this chapter’s theme — we looked at inhabiting space, and then have spent the last couple of chapters thinking about numbering our days and redeeming the time and the shape of our week — this chapter is about seasons. And you know what has seasons… sports.

At the time I preached this sermon, I had just finished playing a season of over 35s football — soccer for uncultured folks — I am the goalkeeper. In the 2024 season we did not make the finals, so it was all over (in 2025, at the time of posting — we had made the finals, and won the Grand Final).

The team I play for started playing together in the Baptist league; some of us have played together for 15 years — since our 20s, playing against 40 year olds, and then found ourselves in our 40s playing 20 year olds, so we moved to a more age-appropriate league where we are in our prime again, not past it. Now — you have been waiting for the graph I flagged above.

Here is how life works if you play sport. At some point you hit your peak. You are the best you will ever be.


When you are young you are fit and healthy; you might move better, but as you gain experience, you play smarter — and at some point, it all clicks and you hit your peak — the perfect overlap of experience and ability — a real sweet spot. Life before this moment is prep for that season, and from then on, you are always kinda trading on the glory days.

I think I peaked in 2010 — at 27 — here I am lying on the ground in the grand final.

Turns out my graph is based in reality — this journal article looks at average ages of success in different high-level sports in Australia.

First — the good news for people considering a run at the 2032 Olympics — Olympic athletes are getting older on average — there was a 66-year-old competing for Australia in Tokyo.

They also looked at male World Cup footballers, concluding attackers peak at 25, defenders at 27, mids in the middle, and goalkeepers are the oldest player type — where our agility and reaction time might decline, we learn resilience and strategic decision-making, and mostly we are just tall.

“Goalkeeping requires significant agility and reaction time. Traits benefiting older players, such as psychological resilience and strategic decision-making, are also important. These skills are thought to develop with experience and age… Their greater playing longevity may be because they are specialized both in skill and body type: they are often taller.”

This sounds a bit right. My body is slowing down every season; my recovery time is longer — but I am probably playing smarter.

What is true of sport is true of many parts of life — this is why sporting illustrations are preaching gold. This season stuff is true of discipleship too. Becoming more like Jesus — our habits and practices will look different in different seasons of life — our capacity will vary, but there are ways our experience teaches us to be smarter.

Discerning the changing of seasons and how this changes what we are called to do within our limits is vital to redeeming the time. This sort of discernment is important for our own growth and for the role we play in the household of God.

So. What season of life are you in? What does living wisely — building wisely by practicing the way of Jesus — look like in this season with your mix of experience and strength and energy and availability and ability? Especially where you maybe cannot jump at tasks you might have in earlier seasons, but where you have developed some other skills — or maybe you are just tall.

Our lives will be made up of various seasons; you have got your classics — birth, childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, adulthood, middle age, old age, dying — and then sorts of shifts that happen along that continuum — education, getting a job, leaving home, maybe marriage, maybe kids, maybe job loss, maybe buying a home, maybe renting, maybe grieving relationship breakdown, or singleness, or childlessness, maybe job transitions, raising teens, maybe caring for an elderly parent, grandparenting, grieving dying parents, grieving lost children, a medical diagnosis — every one of these is not just an ‘event’ where it just happens in a moment and is gone; these are experiences that stretch over a body of time, often overlapping.

And if we pretend they do not change our capacity — or what faithfulness and wisdom look like in our lives — we are kinda missing part of what it means to inhabit time faithfully while seeking God; seeking to become godly in the circumstances where he has placed us.

Part of maturity is not just knowing who I am and acting with integrity — it is — as Jamie Smith puts it in How to Inhabit Time — being able to answer the question “When am I?”

He reckons seasons are a better way to discern when we are and how we should live than days and dates… that if we discern what season we are in, this helps us know what to expect, and that the key to living well through these seasons is not numbering our days by the sun, but by remembering that in every season, we revolve around the Son.

“The answer to the question ‘When am I?’ is not six o’clock or 2022; it is more like youth, middle age, chapter 3 of a life… To ask ‘When are we?’ is not a question of counting years as much as discerning a season, knowing what to expect… Remembering that, in every season, we revolve around the Son.”

Somehow that pun is less clichéd when you have as much panache as Smith.

This discernment of the seasons helps us see that our situations are temporary; to receive the good and live through the bad… which is the tension the poem in chapter 3 of the book of Ecclesiastes explores; it is an invitation to discern the time — the season — and act appropriately.

The poem opens declaring there is a time and a season for everything — and then it describes a bunch of times — seasons — where different actions are appropriate — as well as milestone moments — birth and death, planting and uprooting, killing and healing, tearing down and building.

Some people might say deconstruction and construction here. Some of us have experienced these sorts of seasons in our lives, our faith, our relationships. In any of these, if you do the wrong thing, that is bad, right? We had some ‘help’ from some folks in the garden out the back where we uprooted when we should have been tending to the plants, and it set the garden back a bit.

A time to weep and a time to laugh, to mourn or dance, to scatter or gather, to embrace or refrain, to search and to give up, to keep or throw away, to tear or mend, to be silent or speak, love and hate, war and peace — lots of these are momentary, but some of them are seasons (Ecclesiastes 3:1–7) — and wisdom lies in discerning the difference and acting according to the time.

This list — they are all actions where we have agency to respond to the situation or season or time we find ourselves in — and maybe one of the things this poem also invites us to see is that if we are always just doing one of these options — always uprooting or deconstructing and never moving into a different season — then we might be stuck in a less than wise rut. We are made to discern the time and to act in ways that go somewhere.

Although, the writer of Ecclesiastes is maybe not sure there is anywhere to go, because our seasons end. Eventually.

We worked through the book of Ecclesiastes as a church when we were looking at the books that are often called Wisdom Literature; we saw how it tells the story of someone — a teacher — who we are meant to identify as King Solomon searching for meaning under the heavens (Ecclesiastes 1:12–13); specifically, under the sun — which is a phrase that mostly seems to be about life on earth without much reference to God (Ecclesiastes 1:13–14). In Genesis it is the heavenly lights that shape how we measure the passing of time on earth (Genesis 1:14).

Solomon is trying to make sense of life if death is the end of the story — if every moment is fleeting — this Hebrew word hevel that gets translated as “meaningless” (Ecclesiastes 1:13–14), but is more literally the word “breath” — if every moment, every season, is temporary.

The whole book is an extended meditation on the burden the teacher describes after his poem (Ecclesiastes 3:10) as “the burden God has laid on the human race.”

The burden is this idea that everything is beautiful in its time, but that time seems so fleeting in the face of eternity — and our longing for something lasting — that sits beside knowing our fate; knowing one day the breath will leave our bodies; one breath will be our last. Fleeting. Meaningless. Breath (Ecclesiastes 3:11).

