What do you are you looking for? It’s a fundamental question. What is it that you really, deep down, under all the surface nonsense and trivia of your life, long for?
Author: Alister Pate
I'm a minister in the Uniting Church in Australia, with two congregations: one in Northcote / Chalice, which now includes Cafechurch Melbourne, and one up the road in Reservoir, confusingly known as Preston High Street. I am
For a lot of people, Christmas is an ambivalent time. Emotionally complex. It holds a lot of stuff – both good and bad. For some, it is easy to enter into the spirit of it, perhaps reclaiming that childish delight. For others, it is marred by grief or difficult family relationships. As children we might […]
Categories
Joseph and the Kingdom
Joseph went to bed that night with a lot on his mind. If it wasn’t enough that the Romans were propping up that blasphemous charlatan Herod, his own fiancee, Mary, was pregnant – and not to him. What on earth was God up to? My sermon on Matthew 1:18-25 from Preston High Street UCA A […]
Christian leaders go wrong. We should talk about it. A few unstructured thoughts from a Cafechurch session.
What is the Gospel in our age of anxiety?
What does the resurrection of Jesus mean? What is it to “believe” in the resurrection? Ultimately, does it, or anything, really matter?
Categories
Who is this Jesus person?
Who is this Jesus person? And what does a parade held on the other side of the world two thousand years ago have to do with us?
Categories
Preparation
What’s the most precious thing you own? Would you give it up? Would you give it to the man who saved your brother’s life?
A broken, inarticulate sermon preached in the immediate aftermath of the Christchurch Mosque shootings. The world can seem like a very dark place some days, and it is hard to preach a message of hope. Nonetheless, this is what I am called to do.
Someone asked me once “why does God need us to tell Him how wonderful He is? Does He have some sort of ego problem?” Apart from the regrettable use of gendered language for God, it is a fair point. If God is a personal, as Christians like to insist, then it’s a bit weird. Surely […]
Alister Pate 