Westy's Weekly Blog

  “Your problem is that you think you can keep God in your back pocket..!”   I’ve never forgotten that comment.   I was a rookie pastor at the time.   A church elders had asked me to come with him to confront a chap in the church about his scandalous behaviour.   We had pointed out to this man that his actions were not only offensive to others in the church and a scandal to the wider community but they were especially an offence to the Lord God who had spelled out very clearly in the Bible that this kind of behaviour was not appropriate.   All we got from the man was lots of excuses.   He talked as if God had given him a special dispensation to disobey the Ten Commandments.   That’s when my companion made his comment, about keeping God in your back pocket. It’s a rather telling accusation.   Obviously it’s an accusation that such a person has a very small God.   You can’t fit the Creator and Sustainer of the universe in your back poc...

  Nobody... but nobody... is going to disagree with me when I say that what our world desperately needs is peace. In my lifetime we’ve made astonishing progress in technology and science.   In primary school I still dipped a nib-pen in an ink-well on my school desk and used blotting paper if I ended up with too much ink on my page.   By the time I got to high school we were using ball-point pens.   Today we use keyboards and tablets.   The silicon chip has revolutionised just about everything we do.   In the 1970s I began a career in IT with a computer that would not have fit in our kitchen but I now have more computing power in my mobile phone than I ever had on the IBM mainframe computer I used in the 1970s. My generation has lived through the greatest changes ever in human history.   But we have not yet begun to solve the problems of hatred and war.   War still rages in the Ukraine and the Middle East continues to be a seething cauldron o...

  Introducing ‘God-talk’ into a conversation with unbelievers is fraught with difficulties.   Some of those problems are of our own making.   Too many a Christian has been ready to “rush in where angels fear to tread” – as the saying goes.   The upshot is that some non-Christians feel that talking with followers of Jesus will mean getting hit over the head with a Bible.   My ten years of working in industry and commerce, before becoming a pastor, taught me to avoid “Bible bashing”.   Surely the apostle Peter meant exactly that.   He told us in his first letter that when asked, Christians must always be ready to give an account of the hope that is in us – but, Peter added, “...do this with gentleness and respect.”   Perhaps Peter had also experienced zealous Christians who buttonholed unbelievers with a “Brother are you saved?” approach. I’ve found though that there is one opportunity unbelievers often give us to raise faith issues without even...