Sunday 25 October

This Sunday 25 October we continue our sermon series looking at the book of Malachi.

Malachi is the last book of the Old Testament and it would appear that the Israelite people are being rebuked for their lax religious and social behaviour.

There are many lessons that we can learn from the book of Malachi as we endeavour to live God-honouring lives in our day and age; especially if we are to be examples of what it means to live out our Christian lives in such a way that people will be drawn to the ‘life and hope’ that we espouse as we reach out into our local communities and beyond.

This week we unpack what it looks like to truly respect and honour our Father in heaven and our Master, especially in the area of our worship (which also incorporates our wealth and our work). In each of these areas we need to have the right attitude as they are all supposed to be used by God for His glory.

Messages from this series have been adapted from Mark Driscoll’s sermon series that he presented to Mars Hill Church in late 2013 / early 2014.

So if you are in the Inner City of Wellington on Sunday morning, why not come and join us @ 10:30am at 92 Vivian Street, Wellington – Limited parking is available on site via 6 Jessie Street.

For those of you that are unable to attend for whatever reason or are wanting to check us out online you can view our ‘Church Online’ Service @ 6pm (NZ Time).

Links will be posted on our Wellington City Corps and Wellington Citadel Band Facebook pages and on this site on Sunday afternoon.

Please share these far and wide amongst your friends, family, social media contacts etc. so that we can continue reaching out with God’s love to those that may need it in these uncertain times, as we endeavour to ‘bring life and hope to the Inner City of Wellington’ and beyond.

May God continue to bless and encourage you as we each endeavour to live out our Christian Faith in these challenging times that we find ourselves in 🙂

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What if…

Earlier this month General Brian Peddle released a new video message in light of the challenges brought about by COVID-19.

Acknowledging the tragic tolls of death, hardship, and loss, the General invites viewers to ‘exercise the kind of faith that we find in Hebrews 11’.

The message also brings assurance that the international Salvation Army – with its presence in 131 countries worldwide – continues to meet very real need.

Within New Zealand with the release of the We Commit statements in the later half of 2019 at Congress, we commit to re-imagining mission centres to be effective and sustainable. This will require us to set aside our preoccupation with ‘the way things have always been done around here’ as we embrace what God is doing in disrupting our ‘normal’.

These are going to be testing times, trying times and challenging times as we come to terms with where we fit in all of this, and I reckon that God is refining us so that we can be better shaped to reach out to HIs world, with His love, through of all people US! What a privilege, what a scary proposition.

Are we up to the task?

Do people look at us as Christians and see Christ in US or do people see yet another angry opinionated person which they have become so accustomed to in this world? We should be examples of what it means to be living a Christ-like life in all of our interactions – sadly for many of us that is not the case.

But there is Hope and Life! God is doing a new thing, He is changing us from the inside as Paul in Romans 12:1-2 can attest to if we are willing to be transformed by Him.

“I plead with you to give your bodies to God. Let them be a living sacrifice, holy – the kind he can accept. When you think of what he has done for you, is this too much to ask?

Don’t copy the behaviour and customs of this world, but be a new and different person with a fresh newness in all you do and think. Then you will learn from your own experience how his ways will really satisfy you.” (The Living Bible)

And I love how The Message puts it; “So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him.

Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out.

Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.”

So Lord we pray that you would take our everyday, ordinary lives and use them to draw All people to you, for that should be our act of worship – It is not about us and what we want – But what we can do!

Blessings 🙂

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Sunday 18 October – Recap

If you were unable to join us last Sunday at 10:30am in-house, or at 6pm when we hosted ‘Church Online’ on our facebook Wellington City Corps or Wellington Citadel Band pages, you can have a recap of what we covered during our meeting by clicking on the video link below.

This week we started a new sermon series looking at the book of Malachi – exploring how our lives leave a legacy for those that are watching us, regardless if we think they do or not. They will one way or another!

It would appear from a cursory scan of the book of Malachi that the Israelite people are being rebuked for their lax religious and social behaviour. Yet this is only part of the overall emphasis – as it shows God calling His people back to what they were supposed to be all about. Every one of us as God’s chosen people are called by Him to be an influence on the world around us.

Jesus began teaching this exact same concept in his earthly ministry when he told his disciples that he would make them fishers of men. As God’s chosen people, they possessed the Word of God, and were to be the salt and light in the world.

Therefore, as we look at the many lessons that we can learn from the book of Malachi: I hope and pray that we will take on board the many aspects of our faith that God would have us adopt so that we can endeavour to live God-honouring lives in our day and age.

Especially if we are to be examples of what it means to live out our Christian lives in such a way that people will be drawn to the ‘life and hope’ that we espouse as we reach out into our local communities and beyond. For God is calling us back to what He intended for us and our lives – To get back to where we once belonged!

Messages from this series have been adapted from Mark Driscoll’s sermon series that he presented to Mars Hill Church in late 2013 / early 2014.

We hope and pray that through the words and music that you hear, and the many talents used in His service to bring this meeting to you each week, that you will be uplifted in your spirit and encouraged as you continue trusting in God and living out your journey of faith. Knowing that through His Holy Spirit He goes with you, He is walking beside you, and He is also preparing a way forward for you.

If you’d like to check out our previous services you can subscribe to our Corps YouTube Channel. You can also subscribe to the Wellington Citadel Band Channel where we have highlights of our recent tour to Singapore and Japan in 2019.

For those of you that have stumbled across this site, page or post and may want to know more about the Christian faith and what this can do to impact your life – why not check out the Gospel Message page as we all have a responsibility to share the “Good News” with others especially in today’s world 🙂

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Four Key Attitudes of Leaders…

The following four key attitudes of leaders whose churches will thrive in the future are from a post that was written by Thom S. Rainer (author of I Am a Church Member, Autopsy of a Deceased Church, Who Moved My Pulpit? and many more) on the Church Answers website.

