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.
Seeking and Sharing the Fullness of Life
Seeking and Sharing the Fullness of Life
Sermons on Church
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.
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.
Faced with the decline and disintegration of the Church, we are called to offer ourselves to God as the new branch who faithfully carry God’s love and mercy into a new era.
The Lord’s Prayer is given to us, the Church, as a model to shape all our praying.
Christ calls us together into a spirit-filled body in the face of demonic forces that would seek to drive us apart and trick us into the fatal error of going it alone.
God invites us to say “yes” to the Spirit, to be open to seeing ourselves beyond the constraints others place on us and to be open to forming new community with God and with God’s world.