Calling and Vocation
Every person has purpose in life that they detect rather than invent, and when the Christian church is working well, we are all on the path to working out and out-working those callings. I believe this understanding is core to how God is wanting to re-shape the church at the moment.
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Don’t Be a Christian—Be a Disciple
Who is Jesus to you? Jesus never called people to be Christians—he called them to follow him. Following Jesus isn’t about belief alone; it’s about reorienting your entire life around him. True discipleship means being with Jesus, becoming like him, and doing as he did. Will you follow him fully?
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Do you have a dream like Martin Luther King Jr.?
Martin Luther King Jr. shared a dream that changed the world. Like never before we need leaders who can do likewise. This is how you do it.
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I miss my mate, Phil.
My mate Phil passed away in the early hours of Sunday the 29th of December. I miss him. I don't know why some people are healed and others are not. Phil had so much more to give.
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Time Out is a gift we all need.
Failing to take time off can mean the difference between spending your life reacting and out of control, or spending your life with the ability to make choices.
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I know that my life does have a purpose and that often in the times I am least able to find the words to describe my calling, it is seen most clearly.
It has been a while since I wrote a Faith Reflection. It is not that I haven’t wanted to… I have just felt unable to find the words to explain to myself or anyone else what I have been experiencing. I went through a similar, but longer, period of wordlessness after arriving in Canada. I was changing. My world had dramatically changed. And it was all happening in a way that was beyond my ability to describe. I don’t feel like this is what should be happening for a leader. I feel like a leader should be operating from a plan that leads towards a clearly articulated goal. Over the…
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The moments when you decide your core values are actually the biggest turning points of your life.
Every now and then life takes a major turning point. Something changes that means every other aspect of your life is affected. From an external perspective, my family and I are in a moment like that right now. In eight days time we will be boarding a Qantas flight to head back to Australia. I will begin my new job as Senior Pastor of Citywide Baptist church, Hobart, a week later. On the surface it looks and feels like a very big thing. It feels like a life turning point. At a deeper level though, I think real life turning points look much less dramatic. Last Sunday I gave my…
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The reason that things won’t change is that the real problem is buying into simplistic labels rather than goals.
Watching the news channels in North America is like watching a slow motion car crash… everyone can see disaster coming and yet no-one seems able to do anything about it. I make a point of subscribing both to CNN and Fox News. Switching between channels is like teleporting between alternate universes. One of the things that stands out sharply on both the news channels and on my twitter feed is that the terms “conservative” and “liberal” have become emotionally charged, particularly on Fox. Simplistic commentators divide the world into a continuum between what are seen as two polarities. What I find bewildering is that people identify with those labels and…
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I know that God has a plan for my life, however I also know that my understanding of that plan is extremely limited
In a little over a week I will be giving my last sermon at St. Albert Alliance church. When I started Faith Reflections in 2010 I knew I wanted to find a way to reflect in an ongoing way on the journey of faith. I remember sitting in the living room of my house in Poatina writing my very first reflection. At the time I was feeling as though I had endured quite enough change, and in many ways Faith Reflections was an attempt to find my bearings. I was still reeling and trying to process all the events that had resulted in my Dad finishing as the leader of the…
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There is no question that women have not been seen or valued by the church in the way that Jesus saw or valued them. #ThingsOnlyChristianWomenHear
Often in brain-dead moments I will scan my Facebook or Twitter news feed. This morning I came across a post from Michael Frost which linked to the twitter hashtag #ThingsOnlyChristianWomenHear, and intrigued, I clicked on the tag. If you are not on social media you can look at this blog by Rachel Elizabeth Asproth where 55 of the top tweets are collated. It is an interesting list, mostly of direct quotes that women report being said to them in the context of church. Apart from the odd one (and some were very odd), the overall sentiments could be summarized as: Women shouldn’t teach men (either because the Bible says so or because they…
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Thank God for heroes like Rod Hoople who remind us all what the point of life really is.
I, like so many others, wanted a miracle. I wanted to hear from Cheryl that Rod had opened his eyes and confounded the doctors. It had only been two weeks ago that Rod was with us on Sunday morning, helping prepare our team who would be travelling to Mexico in late July. Rod and his wife Cheryl are heroes in our church. Rod had been a librarian for a few decades. Cheryl had been part of YWAM, and for her the idea of travel and engaging cross-culturally was normal. It took a while for Rod to understand his wife’s heart. He shared with me the profound impact of his first trip…
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Is the church the moral compass for the world? I hope not.
Last week I wrote about pornography and received a lot of feedback, some of which focussed the question of whether the church should be trying to be a moral compass. In a world where we see different wings of the Christian church lining up against each other on almost every issue you can name, it is an obvious question. That question though, leads to another… what is “the church”? I think what most people mean by “the church” is the organizational structures that are represented by personalities we see on the television or at events in out local communities. When we get most frustrated with the church, my guess is, it is that structure we…
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Ordination, while indeed symbolic, truly does matter, at least to me.
It has been an unusually long time since I wrote a Faith Reflection. This has largely been because I have been deeply engaged with what I have been doing over the last few weeks, but also because it has taken a bit of processing to come to terms with it. You see, in addition to running our first one week Foundations course at the church and leading the church to run three Open Crowd festivals simultaneously across the city, and engaging with an annual planning retreat, I got ordained. Since I started as a Pastor three years ago, I knew ordination was going to be something that needed to happen.…
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When following Jesus has to wait
The reason that things won’t change is that the real problem is buying into simplistic labels rather than goals.
There is no question that women have not been seen or valued by the church in the way that Jesus saw or valued them. #ThingsOnlyChristianWomenHear
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Will the Christian church look in the mirror to discover things have changed?
Lately, I’ve been looking in the mirror and being surprised by what I see. The face staring back at me is 10 years older than I imagine it to be. Apparently, this is a normal phenomenon. I have a strong sense that the Christian church, too, is needing to look in the mirror. I’ve was in Calgary participating in a conference run by the Evangelical Missiological Society featuring, among other things, a series of lectures by Dr. Chris Wright (who is the author of a number of books about the implications of Biblical Theology for the practice of the Church). I appreciated Chris’s sessions. He gave a very thorough, biblical framework for mission…
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The real question of healthy sexuality
I wrote a reflection about how Christianity is not anti-sex and I was blown away by the number of people who responded positively, and by the number of people that read it. In just two days that reflection became the most read item I have written on Faith Reflections. As I wrote last week, we as a church are engaging in a sermon series about Jesus, the bible and sexuality and one of the core things that is coming through in that series and also in what we wrote about last week is that the bible puts forward a completely different story about sexuality than the world does. Unfortunately the story the world…
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Moments of inspiration are wonderful, but it is the system I build into my life that determines my actions.
When you have space to think and rest it’s much easier to have perspective. It’s much easier to see how things can change and what forward looks like. When things are busy, it’s easy to get caught in the current of life. I actually have only been back at work since Tuesday, and as I sit here on Friday and reflect on the past few days I can see that one of my biggest challenges in implementing the goals I set myself a week ago will simply be getting stronger at swimming against the current. in 2008 it felt as though God kept bringing me back to Matthew chapter 10, particularly in…
