Past Preaching Programme

The Bible is full of exciting visions of what God intends to do for the world and for those who follow him. Much of the Christian life is about trying to catch God’s vision for our common life together and the work that he is calling his people to do. During this series we will look at various different parts of the life of Christ Church and its members, and seek to discern what God wants these roles and ministries to look like as we move forward. In the 151st year of Christ Church and alongside the opening of the new halls that we have built for children and young people, it is an opportune moment to reshape our agendas in the light of the vision that God will reveal as we seek his will.

The Bible is full of exciting visions of what God intends to do for the world and for those who follow him. Much of the Christian life is about trying to catch God’s vision for our common life together and the work that he is calling his people to do. During this series we will look at various different parts of the life of Christ Church and its members, and seek to discern what God wants these roles and ministries to look like as we move forward. In the 151st year of Christ Church and alongside the opening of the new halls that we have built for children and young people, it is an opportune moment to reshape our agendas in the light of the vision that God will reveal as we seek his will.

One of the most vivid characters in the gospels is that of Peter, with Matthew, Mark, Luke and John writing their accounts in a manner that gives us a great deal of insight into his personality. Mark is probably based on the testimony and teaching of Peter himself. The result of this is a huge amount of detail about how this particular man learnt to follow Jesus through a whole set of varied situations. As much through his mistakes as his successes, studying Peter can help us a great deal as we seek to learn more about how to follow Jesus.

The Christian life should be one of constant discovery, as we learn new things about God and what he has done for us in Jesus Christ. One of the reasons why the Bible contains so much narrative is precisely to facilitate this. During this series, we will look at a number of very familiar Christian beliefs and ask fresh questions about their significance and implications for how we live our lives. Ascension Day, Pentecost and Trinity Sunday are all important points in the Christian calendar and are included within this series as we seek to grapple with what these occasions represent and how this should shape our life at Christ Church. The Bishop of Kingston will also be helping us on 21st May to think afresh about the relationship between Science and Christianity.

The Christian life should be one of constant discovery, as we learn new things about God and what he has done for us in Jesus Christ. One of the reasons why the Bible contains so much narrative is precisely to facilitate this. During this series, we will look at a number of very familiar Christian beliefs and ask fresh questions about their significance and implications for how we live our lives. Ascension Day, Pentecost and Trinity Sunday are all important points in the Christian calendar and are included within this series as we seek to grapple with what these occasions represent and how this should shape our life at Christ Church. The Bishop of Kingston will also be helping us on 21 st May to think afresh about the relationship between Science and Christianity.

C.S. Lewis was one of the greatest Christian apologists of the twentieth century, producing a number of books that have had a transforming effect on the lives of millions of people. The most famous of his writing are The Chronicles of Narnia. In recent years a great deal more has been discovered about what Lewis was up to when he wrote the Narnia stories, revealed that their significance even more profound that was previously recognised. During this series we will look at each of the seven Narnia stories in the light of the biblical truths that they are seeking to illuminate, with the aim of our hearts and minds being stirred to understand the God revealed in Jesus Christ more fully.

The main characters who dominated the book of Acts are Peter in its first half and Paul in its second. However a number of other characters appear in its narrative as Acts tells us the story of what Jesus continued to do, through the apostles and by the power of the Holy Spirit. During this series we will examine these ‘lesser characters’ and see what we can learn from their examples and role in the spread of God’s Word.

During Paul’s first missionary journey, he and Barnabas took the Good News of Jesus from their base in Antioch to the island of Cyprus and then a number of towns in modern day Turkey. Sadly, a row between Paul and Barnabas prevented them from working together again and on his Second Journey, Paul was accompanied by Silas and later Timothy and others. During this series we will look at their journey and what happened as the Gospel of Jesus Christ came to Macedonia and Greece and its great cities of Philippi, Thessalonica, Athens and Corinth. Seeing how Paul sought to connect the gospel to these cultures has a great deal to teach us about its relevance to the cultures in which we live today.

