Preacher: Nathan Nettleton

Jesus constantly seeks to upend our prejudices in order to breakdown and overcome our divisive tribalism.

Healthy spirituality requires an honesty about our experience of pain and confusion in the real world, and that means that lamentation is a part of healthy prayer.

Even in the face of a catastrophic collapse of the world as we know it, God calls us to imagine and invest in a beautiful future.

In order to find our way into the good news of life in all its fullness, we need to first stop denying and distracting ourselves from the bad news we are drowning in.

Despite first appearances, Jesus’s call to “count the cost” of following him is not so much about ensuring we can succeed as it is about ensuring we can faithfully persevere in the face of failure.

In the face of social breakdown and environmental catastrophe, we are called, not to angry protest, but to creative expressions of love, compassion, and hospitality.

Our call to bear witness to the culture of God comes at a time when we face the real prospect of doom and destruction, and so must contend with that.

We all get trapped in demonic and dehumanising social structures, but Jesus unmasks the truth so that we can be set free.

When we fear for our own safety, we condone the violence that promises to protect us, and we use religion to justify it, but Jesus wants to free us to rise above the fear without resorting to hatred and violence.

The Christian understanding of God as Trinity is not so much something you have to make sense of, but a call to recognise that God is by nature relational, and that we are invited into the triune relationship of love.

The Church born when God poured out the Holy Spirit, is one in which barriers of ethnicity, language, sex, age, and social status are transcended and all are equal in Christ.

Christ’s story – the crucifixion of the truly good and its resurrection and coming victory – is the whole story of God’s work in the world and the whole story of the Bible.