Whether or not you can accept the idea of a personal devil, there are forces of evil in the world that are bigger and more powerful than our own inner flaws, but conscious and united, we are stronger still.
An Open Table where Love knows no borders
An Open Table where Love knows no borders
Sermons on Church
Jesus’s perplexing teaching on marriage and singleness calls us into a new network of relationships in which all are fully valued.
All our dinners are an anticipation of the vision of a new world, where God’s very self dwells with mortals, all are welcomed, and all pain is taken away.
In God’s vision for humanity, every person and the role they play is valued and cared for. When society fails to live up to this, the Church is called to go against the flow and courageously champion and model it.
There will always be people in the church you find difficult to get on with, and it is their presence that will really enable you to grow in your ability to love.
Jesus’s radical call to align ourselves with his new family trumps even our allegiances to our blood families, and asks us to shape our relationships in the church around a shared commitment to living out the will of God.
If you’re looking for wisdom, healing, practical solutions, look to Jesus, because church leaders constantly fail when they do any more than point to Jesus.
In a world dominated by arrogant and exploitative leaders, Jesus models a gentle shepherding leadership that prioritises the reintegration of the broken over the drive for “success” and “efficiency”.
In his own demonstration of self-sacrificial love, Jesus has shown us what God is like and called us to love God and one another by loving likewise.
Stories of life, worship and ministry from the new church we have helped to plant in Warrnambool, where more than half of the congregation are children.
The parable of the sower is not about us and our shortfalls but on the generosity of our Maker – the Prolific Sower.
My journey has brought me to a place where I have begun to know the rest that Jesus offers.
While the final judgement of each individual is rightly left to God, we are called to ensure that we are found to be loving, merciful and trustworthy by the world around us.
When we offer hospitality to, and accept hospitality from, anyone who comes – every sinner, wretch, reprobate, and wicked woman – we will encounter Christ and experience forgiveness.
God’s Holy Spirit gathers us into one body where our differences are not erased or downplayed, but boldly offered in love and service of one another.
The Revelation’s surprising image of the absence of church buildings in the fulfilled holy city is a helpful reminder that they have always been a risky concession and that their dangers need to be carefully avoided.
Jesus’s agenda, which we are called to follow, is about healing, liberating and gathering in the excluded, not purifying the community by excluding anyone.
It is as members of the body that you are given the gifts that are needed for this body to serve in this time and this place.
Good gossip, listening in love to each other’s stories and seeking the presence of God, helps us to build connection and community and to grow in love.
It is in our woundedness, this woundedness we try to avoid and would rather not acknowledge, that we find our identity as the body of Christ, our identity as the church.