In this he reckons we are no different to the animals… the same fate awaits us all; the same breath animates our bodies. Everything is breath. Temporary (Ecclesiastes 3:18–19).

The teacher’s advice is to embrace the moment; discern the time — the season — and roll with it; eat, drink, be merry — work hard and enjoy our labour — know that whatever season you are in, good or bad, it will pass — and that life is a series of different times and experiences and moments (Ecclesiastes 3:12–13).

There is some wisdom here, right? When it comes to not trying to make fleeting things eternal. We can waste a lot of time and money trying to be eternally young and never die. We can look for magical ‘forever young’ solutions; trying to hold on to a magic season and never experience the maturity and wisdom that comes through navigating our way through other seasons.

There is wisdom in discerning what season we are in under the heavens (Ecclesiastes 3:1), and how to live accordingly — in knowing when to move to over-35s, or walking football, or coaching rather than trying to keep up with 20-year-olds.

The teacher in Ecclesiastes does not have the same perspective Paul offers in 1 Corinthians — where Paul says, “Actually, the resurrection of Jesus and our resurrection with him is a game changer for how we live in time.” It is not that we should not discern the seasons still, but picking a wise reaction to each season includes hopeful certainty about where we are going.

He also uses a bit of seasonal language — farming language — through this passage, as he describes the resurrection of Jesus as the first fruits (1 Corinthians 15:20); the beginning of a new season — the start of something new even for those who have died already.

It is fun reading this bit of 1 Corinthians and its wisdom side by side with Ecclesiastes. The teacher says “humans and animals have the same breath of life” — which is a reflection on Genesis 1 and 2 — and death makes everything “breath” — fleeting. Paul is like, “Yep. Without the resurrection of Jesus, this is true — even faith is futile” (Ecclesiastes 3:19; 1 Corinthians 15:17).

If he is not raised and we are not raised, then the teacher’s wisdom is right — eat, drink, and be merry, because tomorrow we die (Ecclesiastes 3:13; 1 Corinthians 15:32).

But there is a game changer — our dying “under the sun” bodies are not the end of the story. Living in dying bodies still requires wisdom and discerning seasons of time and what these perishable bodies are capable of — but because of the resurrection of Jesus, these dying bodies of breath are not the end of the story (1 Corinthians 15:42–43).

Our natural bodies will be replaced with spiritual bodies (1 Corinthians 15:44). There is a fun thing in the Greek here where Paul is playing with two different words that can be translated as “breath” and “spirit.” What we get as “natural” uses the same Greek word the Greek translation of the Old Testament uses for the breath of life — the fleeting breath that animates even the animals but disappears on death. And the resurrection body — Paul uses the word pneuma — or spirit — here, the word used for the Holy Spirit. Jesus’ resurrection breath being given to our bodies changes the story.

Now we do have something the animals do not. We had the same breath; now we are animated by God’s Holy Spirit (Ecclesiastes 3:19; 1 Corinthians 15:44).

Now not everything is meaningless… breath. Fleeting. Ending in death. Our destiny has changed; our season has changed; our burden has been lifted. Now we are living — as those with the Spirit — in anticipation of an entirely different season with an entirely different body; one that will not break down and decay, while our experience grows.

I do not know if this graph is entirely accurate — I do not know if our heavenly, imperishable, glorious bodies will be 27, or improve over time — but we will not be experiencing the frustration that comes from dying and decaying bodies that break down and recover slower.

One day the perishable will be clothed with the imperishable — the mortal with immortality (1 Corinthians 15:54). We will see continuity in the bits of our lives that we have invested in the spiritual reality, the life of Jesus — and the other bits will be left in the grave and defeated.

And this future hope might inform how we navigate seasons of frustration and change now — or even great seasons of joy and productivity where we might be inclined to forget eternity and try to make these fleeting moments last forever.

Paul says through Jesus and his resurrection we are liberated from the worst aspects of time — death — as we are also liberated from sin and the law that condemns us. We have this victory through Jesus (1 Corinthians 15:56–57). That is what you want at the end of a good season.

And so this shapes every moment.

Paul says we ought to stand firm — no matter the season we are in — not be moved from this truth that shapes our days and our seasons and our lives. Always — through every season — giving ourselves fully to the work of the Lord (1 Corinthians 15:58).

That will change season by season, in accordance with our obligations and our limitations and our health and our energy and our strength — but when we are labouring in the Lord it is not meaningless; it is not vanity; it is not just breath — it is not just under the sun (Ecclesiastes 1:13–14).

It is for eternity — an eternity enjoying the fruits of this work for God as he sets the table for us to eat, drink, and be merry under the Son.

This is God’s answer to the longing for eternity set in our hearts. It helps us receive beautiful seasons and moments now as temporary pictures of what is to come, and the ugliness — especially the ugliness of dying — breaking down to dust — as temporary struggles and sorrows that will also pass and can be endured.

So how do we do this? What are some practices we can embrace to live seasonally; to rightly number our days, asking “When am I?” discerning the time so we can redeem it and live wisely?

Some of us are in our physical prime — we have so much energy and motivation; we are not weighed down by some of the commitments that come with family — whether with a spouse and kids, or ageing parents who need care — we might lack some experience and wisdom, but that will come with practice. Stewarding this season might mean stepping up and saying yes to challenging things, recognising that you have this season as a gift, and that it is fleeting. This might play out at work or at home or here at church. I am thankful for the way so many younger adults without kids serve our community with energy and enthusiasm — especially those who are teaching kids in kids church to help parents navigate this season.

This season for you might involve grief about unrealised hopes, or navigating the path to get to a new season. This requires discernment, recognising limits — our humanity — maybe even confronting the way our bodies are imperfect and limited no matter how hard we push them. That is okay. There are practices you can embrace in this season that will grow you towards your eternal future. You might look around and resent some older folks because of how much you are doing and forget that older folks have been through that season, have done the stuff you are doing now — and might wish to still be doing it… but they… we… just cannot.

Many of us are past our physical prime. It is true. We are in dying bodies that do not have the energy we once had. How do we live faithfully with the time we have left — valuing our experience? Maybe there is a set of habits or practices you might embrace that are the discipleship equivalents of walking football or coaching; slowing down — still doing the stuff you loved, but as someone who brings experience but not speed to the field, or helping from the sidelines; energising and encouraging. Maybe there is stuff you imagine that you cannot do anymore because you cannot do what you used to — but maybe you are like a goalkeeper and you might find you have got more useful with age, and wasting energy is not the wisest path.

I have got to say — I do not just love that young adults are involved in our kids ministry — you might not have noticed, but our elders are rostered on creche or kids church most weeks. You might join them. Your knees might not cope with playing on the carpet, but you can take a chair and offer love to our kids — or find ways to help parents in our church navigate this season, or offer support and encouragement to single folks navigating a complex season filled with griefs and hopes and challenges to stay godly that look different for each of us.

