Napier Baptist

This week is my last week as Pastor of Napier Baptist Church. It is and will be a hard week - goodbyes to people you love and care about are hard. I'm sure there'll be hugs, laughter, memories, tears and thankfulness to God to what God's done amongst us over these last 4 and a bit years. I'm sure it'd be easier to slip away quietly without having to do all the hard stuff of saying good bye, but we wouldn't have it any other way...

Not long after resigning someone said to me "you'll know you're ready to go when you pack up your books." It's probably saying something that I got to the point of having to pack up my books. Now, it's time to go.

Speaking of being "tough as nails" at Easter (see post below), go and have a read of Stu's story of how for pastors, the show must always go on...

The following is a reflection for Good Friday from my favourite preacher William Willimon:

Here's a clip for Mike and our youth...

Hat tip Stu

Ignatius from travis hawkins on Vimeo.

Paul Windsor is organising a preaching forum for experienced and emerging preachers. He's got a group of preachers (both old hands and up and comers) to give presentations on topics relating to preaching in the Kiwi context. He's got so short on speakers that he's roped me into this! The details are below (you can click on it to enlarge the image). If you're from Napier Baptist and you're interested in going to this even, please let me know. If we get a group of 5 of us we can get a discount...

I'm now catching up on 2 months of posting! So, here's some photos of the Christmas Dinner we held at Napier Baptist on Christmas Day. We put it on so that we could share Christmas with people who would otherwise be alone on Christmas Day. This was the 2nd year we've done this and it was nice to see some familiar faces return. It was also nice to share meals with people who pop in and out of our church throughout the year for various reasons. We put a real emphasis on removing any sense of "us" and "them" so that the focus was on all of us sharing a meal and time together. This year we had people from other churches and organisations who thought it was a great idea and wanted to join us and help and any who wanted to help were welcome to (from doctors to mental health patients). It was great for about 80-90 of us to share a Christmas meal and time together.