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Some Thoughts on Palm Sunday

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This week like every Palm Sunday we are invited to journey with Jesus down the Kidron Valley from Bethany into the temple joining the ambivalent crowds who have come to Jerusalem for Passover, and on through the maze of streets and events until we reach Golgotha and the cross. We are invited to notice how we respond as we enter this week and how this story helps us see our world differently and to live compassionately. It begins with a small crowd from the country waving branches welcoming their “king” who rides a donkey into the city. They cry Hosanna!! Each Sunday we join them crying Hosanna as we gather around the eucharistic table. Hosanna is both our plea for God to save, and a shout of praise and exaltation. As we join that procession what is it we long to be saved from? And for what do we give thanks and praise? This king is unlike most other kings. Pilate and Herod Antipas enter on war horses surrounded by cavalry and infantry and symbols of brutal power. Jesus rides a donk...
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Finding Life and Hope in These Struggling Times

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  5 th Sunday in Lent- Year A - 2026 Readings: Psalm -                         Psalm: 130           First Reading -            Ezekiel 37:1-14 Second Reading -        Romans 8:6-11 Gospel -                       John 11:1-45   What I want to say: I wonder how we are at this moment. - How many of us feeling like field of dry bones in Ezekiel – in need of breath of God? We are reminded by our gospel reading (John 11:1-45) that with Mary, Martha, and Lazarus we are invited to know Jesus as the “resurrection and the life.” Explore what this life might look like in our struggling church. What I want to happen: Where do we meet Jesus’s breathing lif...
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Andy Root and Ministry in a Secular Age part three

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Andy explores all these themes further in Churches and the Crisis of Decline: A Hopeful, Practical Ecclesiology for a Secular Age. I really enjoyed this book .  I enjoyed how he threads the story of young Karl Barth when he was a pastor straight out of seminary, working in a working class parish in Switzerland. In his struggles with post WWI Europe, having rejected the pietism of his father, and been let down by liberal theology in the face of the industrial killing of WWI and the economic collapse that followed, Root tells of how Karl Barth found faith in God, hearing the invitation to let God be God. You can read a longer summary here . Into this story he weaves the story of a real church that failed in its attempts to innovate and be more relevant and closed after last pastor left. He then wonders what might have happened if they had stayed open. He uses these two stories to explore all the themes described above. It is not a how to book but offers a theological framework to und...
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Andy Root and Ministry in a Secular Age part two

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So where does this push to innovate come from that leads to these elements of this exhaustion and despondency? Next, I read/listened to “Church after Innovation” Here Andy returns to “Faith Formation in a Secular Age” and his description of ‘faith’ becoming Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. He explores how this conception of faith can be seen in church and youth group programmes that have been developed by immanent framework with no sense of transcendent divine and have rendered religion as a tool for personal happiness and authentic selfhood rather than a transformative encounter with God. In Church after Innovation Andy goes further to explore how survival of church has become central. And if I reflect on so many conversations and clergy trainings over the last few years as our numbers decline, that is do true. In response we are driven by the need for youthfulness and authenticity and the constant need to innovate, to reinvent ourselves to stay relevant. Ministry has too often been...
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Andy Root and Ministry in a Secular Age part one

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In early 2024 I came across Andy Root’s “Faith formation in a Secular Age” On Audible. This was the first in what was supposed to be a three volume series entitled Ministry in a Secular Age. I love Andy’s writing . I read his book on Relational Youth Ministry a number of years ago, where he offered a critique of traditional relational youth ministry (and of evangelism while he was at it). You know how we build relationships with young people so that they might join our youth ministry, be saved, and then join church etc…. His critique is around how the relationship are instrumentalized   - they become a means to an end, rather than an encounter with a person, and through them an encounter with God. He said what I had been thinking. And he offered some other theological frameworks to both understand and practice our intentional ministry among young people in. I then went on a weeklong course ran on relational youth ministry in Christchurch around 2011? where I learnt about the power ...
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She Left Her Jug Behind

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A Ref lection for   3 rd   Sunday in Lent,  Year A  -  :  I wrote this reflection 6 years ago while at Gate Pa. In this reflection I tired to put the story of the Samaritan woman at the well back, back into the story arch of John's gospel, and back into the whole story arch of the Bible as I understand it. I used it for our bible study last night and thought it still worked, and so offer it again for this year.   Readings: Psalm                          Psalm: 95                                                        First Reading:    ...
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