This discernment — it is not a solo sport. It is part of living in the household of God (1 Timothy 3:14–15); part of being family for each other — the environment in which we each grow and learn and navigate seasons with those who have gone before and those coming after us.

Discernment requires listening — perhaps to those who have gone before — not because being old automatically brings maturity, but because navigating seasons with wisdom that produces godliness is actually what maturing might look like. I know as a younger person I was dismissive of older folks, because what would they know — and I still can be — but now as an older person I am realising that some of what I offer is maturity, not just old-person thinking, and some of what younger people — not exclusively my own children — lack is hard-won maturity, where some of that winning happens through struggle, but maybe some of it is easier to navigate with a good coach.

Those of us who are younger might need to cultivate a practice — and the sorts of relationships — where we can listen to older, more mature voices, while those of us who are older might need to realise what we have to offer; discerning what is mature and what is appropriate for any given season of life — not just cultivating an expectation that young folks will act just like us. That is not wise either. Wisdom is about acting according to our season.

Smith talks about this as a bit like time travel, where the church is like a time machine; as older, wiser folks who have negotiated a season can report futures those navigating a season cannot comprehend — creating hope. He says:

“Trading testimonies across generations turns the communion of saints into a time machine… When an older friend reports from a future you could not imagine, your imagination is infused with a new possibility. That is called hope.”

Some of us are entering — or in — the final season. And this season presents its own particular moments; fleeting moments that might not come back and might be savoured or grieved with particular weight. It is not easy for a young bloke like me only just past sporting retirement age to speak about this — but this is a season some of you are facing. A season not of firsts but of lasts, or “maybe lasts,” where you are just not sure.

And we want to honour that as your church family; to walk with you, to laugh with you, to cry with you, and to be there through this time — as you work out how to say goodbye; how to finish well — and as you model that to us too — especially how to finish well — to mourn while hoping.

We want to see you live as though life is not meaningless but death has been swallowed up in victory, and we want to play our part in celebrating and reminding you of that while thanking God for the seasons you have experienced. Because one day, whether we know it or not, we each experience this season.

The call for each of us — in each season — is the same; according to our ability and capacity and experience — it is to not be moved from our hope; to stand firm in Jesus and give ourselves fully to the work of the Lord. To live for him. To live shaped by the way he shapes time.

One way Smith reckons churches can do this is to think differently about time — to see time as cyclical, not linear. There is an ancient practice where church communities have structured their years to rehearse and remember the Christian story — the church calendar — holy days — they still mark our secular calendar with Christmas and Easter — but this is a way to remember that time does not revolve around the sun but the Son; and that we do not live under the sun but under the Son. He is our centre of gravity.

In this calendar each year begins with a deliberate movement towards the events of Gethsemane and the cross — the silence of Easter Saturday and the explosion of light from the rising Son.

“The Christian inhabits time as cyclical and linear… The liturgical calendar rehearses the way time curves and bends around the incarnate Christ like a temporal center of gravity. Every year, the church walks with Jesus toward Gethsemane, bears witness to his anguish and suffering, steps again into the chilled shadow of the cross, lives with the harrowing silence of Holy Saturday, and arrives on Easter morning to witness the explosion of light that is the resurrection of the Son of God.”

And we end the calendar with Advent, anticipating, hoping for the coming of the Messiah, remembering that he has come — in flesh — stepping into time in a way that changes everything. Embracing this cycle — these annual seasons — we remind ourselves of our story in every season of our own life.

This is already something we have started to do more of together as we gather as a church, but marking time this way in your homes might be something you consider as we cultivate a rule of life together and navigate each season that life throws at us.

We are all caught up in the business of learning to tell the time; to discern the season we are in so that whenever we are in life, we can give ourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because when we labour in him — eyes and hearts towards eternity — it is not in vain.

October 25, 2025 Add Comment

Inhabiting — Chapter Seven — The King of Rest

This was a sermon preached at City South Presbyterian in 2024. You can listen to the podcast here, or watch it on video. Some of the block quotes were on screen and summarised but have been included in full.

What does your regular week look like?

What are the things you do week in, week out — regular commitments — that are shaping you?

For many of us it will be work, or studying, and some exercise — then some church stuff — church on Sundays, growth group mid-week — your calendar is probably already full — and if you throw kids and their weekly commitments it is overfull.

We have been thinking about inhabiting space; now we are exploring time; learning to number our days; making them count — redeeming the time — so we might live wisely.

The end goal is to construct a rule of life; a pattern of habits to adopt to be formed as followers of Jesus — so we are considering how we are ruled by regular life.

How is your regular week shaping you?

And what regular commitments could you embrace to become more like Jesus?

We cannot make time for everything; we are limited — busy — and this idea of adding more regular stuff — it feels — overwhelming…

We have spent time earlier in 2024 thinking about hospitality and Luke’s Gospel; the idea the kingdom of God is revealed at the table — how do we make time for that? And about living before the throne of God as those raised and seated with Jesus — spending time “in heaven” in prayer and worship? So we can live heaven-on-earth lives — we might want to do this regularly.

But… something has probably got to give if we are going to make time for this stuff…

As we think about the shape of our weeks now — seven days — about our limits; our busyness; how overwhelmed we are — I am going to suggest we should carve out time each week for this stuff, and there is a ready-made category for this in the Bible.

The Bible’s story is the reason we have a seven-day week — our rhythms come from the Genesis story, where God creates and generates for six days, then rests on day seven; naming it holy time; a bit like the garden is marked out as holy space (Genesis 2:2-3) — this becomes the regular rhythm of the week for God’s people in the form of Sabbath (Exodus 20:8-10).

Now. I have preached on Sabbath before — but — I am still not sure I am nailing it as a practice in my own life. And if you know anything about Presbyterians, you will know we have got a tradition of being legalistic about the Old Testament law; a bit keen to apply Israel’s laws to Christians — maybe especially on the Sabbath; which we call the Lord’s Day…

This is not just a Presbyterian thing — my mum’s family were part Methodist, part Anglican and there were all sorts of rules about whether you could watch football on the Sabbath — because you certainly could not play it — and — anyway — my family are reactionaries, so when we moved to Queensland in the late 90s, my dad was asked to MC this annual Presbyterian event called a Celebration Rally; it was on the Lord’s Day — a Sunday night — and at this Celebration Rally there was a sausage sizzle; apparently it was OK for people to cook sausages for hundreds of people on the Lord’s Day, but they ran out — and people were hungry — and rather than breaking bread and fish and passing them around the crowd, dad dared to suggest anyone hungry should grab some drive-through Maccas on the way home — a Lord’s Day tradition in our family… And he caused a mini scandal. Trading on the Lord’s Day is a no-no.

