Current Sermon Series:

Friendship

Sunday Evenings October - December 2023

In our evening services we will be looking at friendship with Jesus as ultimate and the template for our friendships but taking quite a lot of time to explore healthy Christian friendships.

Recommended resources for this series

True Friendship
Walking through life with your Christian Friends

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Friend-ish
Reclaiming Real Friendship in an Culture of Confusion

Bible teacher Kelly Needham debunks our world's constricted, small view of friendship and casts a richer, more life-giving, biblical vision for friendship as God meant it to be. As the family unit grows more unstable and the average age of marriage increases, a shift is taking place in our culture: for many people, friends now play the role of family. And just as with family relationships, our friendships often don't turn out quite as we envisioned or hoped, and we wonder, Is there a better way to do this?
In Friend-ish, Kelly Needham takes a close look at what Scripture says about friendship. She reveals the distorted view most of us have of it and recasts a glorious vision for a Christian understanding. By teaching us how to recognize symptoms of idolatry and dependency, she equips us to understand and address the problems that arise in friendship--from neediness to discord and even sexual temptation. With hard-fought wisdom, a clear view of Scripture, and been-there perspective, Needham reorients us toward the purposeful, loving relationships we all crave that ultimately bring us closer to God.

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Iron Sharpens Iron

Friendship and the Grace of God

The modern world, with its emphasis on speed and busyness and the mis-named "social" media, has not been an especially welcoming place to develop long-lasting, solid friendships that help to nurture the heart. Providing exemplars and guidance in this challenging situation, this book on friendship looks at some of the details of the friendships of the eighteenth-century pastor-theologian Andrew Fuller to help us think about and engage in meaningful relationships that [provide joy and comfort (in the older sense of that term as "strength") for the Christian journey. This is an ideal study for anyone desirous of being a better friend as well as those interested to know something of the history of Christian friendship.

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No Greater Love

A Biblical Vision for Friendship

Greater love has no one than this: that he lay down his life for his friends. –John 15:13
Our culture idolizes romance and the love of parents for their children. But Jesus said there was no greater love than sacrificial friendship love. What’s more, He issued a command to His disciples that they live into this kind of love. Christian friendship isn’t just a nice-to-have. It’s vital. But it’s also dangerous.
Friends can pull us up when we’re knocked down, embrace us with their love, and spur us on to follow Jesus better. But friends can also grind us to the ground, exploit, or invite us into sin.
In No Greater Love, Rebecca McLaughlin walks us through the highs and lows of friendship love—a love that’s been neglected and malnourished in our modern world. She draws especially on Jesus in the Gospels and on Paul to show how powerful and precious Christian friendship is and how we can walk through the hurt, loss, and disillusionment that comes from broken friendship trust. Beginning with the words of Jesus on the night he was betrayed and abandoned, she points us to His battle-tested love as the unending source of our best love for one another.
Male or female, single or married, joyful or lamenting, lonely or embraced, we all need friendship love. This book will help us give and receive it in a way that calls us back to Jesus’s commandment: that we love each other just like He loves us.

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Made for Friendship

God made you for friendship.
Friendship is one of the deepest pleasures of life. But in our busy, fast-paced, mobile world, we’ve lost this rich view of friendship and instead settled for shallow acquaintances based on little more than similar tastes or shared interests.
Helping us recapture a vision of true friendship, pastor Drew Hunter explores God’s design for friendship and what it really looks like in practice—giving us practical advice to cultivate the kinds of true friendships that lead to true and life-giving joy.

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The Best of Friends:
Choose Wisely, Care Well

It is unparalleled as a building block of society, a universal theme in great literature and film, and has a huge impact on our mental health, wellbeing and happiness. But many of us are lonely or feel suffocated by the pressures of life and quantity of relationships we have to maintain. Now, more than ever, we need better, deeper friendships. We need the best of friends.
Full of practical advice, humour and wisdom, Phil Knox shows us how to choose our friends wisely and maintain lasting and meaningful relationships.

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Recommended for families

Children 0-6y

The Friend Who Forgives Storybook

A true story about how Peter failed and Jesus forgave. (Paperback & Board book)

Do you ever talk before you think? Mess up? Let others down?
That’s what Peter did, again and again and again, and it led him to abandoning his best friend, Jesus.
Peter loved Jesus. He felt terrible when he pretended not to know him. He thought all was lost when Jesus died.
But after Jesus rose from the dead, he went and found Peter and forgave him. He explained that his death took the punishment for all of Peter’s mistakes and that his resurrection showed that the penalty was lifted.
Peter spent the rest of his life telling people that if they put their trust in Jesus, they could be forgiven too—again and again and again.
This book points children to Jesus, the friend who will forgive them again and again and again. Makes a great book for Lent and Easter.
There is an accompanying colouring and activity book, board book version for 2-4 year olds and family devotional available for purchase.

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Douglas Talks - Jesus is the BEST BEST Friend

Suitable for primary age children

Tweens 8-12y

Meeting with Jesus

A Daily Bible Reading Plan for Kids

Following up his popular book Exploring the Bible, David Murray has written a new reading plan for older children and tweens that focuses on Jesus Christ.
This volume walks kids through the story of Jesus in the Gospels over the course of a year. Each of the 52 weekly "meetings with Jesus" teaches a new truth about Jesus through 6 days of Bible reading and includes interactive reflection questions, space for prayer and application, memory verses, and lines for sermon notes.
In less than 5 minutes a day, tweens will get to know Jesus and his offer of abundant life.