Month: January 2016

Sweden 

Sweden is set up differently

Phil Whittall, , 0 comment

I’m reading Michael Booth’s The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the myth of the Scandinavian Utopia and it’s absolutely fascinating. In one of the chapters on Sweden he quotes author & historian Henrik Berggren. Sweden is set up differently. The main objective is not to be dependent on your family, the wife shouldn’t be dependent on her husband, the children should be autonomous when they are eighteen, old people should not be dependent on their children taking care of them, and therefore to a large extent the state steps in and provides…

Read More
Reviews 

Book Review: Coaching in Ministry

Phil Whittall2 Comments

I am, not to put too fine a point on it, full of myself. Far too often in leadership and ministry, I’ve found myself telling people what to do. Sometimes there is a place for that – ‘stop sinning’, ‘here is why Jesus was the Son of God’ and stuff like that. But all too often when it comes to developing leaders, which I’ve never had enough of, I find myself telling them what to do, solving their problems for them and generally enjoying being the fount of all wisdom.…

Read More
Articles 

Review: Read

Phil Whittall, 0 comment

I read all the time. The back of cereal packets, emails, blogs, status updates on Facebook, tweets on Twitter and news on the BBC. I read dozens of blog posts and articles every day. I regularly read Wired and The Economist magazines, local newspapers and stories to my children. Read, read, read. However when it comes to measuring my reading over the course of a year all that reading basically counts for nothing. The only real form of reading, for most of us, is the reading of books. Within this category it…

Read More
Reviews 

Books of 2015

Phil Whittall, 0 comment

So here is a list of all the books I read in 2015 (I think) Feral by George Monbiot (Amazon) Creating Community by Andy Stanley & Bill Willits (Amazon) Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus by Nabeel Qureshi (Amazon) The Coming Chinese Church by Paul Golf (Amazon) Cities of God by Rodney Stark (Amazon) Who runs Britain? by Robert Peston (Amazon) A wind in the house of Islam by David Garrison (Amazon) Why Jesus? by William Willimon (Amazon) I mullbärsträdets skugga by JohnGrisham (Sycamore Row in English) The Baptism with the Holy Spirit by RA Torrey (Amazon) Saturate by Jeff Vanderstelt (Amazon) Why Cities Matter by Stephen Um &…

Read More
Articles 

Review: Write

Phil Whittall, 0 comment

What are the major themes of your life, the areas where you want to invest your time, energy, skills and resources? Over the course of the past year, as I hit 40, I identified four areas that I wanted to broadly commit to: write, read, run, lead. So how did I do? I have ambitions to write my own books and this year I wrote zero. So on that score, 2015 was not a success. For many years I’ve measured success in my writing but the progress of this blog.…

Read More
Articles 

Four words

Phil Whittall, , , 0 comment

As I approached my 40th birthday in 2015 I began to think through what I wanted and needed to focus on in the next season of my life. I wondered what were the themes of my life that I should give myself to and that in some way described who I was? It wasn’t quite so much tasks or goals, it was more personal, more essential to who I am. These weren’t quite areas of responsibility as much as they were the defining characteristics. I boiled it down to just…

Read More