Hi i'm Al. I'm a priest in the Church of England, a software developer and a musician.
Welcome, friend.
This is my digital garden. A digital garden is like a portfolio but where output is published from the beginning. This means that the collection includes unfinished and bareley started work as well as work that feels complete. The various thoughts and pieces are interconnected allowing you and me to see connecting ideas that, every now and then, result in discovering something new. So there are bits of writing, song ideas and software projects that are potentially embarrasing but I realised that if I wait for content to be ready, I never create anything
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Come With the Fire
A song by Al Munday, presented as a draft recording.
Magnificat
A song of Mary’s song: God’s faithful mercy, good news for the poor, and creation welcoming its King.
Post-Communion Prayer
A pop-punkish version of a post communion prayer from common worship
The Task is not to Toil but to Tarry
An outline for an essay drawn from my sermon on Jesus as the true vine in John 15.
Atonement Images Carry Anthropological Assumptions
Each atonement model implies a particular account of what is wrong with humanity and what kind of change salvation must bring.
Babylon Accumulates While New Jerusalem Heals
Babylon tells an account of humanity in which our hope is only in ourselves: high accumulation, high walls.
Biblical Law Is Wisdom Before It Is Rule Application
Biblical law is first and foremost wisdom literature: it forms discernment for faithful living rather than offering simple rules to apply mechanically.
Biblical Violence and Grieving Mothers
Violent biblical stories can expose the psychological and spiritual damage caused by celebrating victory through the death of another person.
Biblical Wisdom is Innocent as doves and shrewd as vipers
Jesus’ call to be innocent as doves and shrewd as vipers encapsulates the two sides of biblical wisdom ethics.
Biblical Wisdom Is Polyphonic by Design
The Bible is a unified story that leads to Jesus, but it contains multiple voices that interpret, dialogue with, and critique one another by design.
Caring for Creation Through Delight Rather Than Guilt
Caring for Creation Through Delight Rather Than Guilt. Extracts from Three Visions of Paradise Workbook.
Christian Critique Should Begin With Complicity
A defence of Christianity must directly engage the Church’s complicity in evil and what that means for ecclesiology and soteriology.
The Gospel Story Survives the Church’s Failures
The gospel is carried through the Church even when generations of Christians miss its point; God remains ready to speak to the next generation that will listen.
Church Hospitality Requires More Than Inclusion
Tolerance and inclusion are not enough: the Church must foster genuine belonging in order to be fully the Church of Christ.
Churches Are Communities of Competing Narratives
A church communicates its theology through space, shared stories and community practices before we consider its worship, churchmanship or preaching.
Creativity Without Building a Monument to Ourselves
Creativity Without Building a Monument to Ourselves. Extracts from Three Visions of Paradise Workbook.
The Daytime and the Sabbath Are Like Dry Land—but in Time
Genesis’ separation of darkness and water offers a way to see daylight and Sabbath as forms of created space: one in the world, the other in time.
Difference Is Often Experienced as Threat
A feminist reading of Genesis 1 shows how difference can be experienced as threat and turned into fear, rejection or control.
Wisdom Can Be Found in Surprising Places
Wisdom may come through unexpected readers and interpretations, so discernment requires humility about our own reading.
Divine Order Is Knowable but Not Exhaustively Masterable
Proverbs presents creation as ordered and intelligible, but that order should not be reduced to a deterministic system humans can fully control.
End-Times Politics Can Be an Eschatology of Abandonment
Some end-times politics treats catastrophe as inevitable and turns the decisive question into who can escape, survive, or remain protected.
Eternal Life Is Quality as Well as Quantity
Eternal Life Is Quality as Well as Quantity. Extracts from Three Visions of Paradise Workbook.
Fear of the Lord Locates Wisdom Within Covenant Faithfulness
In the Genesis 3 and Proverbs material, wisdom is not rejected but subordinated to dependence upon God and expressed through covenant faithfulness.
Fruitfulness Is Relational Rather Than Merely Productive
Fruitfulness includes encouragement, trust, communal formation, and the creation of conditions in which others can flourish.
Genesis 3 Is About More Than Labour Pain
Genesis 3:16 may be describing the relational and emotional suffering surrounding conception and family life rather than simply predicting the physical pain of childbirth.
God’s Diversity Is Reflected in Creation
Divine unity does not require uniformity. Difference and diversity may be intrinsic to the way God relates to creation.
God’s Joyous Being
A reading note on Dallas Willard’s account of divine joy and affection.
God’s Perfection Includes Relational Openness
The notes on divine perfection raise a tension between immutability and genuine relationship, suggesting that perfection may not mean emotional or relational immobility.
God’s Presence Is Found Among the Poor
The vault repeatedly connects Christian perception of God with attention to those who are marginalised, economically poor, or socially excluded.