This is the heritage I bring to thinking about the Sabbath — which is mostly “it is a restrictive rule from the Old Testament that does not apply to Christians…”

But.

I am increasingly convinced that I have had it wrong — that the Sabbath is not about restriction — but liberation — that rest is not an imposition but a necessary act of both re-creation and resistance to the patterns of the world we find ourselves surrounded by… that maybe we have reacted against legalism — rightly — but robbed ourselves of a rhythm of refreshment; a habit of time — of coming to Jesus as weary and burdened people and receiving rest (Matthew 11:28-29) — seeing the Sabbath as a practice of grace, not law — learning the way of Jesus as we come alongside him; the Lord of the Sabbath (Matthew 12:7-8).

I am on this journey — and today I want to make the case that our week should be shaped around a regular practice of Sabbath — holy time; time marked out to spend in God’s presence, receiving his gifts — enjoying him and his creation — not just as recreation but as re-creation — not as a legalistic restriction but liberation from a machine world that wants to desacrate time and space and our bodies — make those things less sacred — while we should be learning to see time and space and our bodies as connected to the divine life in whom we live and breathe and have our being.

So we will cover the Sabbath in the Old Testament pretty quickly — we have already seen how the Genesis story sets up the Sabbath as holy time, that reflects God enjoying his creation and inviting people into holy space and time with him —

it also emerges against the contrasting backdrop of Egypt in the Exodus story; Israel’s life without rest; their slavery — their oppression — at the hands of Pharaoh and his slave drivers — where they are an oppressed group of migrants doing back-breaking labour while being treated ruthlessly (Exodus 1:11-14).

They are enslaved by a slave-driving kingdom that gives no rest. The Exodus is their rescue out of this kingdom and into God’s kingdom, and this experience defines their ethical system; their law; their regular weeks — see how the Ten Commandments are framed in the Exodus story: “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of slavery” (Exodus 20:1-2).

And when you get to the structure of the week — they are called to keep this day that God declared holy in the beginning holy; to do all their work in those six days, and then enjoy a Sabbath — to God — doing no work; it is a rest day — a holy day given to enjoying God’s rest (Exodus 20:8-10).

And this is for everyone — it is an anti-Egypt — Sabbath includes whole households; including servants — anyone employed or enslaved — and any foreigners — the migrant workforce of their day — it is a day tasting liberation for all. At this point it is tied back to the creation story, to God’s words in Genesis (Exodus 20:11), but as the law expands from the Ten Commandments, Moses says do not oppress foreigners because you know what it was like to be oppressed — their experience of oppression; of work without rest is meant to shape how they live — this regular Sabbath expands from week to year — every seven years (Exodus 23:9-11) — Leviticus calls this a Sabbath year — where they — and all those in their household — and the foreigner — are to live off the land; off God’s provision; rather than their own work; resting the land — and every seventh seven-year period they would have this Jubilee year (Leviticus 25:4-6).

This Sabbath day though — it is to give rest and refreshment to all — including the slave and the foreigner — now — this stuff about slavery amongst God’s people is tricky — but, briefly, I reckon the whole point of Sabbath is that it is meant to shape how you see the people you rest with the way God sees them — and see work differently too — it is a teaching thing (Exodus 23:13). When Moses restates the law in Deuteronomy as Israel is about to enter the land, we get the Ten Commandments again, and the Sabbath command again, with two tweaks — the Sabbath is so everyone — including those who might be oppressed — can rest; and rather than looking to Genesis, the Sabbath is tied to their liberation; the Exodus; their rescue and re-creation — that they were slaves with no rest, so they are not to enslave with no rest (Deuteronomy 5:13-15).

The Sabbath is meant to show them they are not slaves, and teach them not to be slave drivers; to be like the Egyptians.

But once they get in the land they are just like their neighbours; they get obsessed with acquiring wealth; they do not practice the Sabbath year; the prophet Amos says they trample the needy and have done away with the poor — and they spend their Sabbaths daydreaming, waiting to get back to trade; they are dreaming of cheating others out of their wealth, enslaving the poor… buying them with silver or a pair of shoes (Amos 8:4-6)…

The prophet Isaiah launches his condemnation of Israel by announcing their celebration of Sabbath has become worthless to God; because their hands are full of blood; they are not seeking justice or defending the oppressed (Isaiah 1:13-17). Instead, Isaiah lists out their rebellion — explaining why God is not seeing their fasting and holy days as they are facing exile (Isaiah 58:1-3) — because — on the day of their fasting they are not just not defending the oppressed; they are oppressors — they are regularly exploiting their workers; fighting each other (Isaiah 58:3-4); their religiosity is the opposite of what God wants; he wants them to fast from oppression and injustice and set people free, not enslave them.

They should be fasting from hoarding, by sharing their food with the hungry; sheltering the poor; clothing them; spending themselves on behalf of the hungry; satisfying the needs of the oppressed (Isaiah 58:6-10). That is what God would notice; if they do this, then God will guide them to life; they will be like a well-watered garden (Isaiah 58:11) — a people of paradise — Isaiah turns from fasting to Sabbath; he says if they keep from breaking the Sabbath — doing as they please — treating holy time as holy and a delight — not going their own way, but God’s — then they will find joy in the Lord.

This is what the Sabbath is meant to be and produce, then God will bring them into his heavenly feast (Isaiah 58:13-14) — that they have become oppressors; slave drivers means exile; these promises need fulfilment; an Israel who understand the Sabbath, who delight in God and rest in him; enjoying him; practicing justice and love; modelling this new way of living in time.

And we find this fulfilment; this true Israelite in the one who invites the weary and burdened — those overwhelmed by life under the oppressive rule of other powers — in other kingdoms — to come to him — not to buy them for a pair of shoes, and oppress them more — he is not violent and proud, he is gentle and humble, and he offers to give rest (Matthew 11:28-29).

He does not come with a heavy yoke of slavery, but an invitation to come beside him and receive rest, to learn to rest; so that we find rest for our souls — Sabbath rest with our creator, who invites us into his Exodus, the fulfilment of Isaiah — paradise and a feast. Matthew follows these words with a picture of two visions of Sabbath — a miserly legalism, and the enjoyment of God’s provision — I reckon we have often tossed both in order to avoid oppressive legalism. Jesus feeds his disciples on the Sabbath — they are tasting a sort of Jubilee year; picking from the field — but the Pharisees — well — they have never seen Jubilee, so they just see work — rule-breaking — they want the hungry to stay hungry (Matthew 12:1-2). Jesus condemns them for missing the point of God’s law; his heart — and condemns the innocent — missing that the king of rest — the Lord of the Sabbath — is in front of them modelling fulfilment of the law (Matthew 12:7-8).

