I’ve been watching Gilmore Girls again with my wife - the things husbands do for love. It struck me church is so much better than the myth of the show. Gilmore Girls is about relationships; family, romance, friends and neighbours. People caring for each other.

God plays no part in this life. In the show, church leaders are nice and tolerant and supportive and moral. Roman Catholics and Protestants and Jews share facilities with each other.

But, they never discuss God, or Jesus, or how he affects their lives. Their religious meetings are small, significantly smaller than the town meetings. God and church sit on the sidelines, with only a ceremonial role in the town community. Christianity is shown as ineffectual and irrelevant.

This is Hollywood myth. Even in the show, the relationships are continually fracturing. People never reconcile. Story twists enable them to ignore the fight and move on. There is no real forgiveness.

This matches my experience of small towns. I grew up in one. I loved it. But it wasn’t harmonious or tranquil. I saw self-righteous intolerance, nasty gossip, discrimination and indifference. People know each others business but they don’t love each other.

In contrast, God designed church as the place where we will experience grace and kindness. Church is full of sinners. We get to know and experience each other’s faults and sins.

But, and this is the crucial difference with Gilmore Girls, we’re sinners God has forgiven and is changing. Church is where we learn to love and forgive each other, just as our Lord Jesus loves us.

Over the next few months we will have opportunities to do this over a meal; to talk, and enjoy food, and get to know each other better.

This is a step forward in seeing how we can love each other more. So make sure you put these dates in your diary, and think about who you’d like to share a meal with.

dining out at the staff common room

The Spur Conference 09 (formerly known as Club 5 or Challenge) is an excellent conference organised by MTS aimed at raising up the next generation of gospel workers.  It’s for people who are thinking or planning about the future and wondering whether full time Gospel ministry is for them.  It will challenge you to give up worldly success for the sake of Christ’s kingdom!

Phillip Jensen and Greg Lee will preach, there’ll be workshops and one to one interviews.  It’s also a great time for hanging out with other people who are facing the same choices that you are.  It’s on at Katoomba during the October Long Weekend (Oct 2-5).

Would you like to come along?  Grab a brochure at church, talk to one of the staff and set aside the date in your diary.  You can register online at www.mts.com.au.  I’ve arranged accommodation for us at Blue Mountains Christian School at Blackheath.  It will mean sleeping on airbeds in guys and girls classrooms and cooking in the staff kitchen- sounds like fun!  It will cost $10 per night per person.  (This means you should register with MTS for NO accommodation.)  Make sure you let me know that you’re coming (richard@hunterbiblechurch.org).

Any questions?  Post a comment since many people will share your questions and I’ll do my best to answer them.  I’m looking forward to it- I’d love for 40 HBC people to come and for many godly men and women to serve Christ with their life, their all!

As God’s people we believe that Jesus is the most important person in the universe. It follows then that sharing Jesus with our local community through spoken words and practical works is the most important thing we can do with our time, energy, money and resources.

WAVE Kids Club is all about seeing Jesus transform the city of Newcastle.

In order to get WAVE Kids Club off the ground each year it costs an enormous amount of money and requires enormous amounts involvment from Hunter Bible Church.  There are loads of ways you can get involved…

If you would like to help out with…

WAVE Kids Club… Chris & Karen or Sam

Cooking….  speak to John and Tagi

Adults coffee tent… speak to Christine

Registration… speak to Steve

The types of people needed for registration are:

1 Welcoming Person – Meet and Greet

Requirements: Friendly, outgoing, likes meeting people, good with names etc

3 Registration People – Record people have arrived, check registration forms etc, ideally data entry as well.

Requirements – attention to detail, good  at admin stuff.  (Need  2 out of 3 people to be good at computer data entry, ideally all 3.)

3 People for name tags – friendly, able to find printed stickers and write new stickers and ask about allergies.

Equipment… Sam

Download WAVE Application form!!  Or you can fill it in online (wave-2010-registration-form)

Image displayed from Reuters website

We should be ashamed at the news in the last week. Indian students are being targeted here in Australia. Petrol bombs and screwdriver attacks are not how we should be treating visitors to our shores. This is racist intolerance.

As Christians we can and should be so different to our society. Our Lord Jesus is intolerant towards treating people differently based on their birth, ethnicity, wealth or status. His death of love destroyed the divisions between Jew and Gentile. His work of judgment will unite people of every tongue and race under his Lordship. He commands us to love one another, as he loves us.

Church should be a place where people are embraced as God’s creatures, where Christians are loved as brothers and sisters in Christ, regardless of ethnicity or background. And this has been my experience as a Christian. But we can always love more like Jesus.

Can you see how we might ignore or shun people because they aren’t like me? exclude them from conversations because they are older than me, or are a student, or come from overseas or have a different sort of job or are unemployed or? Sometimes we might justify this because we are not sure what to talk about. How we could better love each other?

