The Westside King's Church Podcast

Jesus once told a parable to teach us that life is not about the stuff we gather. It’s probably fair to say that we’ve been resistant to this lesson.

The biblical story begins with a garden and ends with a city, but what happens in between?

If we think that "the Holy" is fragile, will that change how we live our lives?

How do we remember to value the moments we have in our lives?

When we don't get what we pray for does our faith sustain us in the reality of life?

When we don't feel normal, what do we turn to?

Sometimes we will only accept a cure or a solution. The Bible offers us something called lament.

How does a person make the choice to step away from the familiar, comfortable and secure to follow what they believe God is calling them to?

What do we lose when when we strip the birth of Jesus down to sentimentality or sanitise it to make it more palatable or even tolerable?

No one was ready for the first Christmas, and we shouldn’t try to be either.

Like Joseph at the beginning of the Christmas story, we all live in a world where we engage in impression management.

The God of the Christmas story is a God of the middle of all of our stories

Why is it that at Christmas, more than other times of the year, Christians seem to increase their pursuit of the “spiritual” over the “materialistic”? We ask this because the tradition of celebrating Christmas is rooted in God become “material”. The incarnation celebrates God-made-flesh and being amongst us.

In this teaching we thought a little bit more about what it looks like to think of church less as something that we come to but as something that we are. Even something that we do.

We return to think again about the church, and the church we might become. Language of vision and mission can often sound pretentious and over-confident. We don’t want to be like that. But we do want to ask an important question. What would we like things to be like in 100 years? What type of world, city, church will our grand children grow old in?

The everyday scene in the ancient world of a potter forming a pot from clay is the scene we focus on as we end this series.

The Hebrew phrase "Shuv Shevut" is deeply embedded in Jeremiah. It could just mean "Return" or it could mean so much more than that.

What’s Jeremiah’s big issue with idols? Why does he think they are worth so much attention?

How do we respond to biblical text today? Is that even a question we should consider?

Why are things the way they are in the world? We want someone to blame, and in Jeremiah we might get an answer, but we might not like it.

We begin this series on Jeremiah asking about how he finds his purpose and identity in life, and how we might do the same.

We all meet Jesus with a story. How he engages with us in that story is always a surprise.

Like the Israelites, we often find ourselves in “Exile”. The state of being in a situation that we don’t want to be in.

We think retrospectively about how our community was imagined in the past and challenge ourselves to continue in the grace journey that we started upon.

We head into our 25th year as a community. What does our journey look like? Where might we be going? Our lead pastor talks about three areas of trust in God for our church.