Categories
Christianity Faith Religion sermons

Do Not Be Afraid

Imagine yourself a tourist in New York City on the 8th of November, 2001. You’ve gotten up early in the morning to take in the sights, and you find yourself gazing up at the enormous glass and steel man made mountains that were the World Trade Centre….. If even something as permanent seeming and invulnerable as the Twin Towers can come down, glinting in the sun one moment and a nightmare of ash and collapsed building materials the next – then what can you trust? What can you have confidence in?

Categories
Christianity Faith sermons

What is Church For? A Pentecost Sermon

What is the church for? As you can imagine, this question often comes to me as I work my way through my three years of ministerial formation. There seem to be a lot of committees – and I don’t think renaming them “councils” makes them any more glamorous, a lot of OH&S, a lot of […]

Categories
Apologia pro vita sua Cafechurch Christianity Faith Spirituality in the Ordinary

Aristotle, George Vaillant, and Cafechurch

It’s been a little while since I worked on my apologia pro vita sua thread – more than time to return to it. I had a bash at this article over the weekend, and ultimately didn’t like it much, which is why this is a bit later than usual – I’d rather be late with […]

Categories
Cafechurch Christianity Faith So You Want To Run A Cafechurch Spirituality

The Journey Continues

One of the most helpful books I have read to explain what I am observing in Cafechurch is A Churchless Faith, by Alan Jamieson. I think it is a really helpful model of what happens to people as they come out of what he calls EPC (Evangelical, Pentecostal, Charismatic) churches. It is interesting, not just […]

Categories
Cafechurch Christianity Culture and Society Religion So You Want To Run A Cafechurch Spirituality

On Humility and Doing Church in a Pub

For my money, the most important thing about doing church in post-modernity is this: you don’t know what you are doing. Not only that, you don’t know anything at all. You don’t know where you are going, and so you don’t know how to get there either. Don’t feel bad, neither does anyone else, least […]