It’s a worry if the church simply transfers the exhausting, life-draining, joy-sucking demands of the rest of life to its own agenda and programs. The Gospel demands that people need something very different than to feel that their church sees them as a resource to meet their goals. Worse still, the thought that coming to …
God uses people as a means to the end of having people meet and come to have Jesus as their Saviour and Lord. Pastors have a particular role as one of those means. It is possible for focus on the pastor and their personality and leadership to become the point at which people stop. They’ve …
This chair is in the pulpit of the Presbyterian church at Penola. No one sits in it anymore, but it’s still there. A chair is not what the church is about, but it is a reminder of the centrality of the word in that place. It represents a wonderful legacy.
One of the more fascinating things I read this year was David Cook’s effort at auditing the preaching of the Presbyterian Churches of Victoria (Australia) in preparation for conducting a pastor’s conference in Melbourne. This report from the USA based Pew Research Center computer analysed more than 50,000 sermons from a variety of churches in …
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