Author Archives: tim

Beloved, let us love…

There are about 300 words in our reading from John’s first letter this evening. Nearly 30 of them are the word “love”, or related terms. Just about 10%. It is not difficult to get hold of what John’s main theme is in this section of his letter. John has mentioned love before in the letter. […]

Welcoming Sacrifice

This morning we are continuing to explore what it means to be a welcoming church, as we live out our core value of loving others. Over the past weeks we’ve thought about how it is the responsibility of all of us to be intentional and active in welcoming people, and about the importance of welcoming […]

Pentecost 2024

I wonder if you can remember your first day doing a new thing. Maybe your first day at school, or at secondary school. Your first day of a new job, maybe your first job. How about your first day of being married. Your first day in a new house or a new town. I wonder […]

A Last Prayer

I wonder if you’ve got a summer holiday booked. There’s a lot to get ready for a holiday isn’t there. There’s the planning when and where you’re going to go. Then sorting out passports and insurance if you need them. Closer to the time you’ve got to pack, decide what’s going with you and what’s […]

Light

This evening we are beginning new series for our evening services in which we are going to be exploring 1 John. As this is the first in the series, we are going to begin by filling in a bit of the background to the letter, and having a think about who wrote it and why. […]

Getting Involved in Hospitality

I wonder what you think of when you hear the word, “hospitality”. For me the phrase “hospitality industry” comes to mind. A catch all term for hotels, restaurants, cafes and that type of thing. To my mind it’s a slightly strange combination of terms, the idea that hospitality can be an industry. There’s certainly a […]

Getting Involved in Prayer

We have been thinking about prayer this morning. I want to focus on how we can be involved in prayer. Our reading was of a very famous prayer, called the Lord’s prayer. It came about because Jesus friends saw him praying and asking him to teach them to pray. They wanted to be involved in […]

Love

I’m going to begin this morning by reading a few verses from different books in the Bible, and I wonder if anyone can work out what they have in common? Matthew: “As soon as Jesus was baptised, he went up out of the water. At that moment heaven was opened, and he saw the Spirit […]

Restoration

Over the last few months in our evening services we have been exploring some of the great stories of Scripture, and how they might shape our lives and our sense of God’s mission and our mission in the world. We’ve talked about creation, vocation, liberation, formation, limitation and incarnation. We’ve discovered that we have been […]

Getting Involved in the Body

In a bacon-and-egg breakfast, what’s the difference between the Chicken and the Pig? The Chicken is involved, but the Pig commits! This little riddle is used widely in motivational talks in a wide variety of contexts, from sports managers firing up their team before a match, to sales directors encouraging their sales teams to give […]