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.
An Open Table where Love knows no borders
An Open Table where Love knows no borders
Sermons on Church
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.
We are not added to a particular church flock in order to be in the “right” group, but in order to learn, with Christ, to love others and lay down our lives for the world.
We are a ragtag bunch, but in witnessing to God’s mercy and love, we become the people of God together.
God’s mission is much bigger than us, and to play our part in it, we need to live freely and fearlessly and maintain a humble and faithful connection with the traditions and wisdom of the wider Church.
Our identity as a community of Jesus’s followers is primarily expressed in love, gratitude and hospitality, not in compliance with a negative code of conduct.