Central Church Port Kembla

Caro looks at the life of Mary and the ways in which we can see wisdom for the spiritual life and how Jesus regularly does unexpected things that invite Mary to change and grow.

Oran and Luke look at the life of Joseph, what we know from Scripture and what we can imagine reading between the lines and both share their thoughts around how Jesus interrupts Joseph’s life with both challenges and goodness.

Caro looks at the parable of the persistent widow alongside the other passages of the scripture that sit alongside this gospel reading in the church lectionary. Through the readings we listen to how the Bible is in conversation with itself and what common threads we can see through the passages.

Brooke Prentis helps us read this parable through Aboriginal eyes and highlights for us some of the many persistent Indigenous voices crying out for justice in these lands now called Australia.

Too often our faith life/spirituality is reduced to obedience-disobedience, saying yes or no to God. But our lives and our hearts are more complex than that. Caro offers a way for us to pay attention to the resistance we might feel in areas of spirituality, and invites us to ask a deeper question of what we might be protecting, and what Jesus might be inviting us to.

The only way we have ever been able to describe the Kingdom of God is through metaphor. In this episode, Oran looks at ways different people, and people groups, have reimagined the Kingdom of God. He discusses the need for an ever maturing understanding, so the church can better reflect the Kingdom and identify it in the world.

Caro shares some of her own experience with healing and out of that talks about the tensions of an over simplistic theology of healing. She shares how holding onto faith, hope and love might be a path between certainty and cynicism as we wrestle with our hopes for healing and the suffering we see in our world.

Shane Clifton shares with us how his reading of this passage has changed over time including both before and after an accident left him with quadriplegia. Please be advised that explicit language had been used in this episode.

We use the story in John 8 to bounce into a discussion on shame. 3 people in our church (Lynda, Michael and Fyona) bravely and vulnerably share their own experiences and insights into shame in their lives. Please be advised that explicit language had been used in this episode.

Caro, Oran and Becca have a conversation about Jesus' final words to the woman in our text this month 'go and sin no more'...we throw around some ideas about these words, how they can be read problematically and then also how they might be read as instruction and permission and promise.

Caro looks at this passage of the attempted stoning of the woman through the lens of mercy. Showing us how Jesus reveals the character and nature of God as mercy, and what it might look like for us to recognise the divine pauses for mercy in our lives.

Luke looks at the story of the attempted stoning of the woman in John 8. He looks at the passage through the lens of Rene Girard's Scapegoat mechanism.

Jesus told the story of the prodigal son during His ministry years. However, about 200 years later, a very similar parable appeared in the Lotus Sutra as part of the teachings in the Mahayana line of Buddhism. In this podcast Oran looks at the similarities and differences between both tales, and considers how the both bring glory to God.

Guest speaker, and Aborignial Christian leader Adam Gowan, reflects on Jesus' parable of the prodigal son. Adam discusses how Aboriginal people view these stories much more through the relationships and connections between things, rather than the simple "events" of the story.

In this episode of the podcast special guest speaker, Linda Pesavento, draws from her counselling experience to take an IFS look at the story of the prodigal son.

In the gospels, Jesus pointed to the "sign of Jonah" when the Pharisees asked him to perform a miracle to prove his authority. This simple phrase is weighted with so much Jewish context, and has links to ancient near eastern cosmology and mysticism. In this episode, Oran will unpack some of this information to better understand the significance of signs, and just what Jesus meant by "sign of Jonah".

Tonight Bruce Skinner, from YWAM Wollongong, looks at the story of Jonah from a missional perspective, making an insightful comparison between the book, and the story of Abraham who debated with God over the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Bruce raises some deep and thought provoking questions around our attitudes towards mission and the part we play in God's plan.

There are a lot of reasons as to why we might think the book of Jonah is a parable. Tonight, Oran explains this parable and considers the message Jonah might offer. Oran also looks at how parables can take us far deeper than historic accounts, and become intrinsic and valuable lessons to us all.

Oran looks at the story of the woman at the well as a microcosm of revelation, and considers how Christ reveals Himself in our own lives, as well to all of mankind over the course of human history.

Becca questions whether the Samaritan woman really had a sordid past or if there's another way of understanding her encounter with Jesus and how that might challenge the way we see others.