TED talks are a number of high quality monologues by leading experts on a whole range of topical subjects. Accessed through the Internet, they have been watched by thousands of people. During this series we will watch four of these talks and then listen to a Christian response to their contents. All truth is God’s truth and a thorough Christian evaluation of the wisdom on offer in our world is an important part of both following Jesus Christ and proclaiming him to the world.

Many of the Psalms express the strongest emotions possible as their writers bring their problems before God. This is precisely why they can bring us so much help and during this series we will use a number of the Psalms to help us bring our faith in God to bear upon the difficulties which we face.

Paul was the first great missionary of the Christian church and on his first missionary journey in AD 46-49 he planted a number of new churches in Cyprus and modern day Turkey. As Christ Church seeks to be a missionary church, we can learn much from the difficulties that Paul and his companions faced and the way the Holy Spirit worked through them to proclaim Jesus Christ.

If the six30 service is to grow and reach its full potential, we need to possess much greater clarity about what God is calling the service to be. The aim of this series at the start of 2017 is to play a key role in shaping and developing this vision. During January we need to be praying that God will help us clarify this vision so that we can then be led into ways of putting it into practice.

The New Testament contains a great deal of St Paul’s prayer for both the churches that he planted and ministered to and individuals within them. During this series we will look at the different prayers Paul says as we seek to learn more about how we can develop our own prayer lives.

Christian faith is only meaningful when it affects the way that we live and, in particular, when it leads us to serve God. This can be done in many ways but during this series we will look at a number of practical ways in which we can serve God at Christ Church. Many of these involve discovering the power that is unleashed when people cross social boundaries with God’s love.

Alongside our traditional Christmas services, there will be a number of services during Advent where our preachers pick out a single verse from the Christmas stories. They will then go onto explain how the verse and its contents sums up Christmas for them. For many of us there is deep familiarity about the Christmas stories which can serve to dull their impact upon us. The idea behind this series is that certain key verses will then stay with us throughout the Christmas period and help us reflect more deeply on the wonder of what God did when he sent his Son Jesus Christ into the world.

(Note: whilst collected under the United Service banner for convenience - being as the series were quite short, slotted as they were between the 150th Anniversary service and the usual Christmas services - two of these talks were actually at the 11am service, and the other at the six30 service.)

Regular churchgoers have usually heard hundreds of sermons on the Gospels. Very often, however, these sermons avoid those major sections towards the end of Matthew, Mark and Luke where Jesus proclaimed God’s judgement upon Jerusalem. This is because very few understand how this message related to the rest of his ministry. During this series we will look at these passages and try and understand their importance in regard to the saving death of Jesus Christ that occurred shortly after he spoke these words.

‘Gospel’ means ‘Good News’ and specifically ‘The Good News that God has come to rescue his people in Jesus Christ’. This leaves us, however, with a number of questions about the nature of this rescue and what is included within it. During this series we will take four questions about Jesus and ask how key things that he said or did relate to the Good News that he came to proclaim and embody.

Chapter 4 of Mark’s Gospel contains a cluster of Jesus’ teaching. Three of the four parables contained within it use the metaphor of farmers, seeds and soils to teach us about the nature of the Kingdom of God. Some of these stories are very familiar but during this series we will seek to unpack them afresh and understand more of the challenge that they are bringing to both Christ Church and our lives.

All of us need practical advice and teaching if we are going to develop in our Christian faith. The Bible is full of such help and during this series we will seek to uncover more of what it has to say about how to pray, how to share our faith, how to bring God’s healing and how to build up others. Rather than just listen to these talks, it will be good if they prompt discussion afterwards (perhaps in the pub!) about how we can put into practice what we learn.

Our building project at Christ Church will soon be completed and, by a happy ‘God-incidence’, during our 150th year. The story of its development, however, has sadly been a mixed one with nearly ten years of delay caused by endless opposition. A similar opposition was present when the church was reordered in 2006-7 and when the lounge and kitchen were built in 1980-81. The book of Nehemiah is often rather neglected but is instructive in presenting the challenge that will always be present when God’s people attempt such tasks. As we study the book, we will also see the role of faith, prayer, courage, integrity and commitment in ensuring that our new buildings serve God’s purpose in bringing more of his loving rule to New Malden.

