Category Archives: Wellington

Roots and Fruits

As many of you know we have apple trees in the garden at the vicarage. When we first moved in there were three trees. Two great big trees that produced heavy crops of cooking apples and one, spindly little tree that produced a meagre crop of eating apples. I was talking to Gill Ireland about […]

Clear Communication

For those of you who were here last week, you will know that we are now on the second slice of the sandwich. For those of you who weren’t here, I’d better explain. Two weeks ago, we looked at 1 Corinthians chapter 12, and Paul’s teaching about spiritual gifts and the richness of unity and […]

Love

It is said that familiarity breeds contempt. It’s often struck me as a slightly depressing world view, one which I hope isn’t necessarily true. It seems to me much more hopeful to believe that familiarity might breed insight, affection, and comfort. Maybe, though, this does take a bit of work, and maybe a choice to […]

One Body

As we continue on through our exploration of our Paul’s letter to the Christians in Corinth, we are still working through some of the practical applications of the things that he started off with. In the first part of the letter he laid the foundations of what he was writing to them. Everything he writes […]

All Saints

I know that you might find this difficult to believe, but when I was a teenager I could be quite annoying. Looking back I feel particularly sorry for my Sunday school teachers. You see, I had the privilege of growing up in a Christian household, I’d been in church since I was little, I knew […]

Ordinary

I’d like to begin this morning by telling you one of my favourite true stories. It’s a bit longer than my normal sermon illustrations, so please bear with me. Are you sitting comfortably? Mary’s mother carefully placed the apple pie in the oven. She wiped her floury hands. ‘That’s all the baking done, Mary. Now […]

Urgent and Vulnerable

Over the last few weeks we’ve been thinking about mission in our Sunday morning services. Some of us have been exploring it in our small groups, and yesterday about 40 of us got together for a whole day to think about what mission means for us, here in Wellington, in 2019. As part of this […]

What is the body for? – 1 Corinthians

Nice to see you, to see you ….. Brexit means …. A Mars a day helps you work, rest and …. Across the worlds of entertainment, politics, marketing we see the power of the slogan, the short phrase that catches people’s imagination, that is easily memorable, that captures the essence of an argument, a position, […]

The Power of God – 1 Corinthians

Last week we began our journey through the book of 1 Corinthians, this letter from Paul to the members of the church that he had planted in Corinth. We thought about Paul’s absolute focus on Jesus Christ as the foundation of his life, the source of all his thinking, and the root of all that […]

Unity in Vision – 1 Corinthians

For the next couple of months we are going to be exploring Paul’s first letter to the church at Corinth. Well I say first. It’s the first one that we have a copy of in our Bibles. In Chapter 5, verse 9, of this letter, Paul refers to a previous letter that he had written […]