Welcome
This is Rough Around The Halo, a site about following Jesus in the middle of real life: not the polished, picture-perfect version, but the everyday reality of joy and struggle, hope and disappointment, grace and perseverance. Here you’ll find honest, biblical, and practical reflections on discipleship, church life, identity, culture, and the challenge of walking faithfully with Christ when life gets hard — sometimes thoughtful, sometimes humorous, sometimes challenging, but always aimed at helping people keep going when faith & life collide.
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The Slippery Rock Where Paul Stood
Last weekend I visited the Areopagus in Athens.
If the name doesn’t immediately ring a bell, it’s the place most people know as Mars Hill, where the Apostle Paul stood in Acts 17 and addressed the philosophers, intellectuals and religious thinkers of ancient Greece.
If I’m honest, I had imagined something a little more dramatic. Perhaps a grand platform, an impressive monument, or at the very least a rock that didn’t feel like it was actively trying to throw me down a hill. Instead, what I found was a surprisingly slippery lump of stone. After a couple of thousand years of tourists, pilgrims and curious Christians retracing Paul’s steps, the surface has been polished smoother than my freshly shaved head. One wrong step and I could easily have found myself recreating the Fall in a very literal sense.
Jesus or the GP? Why That’s the Wrong Question
A few years ago, my wife Laura suggested I should go and see my GP.
I remember feeling genuinely confused.
Why would she think that?
As far as I was concerned, I was fine. Well, maybe not fine. I was tired, stressed, busy, adjusting to life as a new dad, and dealing with a lot at work. But that’s life, isn’t it? Everyone gets tired. Everyone gets stressed. Everyone has seasons where they’re carrying more than they’d like.
At least, that’s how I saw it.
The Spear, The Lyre and a Couple of Boiled Eggs
I know what you’re thinking… it’s not Monday. Why am I getting a Grace & Grit article today?
Well, I’m sat in an Airbnb in Darlington, drinking a coffee and waiting for a couple of eggs to boil before heading back for day two of a leaders’ conference, and I wanted to share something I’ve been reflecting on.
Yesterday I listened to a teaching session from Chris Frost that I haven’t quite been able to shake.
Now, if you gather a few hundred church leaders in one place, you expect to hear about mission, church planting, discipleship, leadership and reaching people with the gospel. And rightly so. Those things matter. What I wasn’t expecting was to spend the evening thinking about a garden trowel taped to a stick.
SoulMATES: Friendship, But Not As We Know It
My church is part of a family of churches called ChristCentral, which sits within the wider Newfrontiers family. One of the distinctives of ChristCentral churches is that we’re called to be “friends together.”
Now, I’ll be honest, that can sound a bit sickly sweet if we’re not careful. Like something embroidered onto a cushion in a Christian bookshop next to a mug that says, “Too blessed to be stressed,” almost exclusively owned by someone who is visibly stressed.
But “friends together” isn’t just a nice slogan. It’s not a networking strategy with a Bible verse stapled to it. It’s not simply church leaders saying, “We can achieve more if we pool our resources, share a PA system, and occasionally borrow each other’s folding chairs.”
How Much Use Is Physical Training?
There’s a strange idea that sometimes sneaks into Christian thinking without us even noticing. It’s the idea that the “real you” is your soul, while your body is basically just temporary packaging. A sort of fleshy Uber that carries your spirit around until heaven.
The problem is: that isn’t biblical Christianity.
The Bible doesn’t treat the body as a disposable shell. God created human beings as embodied creatures — spirit, soul, and body.
The Comments Section Is Now Open!
Good news! The Grace & Grit blog now has a comments section. After a few weeks of writing into the digital void and hoping somebody, somewhere was reading, there’s finally a way to talk back. If a post makes you laugh, think, disagree, nod along enthusiastically, or mutter “that’s rubbish, Dave”, you can now leave a comment and join the conversation. Feel free to ask questions, share your thoughts, add your own experiences, or chat with other readers.
God Doesn’t Need You, But He Wants You!
One of the ways I worship is through writing, this blog, sermons and occasionally songs. I’ve been working on this song recently (Listen Here), and the main idea has been quietly messing with me.
God doesn’t need ANYTHING from me, not my service or my worship. He doesn’t need my money, my prayers, my surrender, my good decisions, my hands in the air, or even the songs I sing to him.
Which, on the face of it, sounds like possibly the least encouraging worship song ever written.
Why Is The Quiet Revival Still Quiet?
If you’ve spent any amount of time in Christian circles over the last couple of years, you will definitely have heard someone talking about the “quiet revival.”
Young people turning up to church. Teenagers asking spiritual questions. University students becoming curious about Jesus again. Youth ministries growing. Stories of unexpected conversions popping up all over the place.
And something definitely is happening. I’ve seen it myself.
Doing Different, Differently
What I’m about to say, I say as a church leader, but also as someone who doesn’t come to this subject from a distance.
My own particular flavour of neuro-spicy is something of an ADHD/ASD cocktail — served without a little umbrella — which means my brain can sometimes feel like it has seventeen tabs open, three of them playing music, one frozen, and none labelled. I’m also the father of an autistic teenager, so this isn’t theological theory for me. It’s personal. It’s pastoral. It lives in my home and my ministry.