Rain is a necessity of life. From it rivers are formed bringing freshness and newness to everything they touch. Let 2012 to be our year of heavy rain! The problem with rain, however, is that it usually comes with menacing clouds of trouble that tend to overshadow our worlds. Yet don’t be fooled by trouble! Clouds are God’s Eddie Stobbard of the skies. They are giant transporters taking precious water back from the lowlands to the highlands to create great rivers of influence and blessings.

Firstly, I need to say that I like Rob Bell. I cried as I turned the empty pages at the close of ‘Drops Like Stars’. He’s a thinker, a lover of people and a Christian leader of our age. It’s this third Characteristic that has led me to write this short article… Rob has a problem that I have also grappled with (and who in their right mind wouldn’t?). How can a good God send good people to Hell forever? When we say ‘good people’, we mean people that work an honest living, raise an honest family and really care for the world around them. Rob’s answer is to adjust the nature of God, adjust the true nature of people and to adjust the means through which we must all come to God.

There is a well known, but little spoken of, fact in Church life that sound guys often turn bitter. They may not backslide, but they go bitter and often get resentful, and end up leaving the sound team with more than one chip on their black-tee-shirt-clad shoulder. It’s one of those things that happens on a pretty regular basis in many churches across the country and something we at Hope City Church are on the way to solving.

This is a short story by Dave Gilpin and a part of the Mind Map allegory of the mind of a Christian. He tracks the creation, journey and arrival of a prayer, similar to the ones we pray in everyday life. It’s a refreshing and liberating imagery of the desires of a heart being expressed and the translated and interceeded by the Holy Spirit. Let the story begin…

Recently, eight million people tuned in to the BBC’s Question Time, over four times its normal audience, to watch Nick Griffin, the leader of the British National Party, present the views of the BNP and to defend allegations of racism within the party.

When I was both at school and university I cannot remember learning anything at anytime from any teacher. My mind was always elsewhere. Everything I learned I learnt through taking ‘no doze’ caffeine tablets and swotting through the night before the deadline, whether it be an exam or an assignment due.