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Sermons, essays, ideas.

Hi, I’m Alister. After twenty years in software development in London and Melbourne, and more than a decade leading a church in a pub in Melbourne, Australia, I became a Uniting Church Minister in 2019.

I’m interested in how you can reconstruct your faith if you’ve been bruised by your experience of church by taking the tradition more, not less, seriously. I also think about how do to church in post-modernity, having spent more than a decade leading a church in a pub. What does it mean to be a Christian in a world of suffering, doubt, and complexity?

The Cost of Discipleship and the Last Man

How does Friedrich Nietzsche help us make sense of the astonishingly tough demands Jesus makes of his disciples? How could being told to “give away all your possessions” possibly be Good News?

Easter Sermon

No-one knew it was Holy Saturday that first time. No-one who lived through Good Friday would have called it anything but evil, terrible, destructive. The end of all that they had hoped for. All that excitement – the drama of being called and leaving everything to follow this new rabbi, the gradual buildup of the…

Jesus is Lord – and Putin Is Not

I was once asked to sum up the gospel in a sentence. I said this: Jesus is Lord. Why is this so controversial? Did you react a bit when I wrote it? It certainly caused quite a stir amongst the nice, well-meaning Christians in my group. Is this not very stark? Surely the idea of…

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