Central Church Port Kembla

Caro shares how her upbringing leaned more towards spiritual bypassing that equipping her to lament when needed. She shares how lament give us a way to protest to God, express and process emotion with God and voice our confusion. Becca also shares briefly what breath prayer is and how that has been a gift for her in prayer.

Caro shares how speaking to God as we speak to a friend provides a space of prayer as connection. And how the prayer of silence, or wordless prayer, can be a way we discover God in all the spaces in between.

Caro shares how liturgical prayer has been a source of life for her. Liturgy can be a gift to our prayer lives, a way we can join in the rich prayer life of the church across geography, time and history. As part of this service we had the opportunity to spend 15 minutes engaging with some liturgy. If you’d like to have a taste of this, get in touch and we can help you out.

Caro speaks briefly about St. Ignatius then leads us through an imaginative prayer experience with the text. Inviting us to find ourselves in this story and see how the Holy Spirit brings the text alive in our lives.

Larissa Minniecon, a Kabi Kabi, Gureng Gureng, Ambryn and Zenadth Kes woman, shares an Indigenous perspective on abundance and Jesus’ encounter with the woman at the well.

In this month’s contemplative service we looked at the life of St. Teresa of Avila and participated in a couple different spiritual practices. Ambient background music is by https://karlverkade.bandcamp.com/

Food is a highly political topic. The injustice between the “haves” and the “have nots” can be seen in our local communities, as well as on the global scale. In Jesus’ times, the Romans controlled the food supply, and the Pharisees wrapped so much religious red tape around food, many of the Jewish people struggled to keep their families fed. Yet amidst this boiling pot of tension, Jesus fed 5000 people through prayer and provision. In this podcast, Oran explores the significance of this miracle, and the freedom it presented to the crowd following Him, and to us today.

The audio recording from our service failed, so Luke and Caro have put together a snippet of Simone's life and writings for people to enjoy and reflect upon. Ambient background music is by https://karlverkade.bandcamp.com/

Caro shares some of our story as a church and how our culture and approach to finances and resources has changed over the years, including where we’re at now.

Some of the members of our church board share our ethos and values around giving and chat about our current financial situation as well as our hopes for the future.

This week Oran gives an overview of the biblical narrative through a lens of generosity. This lens shows God's love as abundant, plentiful and generous. Sin, on the other hand, is not so much scarcity, rather the lie of scarcity - that there is not enough and we must take as much as we can to find wholeness and happiness. We can see this lie come to people time and again throughout scripture, and also in our own lives presenting the challenge of trusting in God's unlimited provision instead of our own limited resourcefulness.

This month we dive into the life and writings of St Therese of Lisieux, engaging in an Examen and a brief Lectio Divina.

Tonight Belinda Fleming, Cheryl Meers and David Fleming share thoughts, reflections and insights from the book "God Walk" by Mark Buchanan, that they have been reading together over the past several weeks.

There are different things in life that are invitations to us to slow down in this fast paced world. Some are natural, like winter; some are unexpected, like illness or loss; and others are practices we adopt to intentionally slow us down, like boundaries or spiritual practices. 6 people from our community share briefly how one of these things has been an invitation for them to live a slower paced life. At the end Caro reads two poems. These are ‘Sometimes’ by David Whyte, and ‘In Search of Quiet’ by Will Small.

Caro looks at our passage this month through a Christological lens that centres Jesus to see what might be happening. In this light we can read this passage as the anointing of Jesus as King, but a different kind of king to all other leaders in history and our world.

Luke shares a bit about his own journey towards feminism, as well as a brief overview of feminist theology. We then read the passage and listen to the voices of women in our church as they wrestle with the text.

After anointing Jesus with perfume, the disciples/pharisees grumble saying that perfume could have been sold to feed the poor. However, Jesus rebukes them saying "you will always have the poor but you will not always have me". As onlookers, or as people in a position of power, this response from Jesus does not make sense. We can only begin to understand when we look at this story from a powerless perspective. In this message, Oran examines these words from Jesus and considers why a powerless perspective on our own lives might be the only path to true spiritual growth.

Caro reads this passage verse by verse with a curiosity and an appreciation of the masterpiece of the Gospel of John.

We read the story of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem on a donkey and consider how it was an act of political street theatre. A subversive way that Jesus models a different kind of power. Caro then invites us to keep imagining ways we can live the alternate way of Jesus, and we look at the lives of three different followers of Jesus to see how they lived out the upside down kingdom of God.

In this episode, Oran looks at Moral Influence Atonement theory, one of the 7 prime theories acknowledged by the church over the course of Christianity. Within this message, Oran briefly looks at the history and purpose of Moral Influence Theory, and discusses the resurgence in its relevance in today's day and age.