West Baptist Church

On Tuesday at 12.51 pm most of New Zealand stopped what they were doing and joined together to observe 2 minutes silence for the victims of the recent Christchurch quake and it doesn’t seem that long ago we joined to remember the 29 men who lost their lives in the Pike River Mine. The country’s […]

In most of Africa, one in every 13 pregnant women dies in childbirth. In New Zealand it’s one in about 4,000 women. Around the developing world, ten million kids die before their fifth birthday each year, and a sixth of those die because of diarrhoea from dirty drinking water and the lack of a toilet. […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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.  […]

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 […]