And then, as another image of the contrast, we meet this man with a shrivelled hand — and the Pharisees do not see a human; they see a test for Jesus; they want this guy to stay unable to work… excluded… poor… to prove a point. But Jesus declares it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath; and he heals the guy — he brings life — complete restoration — while the Pharisees — well, they are happy to plot a murder on the Sabbath (Matthew 12:10-14).

Later the one who has an easy yoke and light burden says these Pharisees load up heavy, cumbersome burdens on people’s shoulders and do nothing to ease the burden (Matthew 23:4). They oppress. They enslave. They walk like the Egyptians. So what does this all mean for us as we seek to follow the Lord of the Sabbath?

What are we to do with this way of shaping our week?

The miserly legalism of the Pharisees has no appeal to me at all — but maybe it is not a choice between working to eat, or to do good, and legalistic rest… but between coming to Jesus for rest, or being team Pharisee.

Maybe the Sabbath is not meant to oppress, but to liberate; maybe it is a chance to follow a different rhythm; to live differently in time as we come to the Lord of the Sabbath and receive rest; the fruits of the new life of God’s people promised in the prophet Isaiah — whose writings Jesus fulfils.

Jesus is the one who does away with the yoke of oppression; replacing it with a yoke that is light; giving on behalf of the hungry — liberating the oppressed — bringing people into garden-like rest.

Jesus is the one who delights in God’s Sabbath; the king of Sabbath — and brings people to feast at God’s table. Jesus is the one who, on the cross — launches a new Exodus; liberating humanity from sin and death and Satan and from life under oppressive rule into life where he shoulders our burdens — telling the rebel there with him “today you will be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43) — a promise for us as well, as those raised and seated with him now — so that our Sabbath rest is not just shaped by God as creator, or by Israel’s Exodus rescue, but our own — so, in the same way, the practice of Sabbath is a chance for us to learn from Jesus, and, like for Israel, a chance for us to not oppress others; to give rest to others as we embrace the pattern of the kingdom.

Sabbath is a chance not to be a slave or a slave driver; to not live like Egypt, or embrace the patterns of our world, but to delight in God’s goodness; to taste paradise today.

The rest the king of rest invites us into is the garden; not just to look back to Eden, and not just to look forward to paradise, but to remember we are in paradise with him today; it is a day to shape ourselves to live as heaven-on-earth people as we work the other six.

In the Practicing the Way resources on Sabbath — it is one of the practices they suggest might become part of your rule of life — they break down how to think about Sabbath not as a legalistic restriction but as this way of life with four headings — Stop. Rest. Delight. Worship.

Stop working and participating in the systems we live in that are inevitably violent and oppressive; disconnect from the grind; not just reluctantly, like in Amos — where we are plotting and scheming how to game that system. Resting from our work; and trusting that God provides what we need and will keep the world ticking over even when our shoulder is not pushed against the wheel.

And as we do this we are invited to use this time we have carved out to delight in God; his goodness to us in our rescue and in creation; enjoying abundance; anticipating paradise — feasting, practicing hospitality — enjoying one another as we live as the household of God — and worshipping God together; spending time “dwelling in the heavenlies” as part of the rest Jesus has entered into that he invites us into as those united with him.

The issue with that Celebration Rally was not so much that my dad suggested people go to Maccas — it was in the lack of abundance at the heart of the celebration — that was a picture of a certain sort of miserliness. The Lord’s Day is a chance to join the leisure of the garden — to play in anticipation of the new creation; to taste and see that God is good; to feast — and to do this as both the culmination of each week and a practice that shapes our week… to plan and prepare ahead of time in order to experience fulfilment and contentment in God’s generosity that remind us we do not need that Sabbath experience every day; as we work; a rhythm that is deliberate and focused on receiving God’s goodness that keeps us from chasing that same satisfaction from idols…

And… here is a surprising reason to embrace the Sabbath that I like — grounded in the prophets and the life of Jesus — and not just in “what is good for me personally” — Sabbath is political; Sabbath is an act of resistance — a liberating practice for us — and for others — we are not just celebrating not being slaves; it is where we learn not to be slave drivers.

This comes with a challenge as we build our own practices; seeking to enjoy abundance in this sanctuary in time — it is to hear the words of Amos, and step out of consuming others — actively, or in our daydreaming about our own little kingdoms… to refuse to act like an Egyptian slave driver, relying on the exploited labour of foreign workers to deliver for us — and, instead, to make space and time for these very folks to enjoy liberating rest — and this practice is meant to shape the rest of our week too.

You might not notice, but we participate in systems of oppression — particularly the oppression of migrant labour, or foreign labourers — we are not slave drivers… but maybe we enslave drivers.

I wonder how many of you have ordered food using Uber Eats, rather than cooking yourself… what about ordering from Amazon?

There are plenty of other forms of modern slavery embedded in our supply chains… but Amazon has got a track record of exploiting its workers — this story from the Guardian is about delivery drivers so desperate to stick to their delivery schedule — which is so tightly monitored drivers cannot take bathroom breaks…

“I saw no effort on Amazon’s part to push delivery service providers to allow their drivers to use the restroom on a normal human basis, leading many, myself included, to urinate inside bottles for fear of slowing down our delivery rates… ”

Many of them will use bottles in their cars. In Australia, Amazon has gamed the employment regulations so they can overload drivers’ schedules and erode safety practices; by calling drivers “hobbyists” or contractors.

“Serious safety issues like dangerous overloading and pressuring drivers to rush through deliveries is not something to brush off as insignificant, implying that this gruelling work is little more than a paying hobby with drivers in full control.”

People caught up in this system talk about being treated like robots rather than humans.

“I feel dehumanized. I feel like they resent the fact that I am not a robot and that I am made of flesh and bone.”

Enslaved; dehumanised to deliver according to quotas — like Israelite slaves making bricks in Egypt — not just set by their corporate overlords, but the consumer expectations of the market…

Deliberately not consuming on the Sabbath is a chance to lift our eyes so we are not swept up in making money, or planning how we might buy a person for a pair of shoes… to make time to see the way our consumption impacts migrant workers, or the poor.

One of the coolest things I read on Sabbath comes from Tricia Hersey — who gets called the Nap Bishop — she wrote this book Rest Is Resistance — where she argues that the conditions of the modern market were actually born in slavery; in the plantations that built the wealth of the west; and where our bodies — especially those of marginalised and oppressed people — when we are working in a system that celebrates 24/7 productivity and rewards hustle and always being on — what we see in the spirit of Amazon — we are still working under Egyptian conditions; brainwashed by a violent culture that does not see us as humans but as machines — she reckons that is at work across the economy — where we work, and where others work for us — and we will not see it unless we carve out time to notice. She sees naps — resting — Sabbath — as acts of resistance against a world that always wants more from you — liberation; a path back to our true nature.

