I'm a guest blogger

June 8th, 2014

Eva, a fellow Aussie who blogs as The Aspirational Agnostic asked me to write a guest post, and so I tried something different – three short, short stories under the title There is love. You may like to check it out.

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Close to understanding Jesus?

June 3rd, 2014

One day, when I was a young christian, I had a surprising thought. As soon as I thought it, I knew it couldn’t be true. But this untrue thought set me on a path of discovery that I am still on today. This path has enriched my understanding of Jesus and changed the way I […]

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What Americans think of church

May 27th, 2014

The Barna Group has recently released results of research into church attendance in USA, including information on “millennials” (under-30s). While this will have little relevance to other countries, there may be some similarities and thus things we may all learn

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How the four gospels came to be written?

May 18th, 2014

You can read the New Testament without knowing anything about the authors or the background to their writing. If that’s you, you probably won’t be interested in this post. But I have long been interested in these background matters, and lately I’ve be coming to a few conclusions.

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Is anybody listening?

May 11th, 2014

The shaping of things to come by Mike Frost and Alan Hirsch was published more than a decade ago now. It was at the time a revolutionary book which had a lot to say to contemporary churches and christians. Ten years later it still needs to be read. Here’s a few of the things we […]

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Update on sermons and why we should abandon them (for the most part)

May 2nd, 2014

Last post I discussed the messages our dependence on sermons sends, and referred back to a study I had done on Sermons – not how we learn best? A reader went to that page and found a bunch of broken links. I have therefore completely re-structured the page, and included quite a lot of new […]

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What do sermons say about churches?

April 27th, 2014

Pretty much all Protestant churches have sermons – generally as the centrepiece of the weekly service. Sometimes we learn from them, sometimes we don’t. In fact studies by educationalists show that they are a poor method of teaching or changing behaviour, though they do generally make people feel good (see Sermons – not how we […]

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I'm a MennoNerd!

April 23rd, 2014

I’ve been a sort of dissident christian for a long time. I believe most of the basic doctrines of the christian faith and I hang out with other christians and do christian stuff. But I don’t fully belong.

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Easter Saturday prayer vigil for refugees

April 20th, 2014

9 of 12 members of our church who attended the vigil. I have blogged before on the plight of refugees from war-torn or unstable countries like Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Iraq and Iran arriving in Australian waters by boat and Australia’s somewhat callous attitude to them – see links below this post. Australia outsources some of […]

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Is the church dying? Do we need to be worried?

April 16th, 2014

Many atheists make strong statements about how the church is in terminal decline, and it’s only a matter of time til it is reduced to an insignificant minority in most western countries, and eventually worldwide. Some christians may be influenced by these claims. I did some research for my other blog to check out the […]

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A list of all blog posts, in reverse chronological order, is on the Blog archive page.