Grace Turns Graves into Gardens
Christian hope is not simply escape from death or emptiness but God’s ability to transform places of loss into places of life.
Human Agency Is Neither Absolute nor Passive
The engaged-trust theme offers an anthropology in which humans depend on God’s sovereignty while remaining responsible to resist injustice and participate in change.
Human Beings Are Formed by Narratives
People and communities receive identity through stories, symbols, histories, and practices rather than through abstract beliefs alone.
Identity Is Received Before It Is Performed
John’s claim that we are children of God presents belonging as a gift that precedes moral instruction or self-construction.
Jesus Is Lord
The confession that Jesus is Lord should reshape public life, church identity, and Christian ideas of power.
Jesus Is the Criterion for Christian Claims About Victory
Christian claims about power, salvation, and the future should be judged by Jesus.
Judges Is Suspicious of Charismatic Saviours
The book of Judges presents leadership as increasingly corrupted when gifted people are treated as if they can become the saviour of the community.
Learning to Attend to Creation
Questions from the workbook about attention, God’s character, and everyday habits of care.
Leviticus Imagines God in the Neighbourhood
Leviticus makes more sense when read as a practical theology of how an imperfect people can live near a holy God.
Liturgical Order Communicates Theology
The placement of words, actions, and declarations in a service can subtly determine whether authority is located in God, the priest, the couple, or the gathered community.
Many Ways to Understand the Cross
The different theories of atonement are best understood as complementary perspectives on the many-sided meaning of the cross.
Marriage Is Communal
Marriage should be understood as a public and communal commitment, not merely a private relationship between two people.
Mission Begins by Listening to Existing Narratives
Church planting and revitalisation should attend to the history, symbols, memories, and local stories already present in a place.
Mission Is Word and Deed Held Together
Missional action becomes distorted when practical service is detached from its theological meaning, or when proclamation is detached from embodied concern.
Mission Requires Attention to Power
The notes on empire, poverty, justice hubs, and marginalised communities suggest that mission must ask who benefits from a church’s activity and whose voice remains unheard.
Na’ar Does Not Simply Mean Child
The Hebrew term na’ar in Proverbs can refer to a young person, servant, adolescent, or young heir, so translating it simply as child can obscure who the text is addressing.
Old Testament Anthropology Is Oriented Around Human Function
In the Old Testament material, human identity is expressed not only through what humans are but through their vocation to mediate God’s presence and rule under divine authority.
Parables Must Be Read Through Their Narrative Context
The meaning of a parable is shaped primarily by where it appears in the Gospel’s narrative, including Jesus’ journey, audience, and surrounding conflicts.
Pauline Mission Is Adaptive Without Being Indifferent
Paul’s methods appear context-sensitive, but the underlying theological purpose remains stable; this distinguishes missionary flexibility from theological compromise.
Paul’s Use of Habakkuk Reframes the Problem of Israel and the Nations
Paul’s use of Habakkuk connects the prophet’s concern about law, sin, and the Gentiles with the argument of Romans.
Play Is a Sign of Safety
Play Is a Sign of Safety. Extracts from Three Visions of Paradise Workbook.
Prepare for War Is Not a Hot Take
“Prepare for war” need not be a novel prophecy or a celebration of violence.
Proverbs Reworks Earlier Wisdom Traditions
Proverbs appears to draw on surrounding ancient Near Eastern wisdom traditions and adapt them within its own theological vision rather than presenting itself as culturally isolated.
Proverbs Trains Discernment Through Internal Tension
The contradictory voices within Proverbs may be intentionally arranged to prevent mechanical rule application and require wisdom from the reader.
Proverbs Was Not Written as a Parenting Manual
The violent sayings about the rod should not be lifted out of their ancient educational context and applied uncritically to modern children.
Receiving Blessing to Become a Blessing
The workbook connects receiving God’s gifts with offering a foretaste of the kingdom to a community.
Recovering Wonder
The world does not mainly need more spectacular experiences; it needs people who have recovered the ability to pay attention and wonder.
Reparative Interpretation Reads Critically Without Abandoning the Text
A reparative reading acknowledges harmful or problematic features in a biblical text while remaining open to discovering value within its cultural and literary complexity.
Ritual Impurity Is Not the Same as Moral Sin
Leviticus distinguishes ritual states from moral wrongdoing, challenging the assumption that everything described as unclean is automatically sinful.
Salvation Is Not Escape
Salvation is not escape from creation but reconciliation with God, neighbour, community, and the whole created order.
Salvation Reorders Human Relationships
Participation in Christ is presented as breaking down hostility and relativising social distinctions, not merely as securing individual forgiveness.
Singing Together Is Worship
Worship is more than singing, but singing together remains a powerful way for a divided community to practise unity.
Story Sandwiches and the Architecture of Creation
The separating-and-filling pattern of Genesis 1 may help readers recognise why biblical stories are often arranged as nested or interrupted narratives.
