Last year my wife Fiona and I led a growth group together at church. It was a wonderful experience but also very challenging. My chemo cycles meant that I tended to be absent roughly one week in three, and sometimes I wouldn’t know how I’d be until that
So you thought your job was simply to read the Bible passage? That’s easy—you check you have the right passage, you look over it a couple of times and then you get up and read. Surely that’s all there is to it. But I’d like to suggest that there’s a
I love turning up to church and seeing every seat full. Nothing fills me with greater joy than seeing my fellow brothers and sisters gathered and ready, eager to learn from God’s word. I love it when every member of our home group shows up, Bible in hand, and fills
In Isaiah 62, God says he is on the move: “I will not keep silent because of Zion, and I will not keep still because of Jerusalem...” * He is going to do something big. A nation that is “deserted” and “desolate” will soon “be called My Delight is in
You’ve put in the preparation, worked hard at understanding the passage, thought about the study and how you are going to lead the group through it. You are, in other words, primed and ready to go and then… only two of the seven members of your group turn up on
Shining a monthly spotlight on a ministry that we thank God for. Recently the Matthias Media team sat in our meeting room listening intently to an American visitor named Craig Parro. Craig was basically ‘in transit’—stopping off briefly in Sydney, on his way from Chicago to Papua New