1. “God is not done with us yet.” To be clear, the leaders of secular organizations were unlikely to articulate this attitude in the same way church leaders were. But all of the healthy organizations had attitudes of hope and possibility. Defeatism was a foreign concept to all of them.
2. “We are not waiting for things to return to normal.” Any organization waiting for a pre-COVID normal is already in trouble. Any churches expecting patterns of attendance, giving, and ministry to be similar to 2019 are really up against a wall. There will not even be a new normal, because normal cannot be defined. These leaders are looking for indicators of a new reality and they are making pivots to these new realities. 
3. “We will be more outwardly-focused than ever.” Too many churches and other organizations got comfortable prior to 2020. The leaders of future-focused organizations are determined more than ever to reach beyond themselves. The churches and the organizations of the future cannot and must not be navel gazers. 
4. “Major change is inevitable; we will embrace it.” The healthy church or organization of the future cannot simply move from change-averse to change-receptive. They must proactively seek and move toward radical change. They cannot wait for change to come to the organization. These organizations must take faith-based risks like many have never known before. If the leaders of these organizations succumb to the whiners who lament, “We’ve never done it that way before,” the organization is doomed. Healthy organizations of the future will embrace change with wisdom and courage. 

These four key attitudes if adopted by church leaders could help change the world – Bill Hybels (founding pastor of Willow Creek Community Church) is quoted as saying that “the local church is the hope of the world“, and I’m pretty sure that we all want our churches (or Corps in our setting) to thrive.

The thing is, we’ll need to embrace what God is doing in and through our lives today to impact the world – But throughout the western church it would appear that we have become far too comfortable with ‘normal’ and keeping the wheels of the institutional church or Christian organisation turning.

As Catherine Booth once said “if we are to better the future, we must disturb the present“.

Therefore, we need to challenge the status-quo, the systems, processes, policies and structures that we have built up for our protection and control.

Some of these along with traditions, rituals, symbols and sacred cows are potentially no longer fit for purpose in this day and age.

In 2 Corinthians 10:5 Paul tells us that we need to “destroy every proud obstacle that keeps people from knowing God…” (New Living Translation). According to Matthew 5:13-16 we are to be the salt and light that this world needs. God longs to use us for His purposes, so that others will see Him through our good deeds and glorify our Father in heaven.

Therefore, we need to carefully look at the ways that we have been doing church, our methodologies and ascertain if they are fit for purposes, are they achieving what we set out for them to do?

We’ll quite possibly need to come up with creative ways of engaging with our communities so that we can bring ‘life and hope‘. And we’ll also need to be more adaptable as the Holy Spirit leads us into new ways of doing mission and ministry going forward, reaching people who we would not necessarily reach out too.

The reality is that change is happening at an increasingly faster rate than what we are accustomed to in our world, so we’ll need to be a lot quicker at making decisions.

I believe God is doing a new thing but His overall plan hasn’t changed that He will use us, as His church, to change the world.

Shall we embrace the change? 

Are we up to the task?

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The latest War Cry is now available…

If you were able to make it to our Sunday morning service @ 10:30am you may have been handed a copy of the latest War Cry which is now available.

The War Cry is also available online to view or download at Issue.com and to help get the word out there why not share this post via facebook, or forward the links on to others 🙂

Within its pages you will find the following articles / features:

Don’t get Burned! God never intended for our daily lives to overwhelm us. In a go, go, go world, sometimes we don’t realise how badly we need to stop and recalibrate. Don’t get Burned! explores how we can do just that.

Your Vote Counts: Politics and religion have typically been two ‘hot potatoes’, the no-nos of conversation in some circles, likely to spark heated debate and strong feelings. Yet, your vote counts more than ever this year and we all have a responsibility as Christians to vote in our countries elections – as the decisions we make have potentially a lasting effect on the world in which we live, and the Kingdom of God to come.

Legacy: There are also a few other articles which coincide, in many regards, with our current sermon series theme at the moment of “living a life of legacy” as it has a bearing on the lives of our children and grandchildren, and the children of generations to come…

You can also view / download previous publications here.

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Church Online: 6pm (NZ Time) – Sunday 18 October

Today at 6pm (NZ Time) we are hosting ‘Church Online’ as a facebook live video event via our Wellington City Corps and Wellington Citadel Band pages. (Link below also).

Our weekly Sunday meetings feature both the Wellington Citadel Band and the Wellington City Worship Team.

This week we commence a new sermon series looking at the book of Malachi which is the last book of the Old Testament. It would appear from a cursory scan of the book that the Israelite people are being rebuked for their lax religious and social behaviour.

Yet this is only part of the overall emphasis – as it shows God calling His people back to what they were supposed to be all about. Every one of us as God’s chosen people are called by Him to be an influence on the world around us.

Jesus began teaching this exact same concept in his earthly ministry when he told his disciples that he would make them fishers of men. As God’s chosen people, they possessed the Word of God, and were to be the salt and light in the world.

Therefore, as we look at the many lessons that we can learn from the book of Malachi: I hope and pray that we will take on board the many aspects of our faith that God would have us adopt so that we can endeavour to live God-honouring lives in our day and age.

Especially if we are to be examples of what it means to live out our Christian lives in such a way that people will be drawn to the ‘life and hope’ that we espouse as we reach out into our local communities and beyond. For God is calling us back to what He intended for us and our lives – To get back to where we once belonged! 

Messages from this series have been adapted from Mark Driscoll’s sermon series that he presented to Mars Hill Church in late 2013 / early 2014.

May God bless you each as you head into the coming week 🙂

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