Preacher: Nathan Nettleton

If we surrender ourselves to the Holy Spirit, we lose some of our inhibitions about social conformity and are liberated to break down the boundaries that keep people apart.

If we want to understand how Jesus saves us and what Jesus saves us from, we are going to have to abandon the most widely taught explanation.

We mostly don’t see ourselves as either terrible sinners or as gloriously Christ-like, but in the resurrection we are called to fully imagine both as world-changing truths.

In determining our church’s way forward, we need to discern who we exist to serve, and it shouldn’t just be ourselves.

God will walk with us in suffering and work redemptively within it, but God is not powerful enough to just remove it.

Science, theology and reason can often lead to a sound set of ethical behavioural conclusions which then need to be set aside because, in reality, love demands something else.

Although we can’t prove that our faith isn’t another crackpot fraud, we can provide evidence by living lives of love, hope and hospitality.

In baptism we are anointed to reign with Christ over a new creation, but it is a reign of suffering servanthood, not of reckless force.

The child of God became a human, so that humans could become children of God.

God’s coming does not reinforce our social norms and hierarchies, but breaches them to reconcile and re-dignify those who the social order has sacrificed and cast aside.

Jesus calls us to resist the satanic desire to credit violence and disaster with meaning, and instead to acknowledge meaning and truth only in God’s suffering love and mercy.

In a world dominated by arrogant and exploitative leaders, Jesus models a gentle shepherding leadership that prioritises the reintegration of the broken over the drive for “success” and “efficiency”.