Weekly reflections

Dear Friends, It was wonderful to hear an update Sunday on our project ‘Improving the Lives of People with Disabilities’ in Bangladesh. Mike Bartlett from Baptist World Aid mentioned they are experiencing a downturn in donations due to cost-of-living pressures. I know these are real concerns, but can I encourage you to give generously to people who are facing much greater living pressures! And remember – our Thank Offering closes this Sunday, 26 May! Your generous donations can be made Read more…

Dear Friends, I am on leave this week (until Thursday 9 October), but thinking about the May Mission Month theme, ‘Mending’, I was reminded of a reflection I wrote in May 2019 about the BBC series, The Repair Shop. (You might remember episodes of this programme being aired on the ABC.) I loved this programme! I wrote, back in 2019: “In each episode three people bring a family heirloom to ‘The Repair Shop’. This is a temporary installation housed in Read more…

I have two clear memories of unwanted prayer for ‘healing’. The first was when I was a young woman and went to see our pastor to relay the young people’s concerns about the Sunday evening service. (As background, the pastor had decided that every Sunday night service should centre on an altar call. After four weeks of altar calls the young people were hoping to ‘mix things up’ – just a little!) To my shock, in the privacy of his Read more…

Dear Friends, The events of Saturday onwards have been a constant onslaught. The news of killings in the Bondi Junction Shopping Centre. The heartbrokenness of parents grieving for the lives their son had taken, as well as the life of their son. The extraordinary acts of courage in the face of danger. The reinforcing of threat; of harm and illogical hatred, towards women. And then came the events of Monday night. The attacking of a controversial priest. The terrible actions Read more…

It was incredibly tragic news, over a week ago now, that aid worker Zomi Frankcom had been killed by an Israeli airstrike, along with six other aid workers, while delivering food aid in northern Gaza. It was particularly poignant to hear this news at Easter. As the Frankcom family reflected, “We are deeply mourning the news that our brave and beloved Zomi has been killed doing the work she loves delivering food to the people of Gaza. She was a Read more…

Dear Friends, What an incredible Easter weekend we have had! It started quietly on Maundy Thursday with a small group – 11 disciples gathered in a room (I only realised later the significance of that number!) – participating in the actions of washing feet, sharing the last supper, and remembering Jesus last night with his disciples. Then on Good Friday we were led in a beautiful and powerful reflection on the events of Jesus’ passion. Thank you so much to Read more…

Dear Friends, I have, quite literally this Easter, gone down a rabbit hole! Well, not a rabbit hole, exactly! I have been doing a course through Whitley College on Early Christianity in Context and I become very interested in catacombs! I assume many of you, like me, were brought up on the story that the early Christians hid in the catacombs to avoid persecution. But apparently, this is not the case! The catacombs were very public places in the ancient Read more…

Dear Friends On Sunday we were exploring the relationship between ‘God’s glory’ and ‘lives that are lived for others’. (John 12:23) And on Monday night I saw another beautiful example of this. (You might see a few faces you recognise in the picture!) At the Micah Women Leader’s Event, Asuntha Charles, World Vision’s Middle East Response Director, and former National Director for Afghanistan during the Taliban takeover, shared her story of growing up in southern India. How her father told Read more…

Dear Friends, Last Sunday’s bulletin included a knitting pattern! It was a new pattern for the Common Grace Climate Change Scarf, a scarf with a stripe representing the average global temperature for each year across the last 100 years. The new pattern has come about because 2023 marked the hottest year on record. Global temperatures were broken by what has been described as a ‘blistering margin’. So, a new colour has been added – dark purple – to show the Read more…

Dear Friends, I went to the David Hunter Memorial Lecture last night and was thinking – as we drove away – that the word I would use the describe the evening was ‘feisty’. But I’m embarrassed now I chose that word. Calling the evening’s speakers ‘feisty’ minimises the depth and intensity of what they expressed. The word I should have chosen is ‘angry’. We heard angry speakers on Tuesday night. People who are angry because they see injustice. People who Read more…