West Baptist Church

What’s your favourite food?
Imagine biting into it, chewing it luxuriously, savouring the taste… mmm…
That’s what we did with Acts 3:1-10 on Sunday morning, in a version of the ancient Christian practice of lectio divina, ‘holy reading’, and it’s something you can do on your own, any day of the week.  Start by imagining broccoli or [...]

At Allan’s baptism the other week, I was thinking how one of the coolest things about the Church-with-a-capital-C is that we are part of a community that stretches throughout time and around the world.  We are not alone.
Tomorrow we have a chance to be reminded of that as many of us begin the E100 Bible [...]

I’ve been quite sick this week, and found it hard to do justice to the texts we looked at today.  Lucky for all of us, what the Holy Spirit chooses to do with preaching seems to be pretty independent of its ‘quality’!  If anyone would like to think further about what we discussed today, I [...]

One of the best things about unplugging from screens is that you can enjoy listening to great stuff while doing something else fun or productive.  I am in love with Radio New Zealand, and get heaps of their programmes as podcasts that I can listen to whenever I’m doing dishes or folding clothes or whatever.
Last [...]

If there are children in your life, you might like to make use of the Lent activity ideas at The Modern Sacred Family site.
Maybe you could use Lent as an opportunity to rediscover classic children’s books? Wikipedia (of course!) has a list of older ones, and I found this list of more recent ones [...]

This Sunday, all will be revealed.  Come along!

I’ve learned that the best time to think about any regular or annual event is straight after the last one, while the successes and lessons are fresh in your mind.
I made awesome notes about next Advent and Christmas at West last December, for example, and now we have our good friend Robyn Mellar-Smith here as [...]

Through a combination of laziness and love of Christmas decorations, one year we had our tinsel up until September the following year…
One European tradition is to take down Christmas decorations at Epiphany, 6 January, the day we celebrate the visit of the wise men to Jesus’ family in Bethlehem.  (If you missed Simon’s excellent narrative [...]

Heavens to Murgatroyd, Christmas Day was fun!
I forgot to say, unfortunately, that the mad, mad nativity play we enjoyed was of course adapted from Nicholas Allan’s masterpiece of a picture book, Jesus’ Christmas Party, which we read last Advent (without the French accent we were treated to on Friday!).
Thank you to all the good-humoured ‘volunteers’ [...]

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 [...]