Posts from May 2025

On the barstool on Sunday I spoke a little about going on the 5 night silent retreat a few weeks ago. I wanted to tell you a little more about it. Lake Coleridge Village is a beautiful place in autumn. It is on the Te Araroa trail and the trail runs right through the property we stayed on. It is called Powerhouse Lodge. It was the single persons living quarters when the power station was built. The person who was…

Weave Your Own Web “For one particular research project, my colleagues and I at Fuller Youth Institute conducted long-form interviews with a number of families who had been nominated by their faith communities as exemplars.  We asked pastors to nominate families based not on whether the kids “turned out right,” whatever that might mean, but whether the families stayed faithful through the normal challenges of life, even as kids made mistakes and didn’t unfailingly comply with their parents’ wishes.  They were…

What’s in a Word?A colleague of mine once said to me, “words are like freight trains, they come loaded with meaning.” Those meanings, as you may have observed, are often quite different for each of us. They awaken diverse worlds within us.Last Sunday we spent time considering the images and ideas we each associate with the word “God.” We chatted with one another, wrote down our thoughts and placed them into two flax kete. Rachelle gathered them up and later,…

Last Sunday Catherine Fink spoke on barstool. She was reflecting on our journey exploring LGBTQAI+ inclusion and affirmation as a church community. She recognised the importance of this journey but also celebrated that Ilam is so much more than this one conversation. I wrote down some of the things she spoke about and added a few more that have come to me as I’ve thought about it. As Catherine said it is so important to recognise and celebrate our diversity…

This week I stumbled across a Netflix documentary called ‘Stories of a Generation with Pope Francis’.  At the beginning, Pope Francis says “for me, today , it is important for the future of humanity that the young talk to the old.”  The film was taken over the course of a year, and young filmmakers (under 30) interviewed and filmed people over 70 from across the globe, listening to their life stories.  There are stories from a variety of people, including…