West Baptist Church

Martin Luther King Jr wrote this in Strength to Love:
We are everlasting debtors to known and unknown men and women…. When we arise in the morning, we go into the bathroom where we reach for a sponge provided for us by a Pacific Islander.  We reach for soap that is created for us by a [...]

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 [...]

From Matt C:
About a month ago, Michael, Jacob, Nathaniel and me took the long trip down to Manfeild Park in Feilding for EC10. We had to fill in time in the 2 + hours car voyage so we played heaps of boring games. (e.g. Car Cricket which I won by miles, Llama Llama and the [...]

Who should pay for the enjoyment I get from chocolate?  Me, or a child working in slavery in Ghana, without adequate food or education?
That’s the question raised by global free trading practices, where God’s daughters and sons around the developing world are exploited to produce goods we in the West buy for low, low prices.
If [...]

My Mum used to say to me and my sisters, whenever we were losing a fight and trying to get her to step in on our side, ‘it takes two to tango.’
She meant that it takes two to start a fight, so she wasn’t going to take sides.  I think Jesus would agree, and would [...]

We focused on two images today at our Easter Feast: an open, empty coffin, and this photo from photojournalism site The Big Picture.  It comes from a spread of images of Easter around the world.

This is the caption:
Monmouth County Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Police Chief Victor Amato holds a pet rabbit [...]

Unplugging is particularly hard if you live by yourself.
Other people are great sources of alternative entertainment – you can play games with them (or play tricks on them, I suppose), have relaxed chats, do some cooking or a jigsaw, eat dinner together with some great music playing, and if you live with other people, you [...]

One of my great hopes for West is that this period of Unplugging from screen-based entertainment will give us space to Plug In to God – maybe Plug back In to God.
So often we say to ourselves and each other that we don’t ‘have time’ for things we say are important to us.  I said [...]

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 [...]

Today we went ‘over and back’ to figure out what Jesus was on about when he announced that his followers were ’salt’ and ‘light’.
If you’d like some extra food for thought (perfectly seasoned!), download the excellent reflection from Robyn Lewis from Northpoint at the end of this post.  She’s also our special guest star speaker [...]