Relationships
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Do You See This Person? Learning to Love Your Neighbour
Jesus asked Simon, “Do you see this woman?” It’s a question that challenges our fears, our assumptions and even the way we help. Loving our neighbours means seeing beyond their labels—and allowing them to love us too.
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When our friends become prospects
Would I still want to be your friend if you never became a Christian? A reflection on ulterior and ultimate motives, loving our neighbours, and sharing how Jesus meets us in ordinary life and pain.
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Build Your Imperfect Family: Five Practices for Healthier Relationships
Family is one of God’s greatest gifts—and one of life’s greatest challenges. There is no perfect family, but through prayer, forgiveness, honesty and grace, we can help build healthier families and churches.
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Six Ways We Structure Time — And Why It Matters.
We structure time in six basic ways — withdrawal, ritual, pastime, activity, psychological games, and intimacy. Most of us move between them without noticing. But these patterns shape our relationships, our church life, and even our sense of hope. Which one dominates your life? And what would it take to move toward real intimacy?
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Listening as Mercy: Why It Changes Everything
We never arrive neutrally. We carry assumptions, categories, and pictures of how things should be. But Jesus calls us beyond our assumptions and into mercy. And mercy begins with listening.
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What reality are you living from?
We don’t see the world as it is—we see it as we are. Unless Jesus interrupts our story, we live from beliefs shaped by fear, comfort, or culture. He invites us to repent, to replant our tree, and to find real life by rooting our whole selves in him.
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The seeds of destruction were planted in the American declaration of Independence. You can thank the founders for Trump and Hillary.
A Bigger Story: How the Real Gospel Changes Everything
When I saw the Toyota commercial I had to write something. This Christmas, lets not settle for the imitation.
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A healthy mid-life crisis?
I think I’m having a Mid-life crisis… in a good way. Brene Brown tells me that “Mid-life is the first point in your life when you can play the movie to the end. She is right. My little crisis has been precipitated by the Christmas holidays that we had been looking forward to throughout 2020. We watched borders close and open, and close and open, hoping that our daughter Maddi, and son Daniel, would be able to make it home. They did. For the very first time the family dinner table was surrounded by adults after our youngest, Sophie, turned 18 in the middle of the year. It was encouraging…
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Christianity is not anti-sex
Christianity is not anti-sex, Christianity holds the key to healthy sexuality. We just need to talk about it more.
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If you want next year to be different meet people and read books that challenge your “normal”.
I am a different person because of the books I have read and the people I have been exposed to, but there are plenty of books and people who haven’t changed me. They are the ones who I only engaged with superficially and who didn’t challenge my "normal."
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In the wake of #metoo we need to rediscover the implications of a controversial passage of the bible that points to a model of a healthy relationship between the sexes.
It has been interesting to hear my daughters responding to the avalanche of abuse claims coming out after the #metoo movement gathered steam. International women’s day has been commemorated since 1975, but things have seismically shifted over the past 24 months in a way that has surprised many people including me. My girls are strong, beautiful and intelligent and they are very sensitive to anything that looks like injustice based on gender. On one occasion my youngest daughter was feeling tired and she burst into tears because she had suddenly internalised the data about the wages gap between men and women and told me “I am going to get paid 20%…
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We need to rediscover the self-giving generosity that actually is love, and stop settling for cheap imitations.
We received our postal ballot in the mail today. For those overseas who might not be aware, Australians are being invited to express their opinion on the legalisation of same-sex marriage. While it is not really a referendum, the Government have declared that they will base their policy on the result of what is, in fact, a giant opinion poll. I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the whole question and what it means to be a follower of Jesus in this moment in our countries history. More people have read that reflection than anything else I have written in the last seven years, which gives an idea how…
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Steve Jobs may have had a bigger impact on the spiritual formation of a generation than any other person in the last 50 years.
As we see the impact of the i-devices on our society I am starting to wonder whether Steve Jobs may have had a bigger impact on the spiritual formation of a generation than any other person in the last 50 years. I used to joke that Jobs was the Anti-Christ, an image he did little to dispel by pricing the Apple 1 at $666.66 and shaping an apple logo with a bite out of it. Of course, I was never serious. I fondly remember the day I saw the unveiling of the iPhone, and then the iPad. I was fascinated and excited by this new and seemingly magical technology. While…
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This is an important moment for the church to have a long hard look at itself and how it relates to same sex attracted people.
Up till now, I have been avoiding writing directly about the current same sex marriage and homophobia. One glimpse at Facebook will tell you that this is an issue that divides friends and even divides families. The reason this issue is so intense, is that on both sides people feel as though they are fighting a battle that goes to the very heart of their beliefs about themselves and the world. For many Gay and Lesbian people, the question of whether they are able to marry seems like the final battle in the war to be accepted as full members of the society. Things have come a long way in a…
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Too many of us live in a two dimensional, colourless world of our own making.
I vividly remember my first Sunday as a Pastor. I was on the platform being introduced to a sea of faces who were completely unfamiliar, and feeling more than a little overwhelmed. The closest analogy I could find to explain the experience was a brand new colouring book, where you can see the outlines but none of the shades or shadows that bring those outlines to life. Four and a half years later, the outlines had been filled in by experiences, conversations and stories. The faces had become people and the people had entered my heart. Throughout the first three weeks of our new adventure with Citywide Baptist Church, I have…
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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…
