As B&A kicks off a series on its new vision for 2024, this week James and Wayne talk about how vision and values work in the church.
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Following Wayne Massey’s recent Mission to Uganda as part of SOMA UK, James and Wayne discuss what Wayne saw and experienced and reflect on the difference between a post Christian culture and one that is Christian or even pre Christian. How can we apply what we see God doing elsewhere to Bristol and the UK in 2023?
Uganda Mission in numbers; 10 days, average temperature 28 degrees centigrade, approx. 3,000 evangelists from the local church, Uganda, across Africa and Europe. 200 parishes. 80 open air crusades. 370,000 heard the good news of Jesus. 7,800 people gave their lives to Jesus.
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James in conversation with Ed Shaw, Pastor of Emmanuel City Centre Church, Bristol, about the recent voting by the Church of England to welcome the blessing of same sex marriages in dedicated church services. The amendment to the motion scraped through by one vote; the amended motion passed by 227 votes to 203.
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This week James is joined by Matt Southcombe from St Nick's, Bristol, to talk about how we live well as disciples in a world of non-stop media.
On Monday night, thousands of football fans stayed behind to cheer their team after a 4-1 defeat. Why?
This week Wendy and James talk about 'vision and values' and how they can make for flourishing or perishing.
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Following Matthew Perry’s death, James and Wendy talk about light and darkness, addiction and hope in Jesus. What affects who we are becoming as we journey through life and how to alter that trajectory.
This episode was recorded on Halloween, if you’re confused about how to respond to Halloween as a Christian, you may want to read this quick reflection from J John
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What happens when you lose the confidence and trust in others? Can you get it back? How can you begin to rebuild it?
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Following the shocking news from Israel and Gaza, James and Wayne talk about the conflict, the history of tension in the region and what it tells us about the human heart and our need for a home.
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James and Wayne discuss football, referee controversies and what sort of cultures create fear, shame and the need to hide failures.
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How to build a better world
It seems shots are being fired in the next general election. All political parties are trying out new policies and ideas in order to win your vote next year. But is this how we should build a better world? How does our culture do it? How should Christians do it?
MTV New series for Autumn 2023
Suffering: What to do about disasters
This week the news has been filled with human suffering on a mass scale; the death toll from floods in Derna stands at nearly 4000 and Morocco’s earthquake has so far claimed 3000 lives. How can we understand who God is and what He is like in a world where things go wrong?
Suffering is topical but it is a personal issue too because it can be a barrier to understanding who God is. What can we make of disasters like those in Libya and Morocco and how do we reconcile this with God.
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James and Wayne talk about a recent cricket controversy and why this is really about our hearts and not just what happened on a cricket pitch.
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What do the England Cricket Board and Russian politics have in common? This week James and Wayne discuss systems and what makes them choose impunity or scapegoating and how Christians can respond to the wrongs of the systems we find ourselves in.
James has visited Sudan and describes it as a country that has had a deep impact on him. He was shocked to learn from Sudanese friends in the UK that Darfur is back in the news, as reminders of what some called the 21st century’s first genocide circulate.
More Tea, Vicar? this week considers a Christian perspective on the concept of impunity, defined as “exemption from punishment or freedom from the injurious consequences of an action” as the Janjaweed step up their campaign of terror against vulnerable and displaced peoples.
Outside of Jesus we are always creating division, we are always building walls; Hadrian’s Wall, the Berlin Wall, the Great Wall of China. The reason why dividing walls appear is because we don’t feel safe in other people’s presence. But with Jesus, it is safe to have no dividing wall. With impunity, we hide what makes us unsafe - Jesus wants us to bring it into the light so we can live alongside each other for our greater calling.
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When ITV announced on May 20, that Phillip Schofield would be leaving flagship daytime show, This Morning, after more than 20 years, it lifted the lid on a supposedly “toxic” culture and sparked the spectacle of a chain of celebrities “cancelling” the former presenter and the story exploding daily with revelations.
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Wayne and James talk about music, creativity and artificial intelligence. Musician Sting, animal rights philosopher Peter Stringer and the bible have different things to say about humanity’s place in the world. In Genesis, God creates man in his own image and humanity is made last; what does this tell us about God’s purpose for humanity? Is there something distinct about humans as compared to the rest of the created order? We discuss how a common grace and truth that resides in all of us, Christians and non-Christians, speaks to who God is.
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This week we felt it was the right thing to share our vision for our new building at 279 Gloucester Road with you, and talk about where we are headed as a church family. With our new building, we now have 24,000 square feet of faith ! We plan to share it with our community, with the Gloucester Road and with our whole city, Bristol. The next era of B&A is one church, one parish, one building….and we feel God's purpose for us is to fill this building with faith.
We want to see our building becoming fully alive in the week and people welcomed inside straight from the street.
We want faith to rise up and grow - ultimately we want the whole city to be filled with faith - and our building is the first step on this journey.
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This week our discussion is around the news that Canon Mike Pilavachi, founder of Christian youth festival Soul Survivor, has stepped down from his role as Associate Pastor of Soul Survivor Church, St.Albans, as safe-guarding concerns against him are investigated. We look at individuals, at systems, at King David's Old Testament transgressions and how God would like us to respond and how we as a church family can learn to build greater health into our organisations to help prevent future leaders from failing.
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This week we are definitely not talking about ducks in the font, currently causing a storm on Anglican Twitter. What we are talking about is why we do this podcast; how through More Tea, Vicar, we hope to bring a Christian understanding to contemporary issues in culture, and apply this to life as we are living it.
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We've recorded an MTV special all about our upcoming move! This week we take our discussion right into the heart of the Bristol communities where we live and work. As a church we're about to move buildings and we wanted to share the extraordinary story of how we came to our new home through God's grace.
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