West Baptist Church

Tonight we extinguished seven candles, one by one, as we read through Matthew’s account of what happened 2000 years ago.  You could do the same at home, perhaps on Friday or Saturday evenings, so here are the readings, the shadows, and the artwork we reflected on tonight. Matthew 26:36-46: The Shadow of Agony. The first candle 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 […]

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 […]

While we’re all unplugging from screen-based entertainment this Lent, we have a great opportunity to plug into the life of Jesus, particularly in the biographies of him we have in the Gospels. Last Lent we spent most of our time in Luke’s Gospel, looking at Jesus used instances of hospitality to transform people and relationships.  […]

One of the coolest things about our Lent project to Unplug (from screen-based entertaintment) and Plug In (to real life) is that it’s a collaboration with our friends at Northpoint and Central Baptist. And one of the coolest things about that is that each church gets the benefit of resources in the other.  Our friend […]

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, […]

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 […]