In determining our church’s way forward, we need to discern who we exist to serve, and it shouldn’t just be ourselves.
Seeking and Sharing the Fullness of Life
Seeking and Sharing the Fullness of Life
Sermons on Vocation
We are invited to work towards visions of God’s reign, knowing we will never be entirely successful, but sustained by imagining the possibilities.
Like the disciples, we stumble, but we too can pick ourselves up and re-orient ourselves to the transformed landscape that Jesus is slowly mapping out for us.
As creatures made in the image of God, imitation of God is the pathway to fullness of life.
Taking up your cross is about a willingness to pay the price of following Jesus and living out your baptism. It is not a generalised stoicism.
Jesus is angered by our trivialising of religion that inoculates us against the claims of a holy God, and calls us to clean out the crassness and commercialism and approach God on God’s terms.
Jesus commits himself to the path of redemptive suffering in preference to either fight or flight, and he calls us to follow him in that commitment.
We seek to live and practice non-violence as the only way to overcome injustice, persecution, tyranny and violence and build cultures of peace.
Following Christ in incarnational ministry is not a call to do everything ourselves.
God calls us, as individuals and as a church, to a journey with him, but sometimes we find ourselves sitting at a station watching the trains go by.
In baptism Jesus submits himself to his God-given destiny and vocation, and it is by a similar submission to God, allowing Christ to live out his baptismal life in us and for us, that we have life and hope.
Rediscovering the mission of Jesus is one pathway through which we might re-enter the experience of dependence on God.
God has bound pastors and people together in Christ, that we might share in the ultimate victory of Christ as all God’s promises are fulfilled.
By preparing ourselves to die with Christ, we are raised and transfigured, new people with a new vocation.
Authority in the Christian community derives not from worldly status or popularity contests, but from a humble willingness to imitate Christ in his devotion to God and his service of others.
In our worship we drink in the vision of heaven and earth made one so that our yearning might be fuelled; strengthening us against despair and empowering us to strive for the renewal of the world.
Jesus calls us to follow his lead in rejecting easy comfortable paths and choosing the tough road of costly active love.
In baptism we follow Jesus in being “ordained” and empowered for mission.
God calls and equips us to carry on the mission of Jesus regardless of the response.