Central Church Port Kembla

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.

Becca shares out of James Cone’s book how through the horrific period of lynchings in America’s history, Black Christians saw in their own suffering Christ crucified with them. Becca connects this perspective with all those who have been oppressed and brutalised through history, especially here in our own context, the past and present injustices done to Indigenous Australians. Music: 'He was Numbered Among the Lawless' Steve Schallert

Caro looks at a quote from Plato written 300 years before Christ which said that if ever a truly righteous man was to walk the earth, he would be deemed unrighteous then tortured and killed. Caro uses this to reflect on humanity’s tendency to always stuff things up, and the cross as God’s response: forgiveness, grace, love and mercy.

Oran chats about how hospitality and community are expressions of God’s kingdom and how we attempt to live them out at Central. We then wrestle together with how introversion, church trauma, burn out and Covid have affected how we practice these.

Carol talks some more of our values at Central, more specifically around how we hold our theology and how we work for justice.

Through February, we’re going to be looking at some values we hold dear at Central and Caro begins by looking at our value of developing a deep and robust spiritual life. At Central we believe that each of us is responsible for our own spiritual life and that involves sending our roots down deep into the rich depths of our faith tradition and opening wide to become places of refuge and life for others.

We look at the gospel text for this Sunday, the baptism of Jesus in Matthew 3 and Caro shares some reflections on what the baptism of Jesus might reveal to us about the nature of God, and she invites us to remember our own baptism and the way God first wooed our hearts.