This Sunday will be the first time our church has gathered together since March 15. That’s eleven Sundays ago. The time has come when we may reopen the doors of our churches and sit again on each other’s couches, and return to face-to-face fellowship.
Category Archive: Communal Christianity
New Zealand appears to have dodged a bullet and gotten off lightly in this pandemic, yet many Christians are berating the government because we cannot gather as churches under Lockdown Level 2. But there is a high cost which I doubt we are counting.
||Short Article|| Live-streamed video conferencing is not too far from the ‘face to face’ of 2 John 12, but it cannot make up the full experience of gathered fellowship. The time will come when we may reopen the doors of our churches and sit again on each other’s couches.
Last weekend four of our young men were baptised at our church camp. What follows are the questions that were asked, with some comments the significance they carry.
If you are a Christian struggling to find a place in your church, do not give up: you have more to offer than you can realise.
The time when we praise God in song is a time to force cold and indifferent hearts into duty, to nurse godly affections into greater strength that have been smothered by our inclination to self, and to shove aside distracting thoughts of life’s affairs.
It can be hard to really appreciate how challenging it is for some people to continue as Christians, and just how easy and attractive it is to simply tap out. Are we equipping people to process and understand these struggles well? Are we providing the support for them to hang in there while they do?
Truth isn’t affected by popularity, or a lack of it.
Experience will teach us that although Christian hope should give us gladness, it does not remove but only blunts the varied griefs we suffer and does not fill the hole left in the lives of those left behind.
I would like to promote the use of ‘real’ (i.e. paper) Bibles for personal reading.
Chris Northcott 