Over the last 12 months Danelle and I have increasingly considered homeschooling as a way to go with our kids. To be honest, its been more Danelle than me as I don’t want to get too involved practically, but recently we made the decision to give it a shot for the second semester of 2010.
Its [...]
In the last 19 years we have had some wonderful times.
We have led a fantastic youth ministry, traveled a heap around Oz and overseas, had 2 great kids thru IVF, moved house 6 times, taught in various Bible colleges, pioneered an experimental mission project, directed Forge locally and nationally, given up my teaching career, [...]
These days I regularly have unsettling experiences as I read the Bible, where I find myself wondering ‘what is all that about?!’
I just had one this morning as I was using sacred space where a passage that I once would have ‘understood clearly’ no longer made as much sense.
It is a bit disorienting to have [...]
Lately I’ve been getting increasingly concerned about anonymous blogging and commenting.
I’ve been blogging for seven years now and while I do it under the ‘backyardmissionary’ moniker, its not hard to work out who I am, where I live and what I do. That is intentional. I offer my thoughts and reflections on issues and [...]
As of November 14th I will no longer be the Forge WA director and my role will be taken over by the very capable and brilliant Scott Vawser. Ironically I will be down south all that following weekend on Forge business because we couldn’t arrange an earlier time – so I will ‘finish work’ and [...]
Right now there isn’t much that is certain about the road ahead.
However if we’re really honest there never is.
Sometimes we have this illusion of certainty that we sit with for a while, but in truth life is way more fickle than we would like to admit. We don’t have anywhere near as much control [...]
Today Sam came home from school and was very upset.
Sam is 6 and one of the kindest, gentlest little kids you will ever meet. That’s not parental bias because I wouldn’t use similar words of Ellie!
He told us that another 6 year old boy at school had been hitting him in the ‘willy’ and [...]
I’ve been a bit grumpy lately.
I was coming home with fish and chips last night when I nearly ran over some kids who were riding their skateboards on the street in the dark. I pumped the horn loud and long to let them know I wasn’t impressed and they offered a few suggestions to [...]
For most of the time we have been married I have been the person involved primarily in ministry in one form or another, but lately I have been observing that the roles have been changing and now Danelle seems to be the primary ‘minister’ (or insert whatever word you prefer)
Up until 2002 we were based [...]
I think I used to be an evangelist… but even then I’m not so sure…
You see when you are a youth pastor, especially one with significant influence there is a very strong ‘power’ relationship with the young people in your care and their desire to emulate you can make them quite easy to influence towards [...]