In her book Why You Are Australian: A Letter to My Children, expatriate Australian writer Nikki Gemmell reflects on various aspects of Australian-ness, particularly in contrast to her adopted home in London, including the Australian ambivalence toward religion. “As an adult I’d never done church—it was for people in strange places like Cooranbong,” she writes.…
The words ‘Jesus is coming soon’ have been echoed through time. For thousands of years Christians have been preaching the same message and yet, this Earth continues to suffer great tragedies – earthquakes, terrorist attacks, wars, famines and sickness. Many question ‘why hasn’t Jesus come yet? And is He really coming? While many others are…
Worship, despite supposedly being a simple task is a topic of much controversy. Instead of worship being about God, we make worship about ourselves. “Do we allow drums?”, “Should we sing hymns?”, “Should we have an actual worship band or should we instead have a choir, or an orchestra, or one singer?” and, “do we…
Tuesday 6:30 pm, I have just returned from a short run and am about to make dinner. I’m doing this program called “Couch to 5k” because I decided it was time to improve my cardio health and, because I couldn’t find a program called “Office chair to 5k,” I figured this one would do. I’ve…
Routine. That’s the word that comes to mind when I think of church. Waking up on a Saturday morning, putting on my nice ‘church-clothes,’ going and sitting in the same pew, with the same people, standing and singing the same songs, going through the same motions. When did church become a monotonous, repetitive activity? I…
We have used the “Church is not a building” line so many times that—not only have we forgotten that, at least in some ways, a church so obviously is a building—we rarely pause to think what other temptations we could similarly rebut by adapting this simple statement. So let me suggest some other worthwhile applications…
Sometimes when we repeat a true statement too many times, we begin to forget the ways in which the statement might be untrue. One such statement is this: “Church is not a building.” How many times have we heard it without pausing to think about what we are saying? Of course, it is true. Church…
Church is home to me. A space where I can be myself, uncontained and unashamed while coming to Jesus in fellowship with other believers and friends. I walked into church for the first time this week in my pyjamas, but I wasn’t where you’re all probably thinking. I was in my friends’ room in the girl’s…