Weekly reflections

Dear Friends   Today is the first Sunday of Lent. In some traditions it is called Quadragesima, the Latin term for fortieth. Lent commences on Ash Wednesday and extends up to Easter Sunday (40 days, excluding Sundays). It is a time of preparation for Easter in a similar way that Advent is a time of preparation for Christmas. However, Lent is characterised more by prayer, self-examination, repentance, fasting and spiritual renewal. In recent centuries, the idea of giving up something Read more…

Dear Friends    The theme in today’s services is “sharing God’s love and justice and words and actions” (the third of our three church goals). As we consider that, I’d like to refer you to the “Lausanne Covenant”.  www.lausanne.org/content/covenant/lausanne-covenant  It is widely regarded as one of the most significant documents in modern church history. It arose from the First International Congress on World Evangelization held in Lausanne in 1974, which brought together around 2,700 Christian leaders from over 150 countries. Under the heading “Christian Social Responsibility” it declared the following.  “Although Read more…

Dear Friends On Tuesday morning I attended the Ecumenical Service commemorating the commencement of Parliament for 2020. I also decided to stay afterwards for “morning tea”. (More like breakfast seeing the service finished at 8.15am!) Apart from my desire for my first coffee of the day, I thought it would be a good opportunity, being a relative newcomer to Canberra, to continue mingling and networking. But after getting my coffee, I then stood around on my own for what seemed Read more…

Dear Friends   We had a plan. Well, in fact, for SMAD Camp we had several plans. We had a plan for the day. We had a plan for smoke haze. We had a plan for wet weather. What we didn’t plan for was hail. We can’t plan for everything that happens in life but what we can do is choose our attitude. We were blown away by the positivity after the storm. Once we had counted all the campers Read more…

Dear Friends You know how from time to time a passage of scripture gets stuck in your brain and stubbornly refuses to budge! For me, over the past few months, that passage has been Luke 17: 5-10, our lectionary reading from the beginning of October, particularly verses 7-9: “Who amongst you would say to your slave who has just come in from the fields, ‘Come and sit and eat.’ Wouldn’t you actually say to him, ‘Prepare and serve my meal. Read more…

Dear Friends Like you, I distinctly heard John and Kristine say they would not be returning to Canberra Baptist. In Kristine’s words, “Pilgrims never go back!” There’s been a few attempts to explain why they have come back (and gone back on their word!) but I have been thinking lately about the context of the original statement, the story Kristine told of how she and John had purchased some rather nice double walled stainless steel camping cups for the Camino Read more…

Dear Friends Last Sunday – specifically Sunday night – was twelfth night. The Christmas trees are packed away. Christmas is officially over. But as we continue to think long and hard about the magnitude of the fires our country is currently experiencing, I wondered if there was a way to make the season of Christmas – the season of celebrating that the Word became flesh, that God loves and cares for and shared the flesh of all living things – Read more…

Dear Friends ‘Happy New Year’ doesn’t sound like the right thing to say just now when so much of our country is burning, when so many human lives and other life has been lost and homes and livelihoods destroyed. But the prophet Jeremiah (not known as a Pollyanna in the Old Testament!) reminds us that we worship and serve a God who gathers up those whose lives have been shattered, who are the most vulnerable. “See, I am going to Read more…