West Baptist Church

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, […]

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 reckon one of the best things about Taranaki, right up there with the mountain and the windwand, is that we have our Anniversary Day holiday in March – right when you need a wee break, right? It’s become West tradition to go camping at Oakura over the long weekend.  You can view some photos […]

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

I’ve said before that my Mum is my hero when it comes to giving people ‘the benefit of the doubt’, thinking the best of people rather than the worst. Barbara Kingsolver’s new novel, Lacuna, has reminded me why my Mum’s attitude is so important.  The theme of the book is that ‘the most important thing […]