YouTube clip from the Easter morning service 2011

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzqTFNfeDnE 

Want to find out more about our plans for a local community festival this June? Watch this video.

Zoe and I, with a group of history students from Church High in Newcastle, have recently returned from a trip to Poland and Berlin. Both Krakow and Berlin are beautiful cities, crammed full of interesting sites and museums, not to mention shops and café’s! There were two main reasons for the trip: the first, focusing on the rise of the Nazis and the beginnings of the cold war after WW2, and the second, to examine and reflect on the Holocaust, and the ‘final solution'.

Free English classes are being held at HBC Life Centre each Thursday at 4.30pm, for learners at all levels. Please contact the church office if you would like to come, (tel 0191 265 7044) or email Jeremy and Jean Wood. 

I’m sure many of you have received your Teartimes this week and I hope like me you’ve been encouraged by the difference the global church is making around the World. It was good to have Mike Chesterton from Tearfund visit us at HBC and to be reminded of what supporting Tearfund is all about. Tearfund’s mission statement, which Mike explained to us is so full of love, faith and hope:

“We are Christians passionate about the local church bringing justice and transforming lives- overcoming global poverty. And so our ten year vision is to see 50 million people released from material and spiritual poverty through a worldwide network of 100,000 local churches.” 

Reading the bible intelligently is a key part of our spiritual formation. Part of that discipline is to attempt to understand what the author – in this case Luke – was attempting to convey at the time of writing. It’s not sufficient to pluck a text out of its contextual moorings, and apply it to today without attending to what the author had in mind when first it was written. Download my introduction notes here.

Do you care about climate change? Do you believe we should be doing something to prevent it? Do you think it will change the lives of the poorest,who will be flooded, displaced, and hungry?

World leaders have a crucial climate summit in Copenhagen from December 7th and we need to call on them to seal a strong and fair climate change deal. We need to speak out for poor people who are hit hardest by climate change and for future generations. We need to cover this in prayer.

What a fantastic time Zoë and I had when we went to London at half term. There’s no doubt that our country has one of the great capital cities of the world, certainly in terms of history, probably the greatest. The highlight of our mini-trip, following an invitation we received from Nick Brown, our local MP, was to visit the House of Commons.

I came across this from one of Bishop Lesslie Newbigin's books, which I though was worth posting: 

Words without deeds are empty, but deeds without words are dumb. It is stupid to set them against each other. It is, for example, stupid to say: “The one thing that matters is to go everywhere and preach the gospel; all other activities such as schools and hospitals and programs for social action are at best merely auxiliary and at worst irrelevant.”

I'm returning to Africa tomorrow to serve with the Mercy Ship - and this time I'll be in in Benin...