Why don’t you let us know your thoughts. And I’ll share some ideas. But this week lets make sure we pray for our overseas students in particular.

Last weekend all 5 MTS apprentices (Ministry Training Strategy, Ben, Steve, Fee, Geoff and myself) took a road trip down to Stanwell Tops for an AFES apprentice conference (Australian fellowship of Evangelical Students). The topic was God, Emotions and Ministry. Over the weekend we heard talks from Archie Poulas (Moore College Lecturer) and Richard Chin (National Director of AFES). There were approximately 70 other MTSers from other universities around Australia who came along.

There were 3 aims to the conference; firstly for MTSers to meet each other, secondly for us to think biblically about God and the place of the emotion in the Christian life, particularly student ministry and thirdly to think hard about the practicalities of gospel ministry.

I think I could say that it was a really encouraging and challenging weekend away for all the MTSers.

One particular passage that has been reverberating in my brain since the weekend is…

⁶ And he passed in front of Moses, proclaiming, “The LORD, the LORD, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, ⁷ maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation.”

Exodus 34:6-7.

Praying is a strange and exciting thing for Christians to do. It’s strange because really, we have no right to do it. We are simply created beings, we’re intrinsically worth nothing. But even more than that, we’re sinful beings who have no place before God’s throne. We mustn’t forget we’re attempting to communicate with a being totally other than us!

But prayer is exciting because Jesus has reversed all those reasons! At the very moment when all those reasons should make us shy away from praying, Jesus steps in and completely reverses the situation. First, God in Jesus has taken on our createdness even down to our humanity - God’s stooped low enough to humanity to listen to our call. But on top of that, God in Jesus has taken the punishment for our sin - he’s taken away the very thing that should keep us away from him. Do you see what this means? It means that God has invited us and enabled us to boldly approach him in prayer!

The gospel gives us confidence that God is our father, and that he loves us speaking to him!

Its a bit like when I walk through my son’s school… there are heaps of primary school kids there, and if they wanted to talk to me, there’s really no reason why I should stop and listen. But if my son ran up to me… I’d stop right there, get down on one knee, look him straight in the eye and listen to every word he said. See, my son’s special to me, and I love listening to him.

That’s the joy we can have when we go to speak to God… we shouldn’t be able to do it, but he lets us, he loves us, and he listens to us. Maybe we don’t appreciate this pleasure as much as we could?

It has only been 6 months since I started teaching scripture in high school and I have really grasped what an amazing opportunity it is! I currently teach year 7 classes at Lambton High School and I am amazed that so many of these teenagers have not heard about God, Jesus and the bible. This is not to say that it’s easy at all. Far from it! But it’s not everyday you get to share the gospel with a bunch of teenage kids.

At the same high school HBC is running a Lunchtime Christian group who meet in one of the classrooms each week where all kids are welcome to find out more about Christianity. We play games, open up the bible and hear a short talk. We are currently working our way through John’s gospel and it has been really encouraging to see some of the year 7 kids from scripture come along to this lunchtime group.

One of the most distinctive things about Christianity is the Bible’s view on manhood and womanhood.  Many people unfamiliar with the Jesus will be ‘ho-hum’ about things like the Trinity and the Resurrection, but mention that wives should submit to their husbands and they will jump out of their chairs!

On July 12 and 19 I’ll be giving two talks on manhood and womanhood.  We’ll look together at what the Bible has to say and how it makes a difference to our daily lives.  Come along and bring friends (AM and PM only).

Outlines of talks are here:

Series: Looking into the lights #1, Looking into the lights #2

Lights have never really been big in our thinking at HBC. I remember having a conversation with someone at UniChurch in 2002, and saying that we’re keen for music to be good at HBC, but we’d never ever have “lights”.

Looking back, I think that was a bit naive. The fact was, we did have lights… the lecture hall we were meeting in had big ugly fluro lights all over the ceiling. They lit up the speaker, and the screen, and the audience, and the blackboards, and the walls, and everything! (…and all with exactly the same amount of light mind you!)

I think the real issue was, we never really thought we’d ever be able to do anything about it.

But now that we’ve shuffled the way we organise serving at church, it is something we can think about. Those in the Magnification team are concerned about how our meetings feel, and what things make our meetings work. So they’ve got the time and the opportunity to think about using lights in our church meetings.

And so, over the past few weeks, we found out that there are some lights available for us to bring and use at UniChurch …and we realised that there were some lights already at Lambton High School that we could use. So we’ve been trying some things out.

But, why would we even consider using lights at all? Is it meant to help? Help what? I’ll blog about that soon, but I’m interested to hear your thoughts as to why or why not…

Would you like to think how you might begin to serve at HBC?  This Bible study and questionnaire will get you started. Download it here:

beginning-in-ministry-with-hbc.pdf