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If we are not continually seeking and learning and changing, we are not actually followers of Jesus, and we are certainly not seeking first the Kingdom of God.
It is Saturday morning and I am preparing for my first “normal” Sunday as the Senior Pastor of Citywide Baptist church. As I was reflecting on what my first sermon should be about, I realised that it needed to come back to what has been the central question of my life since Leeanne and I were married: What does it mean to seek first the Kingdom of God? Regular readers of Faith Reflections will know that Leeanne and I had Matthew 6:33 engraved on our wedding rings after deciding that we wanted that truth of that verse to be our point of orientation for the rest of our lives. Only 11…
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Don’t let the dark side of consumerism rob you of your life. Life is for living now.
Article in todays St. Albert Gazette Next week we are heading back to Australia after being here for four years. We have loved our time in St. Albert. This is a very special place and you are served by some remarkably dedicated and gifted leaders both in the church and in the broader community. The Good Neighbour Project is remarkable (goodniehgbourproject.org) and I don’t think there is any doubt that St. Albert is the Block Party capital of the world. I doubt that any other city on the planet could point to over 50% of streets having participated through the course of a decade. It has been so encouraging to see…
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I don’t know where the next 23 years will take us but I do know who I will be sharing the adventure with… the bravest person I know.
As we come up to Mothers day in just over a week, I’m going to take the opportunity over the next little while, to reflect on the ways that three women in particular have shaped my life I find myself at another point of transition. Transition isn’t easy. I wasn’t expecting my life to be so full of change when I left home as a 17 year old. When I was 21 I met someone who would become my partner on this crazy journey, and she has been the person, by far, who has had the biggest influence on my life. We started our journey together with long talks about…
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Embrace big changes. Both the joyful, and the horrible moments of discontinuity produce life.
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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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How can I bring my children up in the training and instruction of the Lord without exasperating them?
I am a trained youth worker. I know most of the theories of adolescent development. I have worked with all kinds of youth from all kinds of backgrounds. You would think that being a parent of teenagers would therefore be easy. Its not. Being a youth worker is completely different to being a parent. A few months ago I wrote a reflection on the realization that parenting teenagers is fundamentally about a clash of Kingdoms. My realization was that parenting teenagers is about stepping into, and not avoiding the right kinds of conflict. Leeanne and I committed ourselves to seeking first the Kingdom of God in every area of our lives…
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