Christian Stuff

North Central Church

Here are the notes for the sermons I've preached at North Central, the new church that we're planting in Crouch End, since we started public meetings. I'm including a note of the other session in that series, in the hope that at some stage, I can get notes from Nick, Pete, Matthew and Dave and add them to this site.

• Sunday 4th November 2001 - Church Planting: Life on the Front Line
• Sunday 13th January 2002 - The Church: Army, Family, Body, Bride
• Sunday 27th January 2002 - What kind of people go to church?
• Sunday 24th February 2002 - Is The Church Just After My Money?
• Sunday 3rd March 2002 - Money, part 2 (me - it was a long one!)
• Sunday 17th March 2002 - What is the Role of the Congregation?
• Sunday 28th July 2002 - Grace and Works: what motivates Christians?

  [Move from All Bar One to Bar Rocca]

• Sunday 22nd September 2002 - Why Is the Bible Reliable?
• Sunday 27th October 2002 - The World Turned Upside Down (Introduction to the sermon on the mount)
• Sunday 24th November 2002 - Do Not Worry
• Sunday 8th December 2002 - Living with a Different Spirit
• Sunday 2nd February 2003 - What God is Like, part 3: Holiness
• Sunday 23rd February 2003 - What God is Like, part 6: Omnipotent, Omniscient, Omnipresent
• Sunday 11th May 2003 - Keeping God Central
• Sunday 18th May 2003 - Pleasure: God and Other Sources of Joy
• Sunday 15th June 2003 - Worshipping in Spirit and Truth, reworked for North Central from the notes of what I originally preached in Walworth three and half years ago.
• Sunday 22nd June 2003 - Church Planting: Life on the Front Line, a reworking of my first ever North Central sermon, tuned to the rather different challenges we now face.
• Sunday 29th June 2003 - Grace and Works: what motivates Christians?, a third reworking since (to be honest) I got rather thrown into doing three consecutive weeks at short notice.
• Sunday 20th July 2003 - Praying for God's power
• Sunday 27th July 2003 - Why we're moving to a school hall

  [Move from Bar Rocca to Highgate Wood School]

• Sunday 12th October 2003 - Raising our expectation of what God will do
• Sunday 23rd November 2003 - What holiness means for Christians
• Sunday 30th November 2003 - The Radical Christian
• Sunday 18th January 2004 - The Jealousy of God
• Sunday 8th February 2004 - Communion
• Sunday 4th April 2004 - The words of Jesus in John's Gospel. Chapter 1: The Call
• Sunday 2nd May 2004 - The words of Jesus in John's Gospel. Chapter 3: You Must Be Born Again
• Sunday 30th May 2004 - The words of Jesus in John's Gospel. Chapter 4: My food is to do the will of him who sent me

  [North Central closes. Move to the Gospel Centre]

• Sunday 24th July 2005 - The centrality of God

Sermons from midweek meetings:

• Thursday 16th May 2002 - Romans: Introduction and 1:1-3:20
• Thursday 6th June? - Romans 3:21-4:25 (Jim)
• Thursday 20th June? - Romans chapter 5 (Postponed until Thursday 5th September)
• Thursday 4th July? - Romans 6:1-7:6 (Amanda)
• Thursday 18th July? - Romans 7:7-8:17 (Sujen)
• Thursday 19th September - Romans 8:18-27
• Thursday 3rd October - Romans 8:28-39
• Thursday 17th Oct - Romans 9 (David Littlehales)
• Thursday 7th November - Romans 10-11 (Jim)
• Thursday 21st November - Romans 12:1-8 (Amanda)
• Thursday 5th December - Romans 12:9-13:14 (Kay)
• Thursday 19th December - Romans 14-16

Other Talks

I have on-line notes and overviews of several other talks I've written and given over the last few years in various contexts. Most of these pre-date North Central.

• A sermon on Walking In Two Worlds, which I first delivered in the Walworth church-plant in July 1999. (The notes are not quite complete, but that's alright, because I didn't quite complete the sermon either: twenty minutes seems like such a long time when you're the one listening, doesn't it? And yet it's nowhere near long enough when you're talking ... :-)

• A sermon on Worshipping in Spirit and Truth, also first delivered in Walworth, this one in February 2000.

• Kings and Prophets in the Old Testament - part of a ``what's in the bible'' course that I was involved for my old Bermondsey church. There are four pages of this altogether, but the top-level one has links to the other three.

• A series of three bible studies on foundations. They look at three aspects of what God is like: his sovereignty, his grace and his fatherhood.

• Notes for a bible study on legalism, based on the book of Galatians.

• My notes on The Identity of Jesus (under the misleading title Deity of Christ) for a WORDplus session at Bermondsey on 21st September 2001.

  I am also hosting the powerpoint presentation of Andy Blacknell's talk on the resurrection from the same session.

• Incomplete notes for an informal presentation-and-discussion on Creation and Evolution and why Christians should shut up arguing about it.

• Notes on North Central's April 2003 ``strategy'' for Keeping God Central. These notes informed the subsequent sermon of the same title, but there's actually very little overlap in the material.

Sue Noakes's Healing

I'm hosting the truly extraordinary story of Sue Noakes's healing. A lot of people are skeptical about healing, and reasonbly enough want to see a really clear, well-documented case. Well, this is a spectactular case history, and it happened recently (Decemeber 2000) in Crawley, East Sussex (you can't get a much more mundane location than that!) Sue is Fiona's accountant's wife, and a good friend of Fiona's mother; so while she's not exactly a personal friend of mine, she is close enough to me that I can vouch for the authenticity of this story. Sue's in the process of gathering formal documentation of the healing from doctors and other authorities.

Note that I did not write this text; it is Sue's story told in her own words. I have resisted the tempatation to clean up the prose, because I think it's important that what people read is exactly what she wrote. Crawley Community Church's site has a little bit of detail on Sue's background for those who are interested.