“ …this violent culture that wants to see us working 24 hours a day, that does not view us as a human being but instead views our divine bodies as a machine… The Rest Is Resistance movement is a connection and a path back to our true nature. ”

Sabbath is a chance to deliberately step out of other kingdoms that claim our time, and our bodies, and reorient ourselves to the kingdom of the king of rest; as we come to him, and receive rest — because it is a path back to being human; as we stop and rest and delight and worship — maybe we would find life in a weekly rhythm of Sabbath, not just on that one day, but in a way that will shape our work on the other six days; as we experience freedom from the patterns of sin and slavery and slave driving so we find rest for our souls; learning life with him in paradise.

October 16, 2025 Add Comment

Inhabiting — Chapter Six — Redeeming the Time

This was a sermon preached at City South Presbyterian in 2024. You can listen to the podcast here, or watch it on video. Some of the block quotes were on screen and summarised but have been included in full.

What does it look like to learn to number our days? Psalm 90 is the only Psalm attributed to Moses in the Psalter; it is presented as Israel’s oldest poetic meditation on God, which may have been composed during Israel’s wilderness wanderings. It is a reflection on God’s relationship to time as an infinite being, and ours, as finite beings where every day counts.

This song carried through Israel’s entire life as a nation. These words — including a prayer — shaped how God’s people understood living in time.

“Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.” — Psalm 90:11

This is where we are turning in our series on inhabiting time and space. We have looked at how we live in spaces; how we are formed by the places we inhabit while invited to join with God in reforming or generating new patterns of life in the world; making spaces for people to come to know God. Now we are thinking about time.

We started this series in Paul’s sermon in Acts where he speaks of God making humans to inhabit space and time; our boundaries and our appointed times in history; our numbered days — so we inhabitors might search for him and find him (Acts 17:26-27).

So I wonder how you inhabit time; what your habits of time are — your routines.

Are you ruled by the clock — reacting to the passing of time, and each moment — trying to cram stuff in; meeting deadlines, rushing from one thing to another, where there never feels like enough time — the clock is ticking? Or are you a calendar person — ruled by your diary? Taking control of the way you allocate time ahead of the curve? Planning out your days, and weeks, and months and years?

Some of us might be a mix of both.

I am more a clock guy than a calendar guy — I would love to be able to use a calendar, but I am routinely flexible; chaotic; life is a series of deadlines. I am ruled by the clock — but I also waste a lot of time. I am not as productive as I could be. It is not that I am lazy. I work hard, but I am not one for life hacks; calendar hacks — counting every second.

How do you spend or fill or invest or waste your time? Are you making your time count? Or just watching it fly by?

And if God wants us to inhabit our days seeking him; finding him — how does that shape your days? The idea of this series is that this search for God is about becoming disciples; being wise builders of a life following Jesus, and how we use our time shapes who we are becoming.

Next week we will look at our weeks, and then the week after our seasons, and then how we live with the long term in view — but today we are looking at today. How to number our days; to make them count.

This is stuff philosophers love to ponder. So I want to start with a popular philosopher of time — the modern Psalmist — Jon Bon Jovi. With the lyrics from his songs I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead and It’s My Life — they are a kind of anti-Psalm 90.

Bon Jovi imagines days not counting; a week of Saturdays; no need for Sunday — for the religious day of rest — no need for resting in peace; he is here to party — not to work.

Seven days of Saturday
Is all that I need
Got no use for Sunday
‘Cause I don’t rest in peace

“I don’t need no Mondays
Or the rest of the week
I spend a lot of time in bed
But baby I don’t like to sleep, no

No Mondays or the rest of the week — time in bed, but no sleeping.

No bed, really — he will live while he is alive; he will sleep when he is dead.

Until I’m six feet under, baby
I don’t need a bed
Gonna live while I’m alive
I’ll sleep when I’m dead

There is no need for prayers; he will grasp hold of life on his terms.

This ain’t a song for the broken-hearted
No silent prayer for the faith-departed

As he says elsewhere; it is his life; it is now or never; he is not going to live forever.

It’s my life
It’s now or never
I ain’t gonna live forever
I just want to live while I’m alive

If this is the case — living while we are alive — making every moment count — that comes with its own habits that will shape the sort of person he is.

He is the foolish builder though, right? From Jesus’ story?

Because there is something else shaping a person — Bon Jovi no longer looks like this…

Now he looks like this… And one day — he will be dead.

And he will not just be dead, if the Psalm is right, and it is God who sweeps people away in the sleep of death — Bon Jovi will meet his maker.

“Yet you sweep people away in the sleep of death — they are like the new grass of the morning: in the morning it springs up new, but by evening it is dry and withered.” — Psalm 90:5-6

How do we make time count — numbering our days — in the face of death? In the face of coming face-to-face with God? Who do we want to become — not just in the face of death, but this idea of coming face-to-face with God? How does this shape how we spend today? Numbering our days. Making them count.

There is a writer I love — Tish Harrison Warren — an Anglican priest in the U.S. In her book Liturgy of the Ordinary she writes about deliberately shaping our days, our time, around seeking God, because how we spend time — whether it is a morning routine, or going to the gym, or going to work — will always function like rituals or liturgies; acts of worship that make us who we are.

“We are shaped every day, whether we know it or not, by practices — rituals and liturgies that make us who we are… we spend our days doing things — we live in routines formed by habits and practices.
How I spend this ordinary day in Christ is how I will spend my Christian life.”
— Tish Harrison Warren, Liturgy of the Ordinary

We are creatures of habit; and our routines are made up of practices, and these are what build our life.

Another writer I love — Jamie Smith — wrote this book How to Inhabit Time. He says:

“We are all choosing to synchronise our watches with someone’s configuration of time.”

We are choosing for our time to be ruled by someone — and so — who is shaping your habits of time — the shape of your days — whose schedule are you synchronising your watch to? Your own? The powers of this world? The consumer culture — the rat race — where you have to work harder and longer to produce more so you can consume more, or amass more security?

Or is it the God we meet in Psalm 90?

This Psalm makes the case that as we number our days, we ought to be synchronising our lives — our watches — to God’s rule. And when we get to Ephesians, Paul shows how our perspective changes with Jesus, and unpacks how we might live in time differently as a result; as those who have met the creator God through Jesus, and received eternal life.

Everything this Psalm says about God focuses on his relationship to time and space; his limitless experience; his mastery and power and authority — his role as Lord of all; all generations; who pre-existed the oldest things we can imagine — the mountains. God is God from everlasting to everlasting (Psalm 90:1-2). It is hard to describe infinite life poetically, but God is everlasting. While creation is not. The mountains will erode.

