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Faith

Faith through the furnace

May 4, 2022, Published by

“Until the lion learns how to write, every story will glorify the hunter.” – African Proverb I still remember when I first walked through the doors of the church. I’d heard about places like this, I’d seen them on music videos, but to find one in Newcastle was something else. Smiling people greeted me and got me a drink before taking me into the auditorium. It was in darkness with haze rolling across the stage and strobe lighting. I’d grown up in a cult and leaving it had been hard, not because I didn’t want to leave, but because cults...
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Repentance and the Kingdom

June 7, 2020, Published by

There’s a word that Jesus used when he walked the streets and byways of first century Judea: repent. “Repent,” he would say, “for the kingdom of heaven is at hand”. It’s a word that carries a heavy weight. For that reason it’s been sometimes sidelined a little within some of our circles. We try to explain it without saying it, to summon it without asking for it by name. But if we’re followers of the way of Jesus, repentance should be a consistent theme of our life’s journey. Repentance means to change our mind or purpose, to turn back in...
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Caesar’s Gold

December 6, 2018, Published by

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the ways that Christians respond to the politics of the age. When I was pastoring in an area in the north of Newcastle, I would be intentional about leading us in prayer for the local MP and councillors and encouraging people to view them as co-workers in our shared desire to see the good of the area. I believe we have a clear biblical mandate to pray for our leaders, be good citizens, submit to the rule of law. But that can feel hard to hold in tension when there are world leaders who seem...
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Reformed and being reformed

October 30, 2017, Published by

I’m not going to lie, I was underwhelmed by the door. When you travel over 650 miles to see a door, you expect it to be as you imagined it. While there’s some debate about whether Luther ever posted his 95 theses on the door of the Schlosskirche, we can all be sure he didn’t personally engrave them on the ornate door that now stands there. If the door itself was something of a let down, however, the trip to Wittenberg was anything but. I’d travelled there to learn more about the events that led to the reformation and to see...
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Resurrection

May 16, 2017, Published by

The thinkers and philosophers who gathered to grill the apostle Paul on his beliefs atop the Areopagus had heard many things in their time. Athens had always been a centre of knowledge and education; it was the city that had produced Aristotle, Plato, and Socrates and it carried the intellectual stature to match that tradition. The men Paul spoke with probably thought they had heard every idea under the sun. According to Luke, the historian who travelled with and wrote about Paul, they did little else with their time but talk about and listen to ideas. A revolutionary claim There was something...
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