Sermons from Southpoint Church

Seeds remind us of organic growth patterns. They are small, full of potential and can flourish when placed in the right environment. As we drink from the well and take our place at the table, the Holy Spirit works in us. The soil of our heart becomes softer, the stones are removed, bitter roots are pulled. As the soil is prepared, the seeds of the kingdom within us begin to grow.  The seed symboli...

Loving God, grant us a continually renewing experience of your love, acceptance and presence; grant us a core experience of being caught up in your net of love and mercy. Grant us humility, hope, and grace that by actions of wisdom, courage and justice we might mend and extend those connections that are healing and humanizing and reconciling. Inspire among us the prophetic vision of a deep, abidin...

It is this image of the Table that became the portal through which we became an openly welcoming and affirming church. In the early days, it was our weekly practice of communion that brought clarity to the conversation around membership. Gay and straight, we love Jesus and want to follow him. One day, we will sit around the banquet feast of heaven together. So, why would we not be that beloved com...

Our first core image is the Well. Join Anne as she expresses "why the well?" and "why the well?" in a week like these ones, in which images of devastation sear our hearts.

In the work artist Joy Banks created for us, she has given us a vision of God, a vision of what community in God looks like, and even a vision of who we are as a church community. We pray that the Spirit will use it to refresh our prophetic imagination about who we are and who God is calling us to be. The actions that we are being invited to take in our four images are very simple: coming to a wel...

The history of a church is difficult to record in a few lines. We would have to tell you about the time when our children were born, or when people joined our community, or when others left. We would have to tell the stories of challenge, frustration, breakthrough, joy and sorrow. The true history of a church is found in the collected stories of the people, and the story of a collected people. Sou...

Seeing Ourselves Freshly through Our Four Core Images Rather than crafting a doctrinal statement for Southpoint when its roots were planted almost twenty years ago, Scott Simpson, Southpoint’s founding pastor, and his leadership team chose four core images to communicate the heart of our community: a Well, a Table, a Seed and a Net. Anne Baxter Smith has leaned into these images over the past 12 y...

A brief meditation from our All In service wrapping up our Season of Creation with a discussion of God's regenerative agency in Creation.

Anne suggests that maybe groaning is having its day.  Groans are powerful. Groans keep us from making peace with things that have no peace.  In Romans 8, Creation, every microscopic part of it, is groaning. Humans are groaning. God's Spirit is groaning—an inexpressible groan, too deep for words. When we groan, our bodies and breath take over. Our bodies show us what is becoming intolerable, wh...

We’ve been poking around in our Judeo-Christian Genesis origin stories these weeks, and Anne has found herself enamoured with a character in these stories,  Adamah : earth, dirt, land, soil. In these origin stories, Adamah is often mentioned. Humans and Adamah are so interconnected—Adamah is the source of human form, abundance and provision for Adam. But Adamah is also cursed, unable to provide, n...

This Sunday Anne takes on the dominant—and toxic—interpretation of the story of Adam's creation in Genesis 2. She discusses how it, in fact, invites us to see that God’s design was for us to be part of the net of kinship, not the exercise of human dominion. Further, the humans and the trees are drawn from the ground by God  for  each other. There is an implied relational connection between the...

Breathe in: "Be"... Breathe out: "Held." Interviewed by Brent Unrau, Jess shares what she experienced during her journey with cancer, when, prompted by a rich inner vision, she reached out for help, breaking past her assumptions about what the response of others would be in her time of vulnerability.

Our pastor, Anne Baxter Smith, introduces and finds out a bit more about Madison Friesen. We are so excited to welcome Madison as our Community Life Coordinator. This is a get-to-know-you exchange between Anne and Madison so you can get to know him, too. : )

"Jesus wept.” Guest speaker Leah Kostamo imagines it felt "“achey, but good”. It was evidence of his wholeness, of his congruency — that he not only preached love but he felt love, and he felt the commensurate sadness in the face of loss. And so, he wept. (Maybe a lot.) Well worth a listen, this episode eases us into the goodness, and discomfort, of our emotions, and how they function in...

"Once you catch the scent of Joy, it's like everything else falls out from your attention." In the book of Hebrews 12 the writer says of Jesus that "for the joy set before him", Jesus endured the cross, and the shame of the cross. He was moving towards joy... maybe Joy is the very thing that leads us on the path of life — connected not only to our own refreshment but to the...

"Consider how the wildflowers grow: they do not labour or spin. Yet I tell you, not even Solomon, in all his splendour, was dressed like one of these... " —Luke 12

This summer our theme is Refresh. We’ve talked about rest, we’ve talked about play. Today we explore turning to regard the present with openness and curiosity, even in the hard things. This one, this podcast, has it all: the sublime and the ridiculous. Imagine this: God is like a marshmallow. Or, imagine this:  there’s a burning bush—on fire, not consumed—and a voice, and an aging man alone in the...

Our summer offering at Southpoint is a response of compassion to what we've been through. Instead of focusing on something you  should  do, our summer series reminds you that you are worthy of care, and that God has woven into everything an abundance which can resource us when we are depleted. Anne speaks of children as the pied pipers who can lead us back to this abundance, if we are willing...

“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” — Matthew 11: 28-30  Jesus reveals for us more clearly than anyone or anything else who God is. “ Come to me. I will give you rest. ” Rest is a gift of God, an exp...

To launch our summer series, "Refresh", Brent Unrau delves into the gift of becoming like child. Starting with Mark 10:13-16, Brent weaves in reflections from being a grandparent and draws upon The Hummingbird, a poem by Naomi Shihab Nye and an excerpt from Erling Kagge's Walking. One Step at a Time. And, in case you miss it, he also manages an allusion to running shoes, from Ray Bra...

Humans tend to cling to their customs — their ways of being and believing and thinking. When we come up against “difference” — people or ideas offering a fresh voice, or a fresh take on things — how do we handle our encounter with that which risks influencing our beliefs and behaviour? Guest speaker Pastor Lee Kosa of Sanctuary Church (Delta, BC) examines belief, belonging and mutual transformatio...

Join us today as Rev David Morrison continues our Easter Season theme "Fresh". (The sound quality is at times a little muddy, so you may like to increase the volume. Apologies!)

Love won’t stay hidden in abstraction. One way or another, love will show up in the particularities of time, space, words, and deeds.  In Jesus, love showed up so concretely and with such great specificity, that it seems to be his form of art. When love showed up in Jesus, something broke open, something fresh emerged. That breaking open and fresh emergence through the power of love  was  the comi...

These weeks after Easter, as we head to Pentecost, Pastor Anne invites you to make room for a rewilding of your faith. To allow space for the possibility that the movement of God is beyond your imagination. To allow room for a fresh hope in the endless creative possibility of God who is perpetually birthing new life.  We are made. We are loved. We are kept.  While Peter’s initial hope for the Mess...

We think being a Christian is about belief, but really, it’s about desire.