People are mortal — we will die and turn to dust. For God a day is a blip, a thousand years is like a day (Psalm 90:3-4). Life comes and goes — like grass — but he remains (Psalm 90:5-6).

And this produces an amount of awe — especially if God has the capacity to intervene and judge such puny finite figures as humans; to look at our sin, even the ones we think are hidden — and find us wanting (Psalm 90:7-8).

We become very small in this perspective. Our days pass away. Even our sufferings are fleeting. We might last seventy or eighty years — they pass, we fly away, we die (Psalm 90:9-10).

It is all very depressing.

We are fleeting. God is not. This is all about perspective.

And for Moses part of this picture is meant to generate a fear of God — a life that recognises him as God and so avoids his power being turned on us. A desire to learn from God to think about time, and from this perspective gain wisdom — a heart of wisdom — an understanding of reality (Psalm 90:11).

And somehow — Moses — who in the story of Exodus has come into God’s presence, who knows things about God and his compassionate, covenant love, his character — this holy, infinite, potentially unapproachably glorious and powerful God — he does not stop with fear and avoidance. He turns to God and speaks to him; he asks him for stuff; he asks him to be compassionate and to shape the days of his people, those numbering their days and recognising him as God and becoming wise.

He says “satisfy us in the morning with your unfailing love” in a way that shapes not just that one day but every day — all the days we humans are given — so that we might sing for joy and be glad even in the face of our mortality, because we are facing God instead (Psalm 90:13-14). And he is making us glad for as many days as he gives us; as many years — balancing out, or neutralising the bad, the suffering — giving people time to see and experience God’s deeds, from generation to generation (Psalm 90:15-16).

This perspective leads Moses to ask that his favour might rest on his people — so that time is not producing nothing, fleeting rubbish — but so that God, the everlasting creator, might be establishing the work of human hands; making it count; making it something wise and established and not frustrating or grass-like (Psalm 90:17).

It is a Psalm worth meditating on, and asking how the God it depicts might shape our days. Paul draws on the ideas of this Psalm in Athens as he proclaims the God who made us to inhabit time and space; the one in whom we live and breathe and have our being — and the idea that we might meet him; find him — as he reaches out from the eternal, from reality beyond our limits of space and time, into our experience of space and time in the person of Jesus so that our search for him can actually lead us to him, as he invites us into life with him. As we receive his Spirit living in us so while we live day-by-day in dying bodies, we now see our lives continuing beyond death. This has got to change how we number our days, right? Not just from Bon Jovi’s perspective, but also from Moses’ perspective.

We are now able to work towards things that last; what Jesus calls treasure in heaven. We now have a fuller sense of how to make our days count; how to be wise. We looked at a bit of Ephesians in our Before the Throne series.

The idea that we have been brought from death to life; taken out of the rule of the prince of the air — Satan — and the power of sin and death and darkness (Ephesians 2:1-2). Where all of us lived at one time, and so were headed towards death and wrath (Ephesians 2:3) — like in the Psalm. But because of God’s love for us we have been made alive with Jesus (Ephesians 2:4-5). And raised with him so that we are already seated with the God of Psalm 90, in heaven, enjoying his life — in anticipation of the coming ages (Ephesians 2:6-7). And living in this world as his handiwork, created in him to do good works; to spend our days on earth as those shaped by this reality, towards this future (Ephesians 2:10).

In Ephesians 5, Paul talks about how we become children of God who are now going to follow God’s example as we see it in Jesus (Ephesians 5:1-2). He has this phrase that I reckon should bounce around in our heads like asking God to “teach us to number our days” so we might live with wisdom. He says “be careful how you live — not as unwise, but wise” — and our English reads “making the most of every opportunity” (Ephesians 5:15-16). Literally this says “redeeming the time” because the days are evil — because life in this world is still marked by death; by those powers and principalities that lead people away from God; to folly, and the judgment Psalm 90 speaks about.

So wise people who live in time ruled by God, as those given life with God — we will number our days — make them count, knowing though our time here on this earth is limited — death is not the end of the story. And we will redeem the time; living with our position in time and space as those raised and seated with Jesus defining our days now. For Paul this looks like not finding ultimate meaning in the things of this world; the days we have here, marked as they are by evil, not being foolish, but living understanding God’s will (Ephesians 5:17).

Not filling our days with drunkenness, or sex — pursuing pleasure, now or never, living while we are alive — the Bon Jovi principle — but being filled with God’s Spirit as we speak to one another with psalms, hymns and songs (Ephesians 5:18-19). Just like Moses wanted in the Psalm.

This feels like the satisfaction Moses longed for — and Israel with him (Psalm 90:14). Making music from our hearts. And always giving thanks to God the Father in everything; always (Ephesians 5:19-20). Redeeming the time means living in this world grounded in who God is; recognising who he is; using Psalms like Psalm 90, and music, and prayers of thanksgiving to shape our hearts and our journey through time towards eternity. Not towards God, because we are already living with God. But redeeming the time; making our days count, because we are seeking to live with him.

We all synchronise our watches with someone’s configuration of time.

Bon Jovi’s?

The prince of the air?

The God of Psalm 90 who reveals himself in Jesus?

What is it for you? The Bon Jovi principle; the clock is ticking — you just want to live while you are alive. Your boss, the “clock” where you are clocking on and off. Your biological clock; stuff you want to do because you are old, or before you are old, or because death is getting closer.

What would it look like to synchronise your clock, and align your calendar — your day — to God’s plan? To number your days; to make them count — as someone living towards eternity now, by redeeming the time. Because this is what wisdom looks like. And it starts with having a plan for your ordinary days; your habits, your routines.

And how should that shape today and tomorrow as the ordinary, numbered, days that are the building block for your Christian life? How will you make them count? Redeem the time? Sync up with God? We have been thinking about habits we might adopt in space; about practicing the way of Jesus — doing what he calls us to.

Building our lives wisely by building them on his life; on his teaching (Matthew 7:24). On imitating his example, and the example of those who imitate him (1 Corinthians 4:16-17). Creating a way of life (1 Corinthians 4:17). We have talked about the idea of a ‘rule of life’ while exploring Practicing the Way together, this ‘rule’ is a deliberate pattern we might adopt in our lives to give them a structure so we are growing towards where God wants us to be growing towards; a way to “schedule our daily life practices and relational rhythms that align our time and our habits to our desire to be with Jesus and become like him,” to be wise.

James K.A Smith reckons part of this wisdom is captured in the spirit of Psalm 90; recognising that our lives in the flesh are transitory; that we are limited in ways God is not; that we need to learn to keep time.

“Learning to live with, even celebrate, the transitory is a mark of Christian timekeeping; a way of settling into our creaturehood and resting in our mortality….”