The Audacity of Being Called God’s Children
The greatness of God’s love is not merely its emotional intensity but the astonishing status it gives: that we should be called children of God.
The Bible’s Outsiders Often Understand the Story First
Biblical narratives repeatedly use outsiders, women, foreigners, and socially marginalised people to expose what insiders have failed to see.
The Church Participates in God’s Mission Rather Than Owning It
The idea of missio Dei shifts mission away from institutional expansion and toward participation in what God is already doing.
The Counterfeit Can Look Like Salvation
Scripture often portrays evil as something that resembles salvation: order, security, abundance, technological achievement, and escape from death.
The Fool Is More Than Someone Who Lacks Intelligence
In Proverbs, foolishness is fundamentally a moral and relational refusal of wisdom, not merely an intellectual deficiency.
The Gift of Vulnerability
Becoming fully alive requires a willingness to become vulnerable, because safety and self-protection can prevent genuine growth.
The Gospel Relocates Honour and Shame
Paul’s language of not being ashamed of the gospel suggests a revaluation of status, power, and public honour.
The Imago Dei Is a Conspicuous but Limited Old Testament Theme
The image-of-God language in Genesis 1 is significant but occurs relatively rarely in the Hebrew Bible, raising questions about how central it was to Israelite anthropology.
The Imago Dei Undermines Human Hierarchy
If all people bear God’s image, distinctions of gender, ethnicity, class, and status cannot justify unequal human worth.
The Lamb Redefines What Conquest Means
Revelation destabilises the assumption that victory means becoming a stronger Caesar.
The Old Testament Does Not Treat Every Leader as a Hero
Biblical narratives often preserve the failures and moral compromises of their leaders instead of turning them into uncomplicated examples to imitate.
The Parables Reframe Wisdom as Readiness
In the parable of the ten virgins, wisdom is not merely intellectual understanding; it is preparedness to act faithfully before the crisis arrives.
The Self Is More Than One Description
Psychological, vocational, existential and theological accounts of a person can all be true without reducing someone to a single definition.
The Spirit Equips Craftsmanship
The workbook connects artistic skill, imagination and practical craft with the Spirit’s gifts.
The Spirit’s Empowerment Does Not Automatically Legitimate a Judge’s Actions
In Judges, divine empowerment can enable a deliverer to achieve an intended outcome without implying that every choice made by that deliverer is morally approved.
The Ten Virgins as a Warning to Jesus’ Immediate Audience
The parable of the ten virgins is best read as a warning directed toward Jesus’ contemporary audience, rather than only as a prediction about the church’s future readiness.
The Two Mountains Ask Who Is Sacrificed
The two mountains offer a compact biblical diagnostic.
Theories of Atonement Are Historically Situated
The development of satisfaction and penal-substitutionary accounts shows how doctrines of salvation are shaped by their cultural and political contexts.
Who Is My Neighbour?
Christian ethics should learn from effective altruism’s concern for distant neighbours while resisting its tendency to reduce human value to calculation.
Wisdom Is Both Divine Gift and Human Practice
Wisdom appears as rooted in God’s ordering of creation while also requiring human acquisition, interpretation, and disciplined action.
Worship Is Collective World-Making
Singing, creativity, and liturgical participation do not merely express belief; they create a shared communal reality and declare what the community considers worthy.
You Are Becoming, Not a Fixed Essence
Human identity is not a static category but an unfolding pattern of commitments, loves, habits and relationships.
Daring greatly with Psalm 1
Finding parallels between the critic in Roosevelt's famous speech and the wicked one in Psalm 1
Wisdom can be found in surprising places
Wisdom in the Bible is woven throughout creation. We should expect to find wisdom that draws us toward faithfulness in all sorts of places.
Reading with Creation Goggles Part 1: Separating and filling - the reading of Genesis 1 that changes everything
Genesis 1 has a very clear shape, one that is often obscured by our concerns about science, doctrine or culture wars. But what if the essential pattern of separating and filling was as second nature as "in the beginning" or "Let there be light"? How would that change how ordinary people read the Bible?
An Avalanche of Crumbs - When Jesus called a Woman to Preach.
The story of the Syrophoenician woman is one of the most ignored Gospel stories in our pulpits. Jesus calls a woman a dog. Not because he hated women but because he was activating her leadership. He was calling her to speak prophetically to the gathered people of God. He was calling her to preach.
Genesis 21: Who Gets to Laugh? Who Gets to Drink?
When confronted with difference, which path will we choose? Welcome or rejection?
The Hell of Getting Everything You Want
Why the promise of AI creation mirrors C.S. Lewis's chilling vision of hell in The Great Divorce.
Why an unbiblical view of perfection makes Christians into bigots
Diversity in creation is not a flaw. It's a reflection of the good God.
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