gregmelia

I’ve just started writing for the Student Christian Movement. I’ll post something whenever they ask me to, which should hopefully be roughly every fortnight. It’ll obviously be on Christian matters, so there may be a bit less of that on here. In fact, you may have noticed rather a glut of cycling posts on here [...]

Child abuse a la the Richard Dawkins is more difficult than he thinks, or else I wish I had something of what he’s got. In this article – Guardian: An atheist goes to Greenbelt – atheist Jessica Reed gos to the christian festival Greenbelt, and finds largely what she came for. She starts off very [...]

I preached this on my last Sunday evening at church, August 23rd.  The readings were John 6:57-69 and Ephesians 6:10-20. I once knew two pastors, who’d both moved into new churches in the past couple of years. We were all together and chatting about church stuff, and I asked one of them how he’d been [...]

I preached this at a lunchtime service a few weeks ago, but have only just got it online. I actually preached without notes, so what you see here is a summary from my original script. The reading was Revelation 1:1-8 Mike’s called me in to do the sermon for the last Wednesday lunchtime service of [...]

21 young people visited us on Thursday and Friday, on a mission. They’d come from all over the country to Manchester, as part of 10,000 hours of hope. Run by the Message Trust and Audacious Church, this saw young Christians giving 10,000 hours of kindness to communities round Manchester, including ours. Just before they came, [...]

Term’s ending, so there are a lot of ‘finals’ happening at the moment. Last week, it was my final trip to Kingsway school, and my final KS2 assembly in Meadowbank. This week contained my final High Lane club, my final Fusion and my final proper AllStars (they’re going swimming next week) and I’ve just finished [...]

Can a good person get to heaven even if they don’t believe? We were discussing this at a recent CY?, and the girls were firmly of the opinion that for God not to ‘let someone in’, if this nonbeliever had “been reasonable good like, not murdering loads of people or something” would be very unfair. [...]

I preached this at St C’s lunchtime service, two Wednesdays ago. The readings were Romans 1:16-25 and James 3:13-4:3 Let me read you a story… Six blind men encounter an elephant – although how they knew that it was an elephant. The first touches its trunk and says that an elephant is like a palm [...]

Everything finite has a cause. Nothing finite can cause itself. A causal chain cannot be of infinite length. Therefore, an infinite, uncaused ‘first cause’ must exist. So said Thomas Aquinas. Spending my usual Tuesday lunchtime in the local primary school’s playground, I felt too sluggish for sport, so sat down on a grassy bank and [...]

Today, our Covies (Y7+) group schedule pointed us at Genesis 35:1-15. We’re just finishing a series on Jacob, the father of Joseph and his amazing infamous coat. In today’s passage, Jacob took some time out to build an altar, spend some time with God and reflect on where he’s going. So, what was the youth [...]