West Baptist Church

Each year I write a ‘Pastor’s Top Five’ for our Annual Report.  This year I thought I’d serialise it on the blog, so here is number 3: one of the 5 things I am most grateful for in 2009 at West.
#3 Head meets Heart meets Hands
It’s still a huge buzz for me that I [...]

How are we changed by encountering Christ?

On our fourth Sunday in Advent in 2009 we explored this question using Michael Foreman’s picture book, Cat in the Manger. The cat’s tenancy in the stable is based on its mouse-catching prowess, but relationships in the barn will never be the same after a visiting couple meet their [...]

I said this morning (click here for audio of the sermon) that the third week in Advent, where we focus on joy, is not only the hardest week to come dressed in the right colour – yellow – but is also the hardest to preach on.

It’s often said that joy is not the same as [...]

I heard today that five-year-old Thomas really enjoyed the ‘rice prayers’ we put together for the Handful of Rice series in June.  So much that his Mum has now made a sheet of Advent and Christmas prayers, to be used at mealtimes and bedtimes and whenever a praying occasion arises at home.
If you’d like a [...]

Let me tell you what a young woman called Esther thought about the Peace we Find Ourselves In (with thanks to JK).
Esther, or ‘Etty’, Hillesum was born on 15 January 1914, Netherlands. Just like the biblical hero she’s named after, Esther was Jewish, and if you know what happened in the 1930s and 1940s in [...]

When Georg Frideric Handel was in the middle of writing the Hallelujah Chorus, one of the most famous pieces of music in the world, he was interrupted by his assistant, who had been banging on his study door for ages, not getting any reply.  Handel looked up, in tears, and said ‘I thought I saw [...]

I go back five generations in this land, on each side of my family.  And until this year, my whanau knew none of our ancestors earlier than the brave or desperate people who left various parts of the United Kingdom.  So I’ve always been in awe of people who can recite their whakapapa, their family [...]

Can’t remember what colour to wear each week at West? Me neither, so I wrote it down…