From Hog Pen to Home
Driving home from dinner with Billy Graham's crusade directors, Sean Nolan thought: "Their God is a different God than my God. Their God is powerful." Then he realised:same God, two very different ways of walking.
What if God wants to take you somewhere new this year?
Is It All a Laugh?
When men pay each other out, are they building friendship or enforcing conformity? Joel, Stu and Tim open with Easter baptisms at the river and end up deep in NT Feather's tall poppy syndrome, Gramsci's hegemony, a proverb about flaming arrows and the question of whether Jesus ever made a joke. Honest, wide-ranging and worth your time.
Jesus’ Prayer
"Have you ever had someone say, 'I'll pray for you,' and actually do it?" Now take that feeling and times it by infinity—because Jesus, before the cross, before you even existed, prayed for you in John 17, asking the Father to protect you, fill you with joy, sanctify you by truth, unite you with believers, and bring you into His presence forever.
The Yellow Submarine at Full Scale
Sixty years of attractional church strategy has quietly institutionalised the generation gap, and Sydney Anglican churches are losing 40% of their young people as a result.
Stu unpacks the theory behind the Shock Absorber model, the problems with the homogeneous unit principle, and exactly how Soul Revival has built a governance structure that gives young people a genuine voice without abandoning formal institutional accountability.
The Quiet Before Everything Changed
Easter Saturday feels like filler between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, but this is where three world-changing truths emerge:
Jesus really died, the tomb really was empty, and faith begins before full understanding in the quiet moments that change history.
Stop Making Church More Like the World. Build this instead…
The attractional church model told us to make church more like the world so more people would come. Donald McGavran called it the homogeneous unit principle. Willow Creek made it famous.
But sixty years on, Joel and Stu are asking whether it's actually worked, and explaining the countercultural Yellow Submarine alternative they've been building for thirty years instead.
Birth Pains Until He Returns
The Father Himself loves you. No forms, no admin assistants, no working it up the chain. In John 16, Jesus promises instant, direct access to God and reveals why your confidence isn't in following influencer steps but in Christ's finished work on the cross.
Is Boring People with the Bible a Sin?
Simplification strips out complexity — and sometimes the truth along with it. Distillation keeps the essentials and removes the unnecessary. It's a small distinction with enormous consequences for how we pass on faith to the next generation.
Joel, Tim and Stu dig into the history of youth ministry, Lee Strobel's drift into atheism, and what it actually looks like to be a non-anxious adult presence for teenagers who are pushing hard against everything.
The Spirit's Testimony While the Son Sits
Would you rather have Jesus physically beside you or the Holy Spirit living inside you? Jesus Himself says it's actually better He left and sent the Spirit, because God is now with all of us, always, convicting the world and making Jesus bigger in our lives every single day.
The Yellow Submarine
What if youth ministry wasn't just a program but a "shock absorber" that helped the entire church navigate cultural change?
Don’t Let Them Hate Jesus Because of You
Don't make people hate Jesus because of you — let them hate you because of Jesus. That's the order, and getting it right changes everything about how you show up as a disciple.
Joel and Tim work through screen time data, shrinking family networks and John 15 in one of their best conversations yet.
When the World Hates You
"If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first."
Jesus isn't talking about casual annoyance, He's describing spiritual disgust, eternal rejection, and why following Him means being hated by the world (and why that's a far lighter burden than knowing people you love face eternal destruction).
The Greatest Love
A stadium full of people waves to sick children in a hospital, making them feel like they belong. But Jesus offers something even greater: the love with which the Father loves the Son, and the choice to abide in it or abide in the world.
Revealing the Spirit
If Jesus is the Messiah, why didn't He split the sky and shock the world into belief? In John 14, Jesus reveals something far better than spectacle: God making His home in you through the Holy Spirit, bringing peace that transcends understanding even in your chaos.
131 Years of God’s Kindness and Faithfulness
Celebrating 131 years of Miranda Congregational Church
Life With Jesus — Not Just Life From Him
Everyone seems to be rediscovering the value of Christianity right now: except they mostly want the fruit without the vine. Joel and Tim trace a line from Bluey through the culture wars to Skye Jethani's brilliant framework, and ask the question every church leader should be sitting with: are the people in your church pursuing Jesus, or just the benefits of proximity to him?
Revealing the Way
Standing in a hospital hallway after his wife's death, a man asked the question we all fear: "Will I ever see her again?" In John 14, Jesus makes four promises about death that no doctor, philosopher, or religion can match—starting with "Do not let your hearts be troubled."
Have We Forgotten About Friendship?
Most churches have the Sunday gathering and the small group sorted. But there's a whole layer of community sitting between those two — and its absence is why people keep saying "I don't feel like I belong here." Bonhoeffer called it an ecclesial category. Your church might just call it the thing that's been missing.
Revealing the Father
What if you're not as alone as you feel? In John 14, Jesus makes a promise that sustained martyrs facing flames and carries believers through hospital rooms today: "I will not leave you as orphans", because the Spirit of God lives in you.