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 4: one of the 5 things I am most grateful for in 2009 at West.
Don’t tell numbers 1, 2, 3 and 5, but this is [...]

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 are numbers 1 and 2, the things I am most grateful for in 2009 at West.
#1 Shelter, Faith, Laughter
Our identity as ‘a place of shelter, faith and laughter’ has come to [...]

Ruby Duncan is a provocative thinker and local hero.  She’s lived in New Zealand, Australia and the slums of Manila, and is now the head of Iosis, the family support service of the Baptist Union in Aotearoa.  
I mention this because she was invited to speak at Parachute this year as part of a [...]

It’s day 4 of our collective fasting from screen-based entertainment.  How’s it going at your place?
So far Matt and I have taught each other our childhood card games (it’s all part of cross-cultural understanding) and gone to the high energy Hospice fundraiser, Grease (more about the unsuitability of this adult musical for children later, perhaps…).
Hester [...]

The average Kiwi watches 168 minutes of television each day.  That’s the average.  So Kiwis spend around 4,000,000,ooo (4 billion) hours a year watching tv.
In this mind-blowing article, Clay Shirky does the maths and works out that the free, online, user-generated encyclopedia, Wikipedia, probably took about 100,000,000 human thought hours to create – and it’s [...]

In their book First Things First Stephen R Covey, A Roger Merrill and Rebecca R Merrill tell a story that has become part of our life at West.  We’ve done the rocks-in-the-jar demo several times since January 2009 and it has become a significant image for lots of us.

If you don’t know what this is [...]