Reflections by Rev Dr Paul Tonson - Interim Minister

I ask myself: Am I a spiritual person? Are you? I am more a free spirit and not really religious. Still I think of myself and of each of you as essentially spiritual. I have friends who no longer go to church: ‘the church alumni society’! They have given up religion but not the spiritual. My atheist Humanist friends run a...
read more

Today the sermon asks, “How do you recognise God?”  In John’s Gospel, Jesus tells his disciples God will send them a helper: “This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him.  You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in you.”   It seems as if...
read more

Part of our family is Julien, who was born in France and is studying wine production. Just as he will always be French, the identity of wine is given by the stock. Australian vintners can no longer name their wines after the regions of France where the grapes originated.How does Jesus as our root stock elucidate our identity and bear...
read more

Some years ago, a senior colleague in ministry was appreciating a communion liturgy I carefully prepared with a progressive and universal character. However, he shocked me with his question: ‘But why have you got that word ‘Christ’ in there?’ Perhaps he thought Jesus understood as Christ had lost its meaning.His question prompted me to further focus my language on the...
read more

In a subject I took at university, one student was late for every single lecture.   The lecturer would have given us the handouts.   The subject of the next essay would have been announced.  The class would have settled down to take notes on the day’s lecture.  Then the door would open and this woman would come in, all...
read more

You go to the funeral parlour for a viewing of someone you deeply love and when the casket is opened, there is no body! What do you imagine? But when you see neatly folded the clothes you had provided, what then? And when the director telephones the morgue and there is no body there …? Something phenomenal has happened. My...
read more

‘Letting go’ can be agonizing, and yet to do so is precisely the invitation of this day, Good Friday. Three years ago when we moved house, we had over 100 wine cartons of stuff. But we had also got rid of a comparable amount. When we move house, we discover how attached we are to our books and pictures, our...
read more

The people of Jerusalem were waiting patiently along the road for their Messiah. They had heard about Jesus’ teaching and healing in Galilee and knew he was coming south. They liked the way he challenged both Jewish and Roman leaders. They loved the way he made ordinary people and the marginalized welcome. As they looked down the road they were...
read more

Natural Spirituality - Progressive or Orthodox? This congregation and SWell represent the wellbeing and joy that people find in living out a sense of the spiritual in the midst of life. The triumphalist Christian church has sometimes asserted that Jesus was the originator of personal faith but 600 years earlier, Jeremiah announced the New Testament (=Covenant) in which the divine...
read more

The first three gospels are referred to as the synoptic gospels because they give us a synopsis or the story of Jesus and his teaching.  They consist of the teaching of Jesus and stories about Jesus which are ancient in form and reflect a consistent style and theme. Mark was the first written and the Luke and Matthew using a...
read more