As we settle into our creaturehood and rest in our mortality — not live the unsettled, hurried, life of Bon Jovi, trying to cram everything in, get all we want…

But learn to be content in time — temporal contentment; inhabiting time with eyes open, hands outstretched, not to grasp and make the most of every moment on our terms, but to receive and enjoy and let go. To practice thanksgiving and rest in who God is.

“This is temporal contentment: to inhabit time with eyes wide open, hands outstretched, not to grasp but to receive, enjoy, and let go.” — Smith, How To Inhabit Time

It is his life. And he gives us now and ever. So what does this look like day-to-day; redeeming the time — living in our limits, wisely — but also towards eternity?

When it comes to how we spend our days — most of us will spend our days working in some form of labour — whether it is paid, or unpaid; out, or in the home — grandparent duties or in the trenches of parenting — and this work can feel meaningless if our life feels like it is being wasted and going nowhere.

Some part of redeeming the time will mean asking, with the Psalmist, that God will establish the work of our hands; directing them and giving us a sense we are approaching work with purpose.

The purpose of doing good; bringing order; orienting our hearts and our bodies towards heaven as we do the good works God has prepared in advance for us to do.

Redeeming the time at work might involve prayerfully orienting your labour towards this greater meaning; seeking to work as though working for the Lord. Not simply sharing life and love and hope with, or praying for, your colleagues — though those are good habits to get into — but by working with eternity in mind. Sometimes that just means remembering that some of what we do feels pointless and mundane, and fleeting, but we might be building character that lasts forever, and we might find ways to enjoy the fruits of our labour and the satisfaction of a job well done.

Our best work though will be limited; we are not omnipotent creatures of boundless energy. Our work comes from a place of rest — we are maybe addicted to busyness and productivity as a culture, but part of numbering our days and remembering that God is infinite while we are finite and limited is scheduling rest. This will be part of how we think of the week next week — but it is also part of how we think of the day — sleep.

Now. Sleep is harder to come by for some of us — because of our bodies or our brains or our circumstances — and I do not want to be insensitive to that struggle. But those people will tell you that sleep is a good gift from God, even if it feels unattainable. And I know for myself, and for others, that sleep sometimes feels like not living.

Like Bon Jovi we might feel like sleep is a waste of time; something we do not like because it gets in the way of partying.

That we will sleep when we are dead.

But rest — it is one of the good gifts of God Jesus came to give us — and our days are not just made for work, but for play — recreation — relationship — and rest, and sleep (Matthew 11:28-29).

“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.”

And redeeming the time, numbering our days; recognising that we are finite and that we depend fully on God, not ourselves — might require trying to, at least, sleep.

We are able to sleep — so the Psalms say — because God does not sleep; he looks over us as we slumber; he does not sleep so that we can. So that we can rest in him while embracing our limits. But this might also mean working less. Being less busy; less productive.

“He will not let your foot slip — he who watches over you will not slumber; indeed, he who watches over Israel will neither slumber nor sleep.” — Psalm 121:3-4

Maybe the best thing you could do to redeem the time is learn to slow down; to rest; to sleep — to let go and let God, so to speak. To un-hurry, as John Mark Comer who is behind Practicing the Way puts it. He reckons many of us will be too busy to add Jesus to our daily schedules; too hurried; not resting; not making space in our lives. We fill our lives — Bon Jovi style — with the sort of stuff Paul tells us not to do, and crowd out the life-giving stuff we ought to do, including rest.

“The elephant in the room is that the vast majority of us have far too much going on to ‘add’ Jesus into our overly busy schedules.” — John Mark Comer

And our best work, and rest; our best redeeming of the time; our best numbering of our days begins with knowing who God is, and who we are before him; creatures — not the creator — those who live before the throne of God in heaven, which shapes us for life on earth. Redeeming the time might mean spending time located in not just our future home, but a home we are located in now, by God’s Spirit. As we sing Psalms, and songs, and always give thanks — praying — not just sometimes (Colossians 3). Did you notice as we looked at Acts 2 earlier in the series the early church met daily together (Acts 2:46-47); involved in these rhythms?

They met habitually — with the idea this habit would increase the more they understood how life now is oriented towards life eternal; that day approaching (Hebrews 10:25). They just could not get enough of time together, or time with God.

I wonder if that sort of time with God — before we think about time with others — is part of our days. Did you notice in Psalm 90 Moses calls out to God asking that he might satisfy us in the morning so our days might be filled with his love; that we might sing for joy and be glad all our days (Psalm 90:14)?

There is lots of stuff in the Psalms that aligns with the practices we see Jesus and his disciples embracing through the Gospels — probably because the Psalms are their songbook. They seem to routinely pray at certain hours of the day.

One suggestion is that this is a tradition that begins in Psalm 119, which is all about meditating on God’s word — a life filled and formed by the Scriptures — where the Psalmist says “seven times a day I praise you…” (Psalm 119:164).

What would your calendar look like if you had reminders in it to pray seven times a day? What about just one? Or two? This is how we redeem the time.

Now look — for most of us our calendars and clocks are on our smart phones. And we probably have habitual relationships — some might call them addictions — to these little devices; rituals training us not to redeem the time, or rest, but to waste it.

I am not sure the answer is to get a dumb phone, or no phone — but I wonder if we might use our phones as tools to help us redeem the time; to shape our hours, to remember to pray, and even to provide us words to pray when we cannot come up with our own.

Some of us really like the project Every Moment Holy, which is a group of creative folks committed to writing beautiful prayers for all sorts of moments that come up in modern life; whether these are hard or special occasions, or just the mundane day-to-day stuff. You could get a hold of that app, or go old media and get a hold of the books.

Maybe you could set a reminder, or create a habit of Bible reading, prayer, and journaling with leather-bound tactile books that break the phone’s hold on you. Or maybe you could get an app like PrayerMate, that helps you track prayer points and pray for the people you promise to, and prompts you to do it throughout the day. You might redeem the time by using your phone to dig into the Bible — whether just in a Bible app, or something like the Bible Project, which I love. I have even got a life hack where I will listen to Bible Project podcasts, other great podcasts, or Christian audiobooks while I am gaming. Talk about redeeming the time!

Whatever you do as we work towards a rule of life; however you structure your numbered days — what would it look like to redeem just a little bit more of the time by adding just one or two more practices, could be from this list, could be something else, so that you are deliberately pursuing wisdom and embracing reality; the reality of who God is and who you are.

A wise life inhabiting time as people who are going to die, and face our maker is a life grounded in Jesus; a life looking towards eternity; a life redeeming the time we have now as we do the good works God has prepared for us — as those who know God because we spend time with him.

Are we going to take advice for how we fill our time from Jon Bon Jovi, or from Jesus?

October 13, 2025 Add Comment