Found in Matthew 5-7, ‘The Sermon on the Mount’ contains some of the most radical teaching that Jesus ever gave. Much of it is extremely counter-intuitive and commanding us to live in a completely different way to the surrounding world. It is when the church lives in this way, however, that Christianity becomes dynamic, exciting and life changing rather than dull and conventional. As we explore the Sermon during this series, our prayer will be that God will use it to make us into a more radical, faithful and life-changing community.

All Christians are called to proclaim God’s Word in our daily lives with a whole variety of different ways in which this can be done. Within the Bible we get a number of accounts of such calls with each containing different emphases that we can learn from. During this series we will look at the calls of Moses, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Paul and finally … Tom Collins on the Sunday that he, Helen, Joshua and Timothy leave to train for ordained ministry at Trinity College Bristol.

Developing leadership, including the leadership of those who are young, is a vital part of any growing church. The Pastoral Epistles within the New Testament are particularly focused upon the qualities needed within leaders and during this series we will look at one of these epistles in Paul’s second letter to Timothy. As we follow Paul coaching Timothy about personal boldness, holiness and suffering as well as how to how to handle the Scriptures, it will hopefully serve to inspire more members of Christ Church towards the greater leadership that we need if we are to grow further.

One of the most important things that we should be doing as a church is showing how Christianity can make a difference to our lives. When people become Christians, their problems don’t disappear and in some ways their lives become more difficult. What we are promised, however, is that God will be with us helping us with these issues and difficulties in a whole number of ways. During this series we will look a number of issues affecting of daily lives and try to unpack some of the practical ways in which our Christian faith can make a difference as we seek to respond to them.

Luke’s gospel contains many special emphases. These include Jesus’ particular love for the poor and marginalised and his teaching about the dangers of wealth. These emphases particularly stand out within the material that only occurs in Luke and is absent from Matthew, Mark and John. During this series (which will continue into July) we will study a number of these stories as we seek to apply the radical challenge of the third gospel to our daily lives and our life as a church.

The letter to the Hebrews forms one sustained argument concerning the indispensable nature of what Jesus Christ has done for us. Those to whom the letter was written were in danger of giving up and retreating into the old ways of thinking that had sustained them before they came to faith in Jesus. The writer of Hebrews was determined to encourage them to keep going chiefly through showing how all the Jewish ritual and belief that came before was pointing God’s people ahead to what Jesus would achieve. Studying the letter and its argument can encourage us, within a rather different context, to persevere in our faith by focusing us upon the significance of what God has done for us in Jesus Christ.

If we are open to seeing him, God is all around us including within areas that we might not think we are meant to look for him. During this series, we will look at the four areas of Literature, History, Science and Film and, in each one of them, look for how they can open our eyes more fully to the nature and purpose of the God whom we worship.

Widespread confusion still exists amongst both believers and non-believers in regard to the Christian hope. The Bible, however, is quite clear that the Christian hope is our physical resurrection into a new creation. During this post-Easter series we will look at the implications of this for what will happen to our bodies and creation itself as well as the controversial area of what will happen to people with disabilities.

The resurrection of Jesus transformed everything for his followers. During this post-Easter series we will look at three of its most obvious effects upon the early church in people coming to faith, its radical community and the acts of healing that occurred through it. Living also in post-Easter times, we will then consider the challenge that each of these brings to us at Christ Church.

Lent is traditionally a period for taking time out to focus upon and deepen our relationship with God. During this series, we will look afresh at the three areas where God might be challenging us to seek further renewal. The aim, as we look at prayer, fasting and fellowship, will be seeking to find new ways in which we can use these vital resources that God has given to nourish our relationship with him and make us more effective in his service.