Our website has also undergone a revamp, check it out: http://www.mwchurch.org.au

There will be no new posts made to this blog so please go to the new blog above.

Message: Pastor Larry finalised ‘The Warrior’ series today with a message titled ‘The Passionate Warrior’. Some key points were:

1. The warrior who abandons his cause becomes passive
2. The warrior who abandons his cause becomes abusive
3. The warrior pursuing his cause becomes consumed with passion!

The passionate warrior always has:

1. Someone to protect
2. A Kingdom to advance

This was a great series and definitely put out a challenge to Men to live life as a Passionate Warrior for God!

Highlights: We had egg and bacon muffins pre-service to celebrate Father’s Day. The were simply delicious and were a hit with the Dads. The Fathers also got a Darrell Lea gift bag filled with Chocolates and Licorce!

Next week: We will be starting a new series called “Freedom!”, you can check out more details here. It’s bound to be a fantastic series as we go over some of the fundamentals of Christianity.

Message: Today we had Gary Hourigan as guest speaker and he spoke an awesome message on ‘The Power of the Gospel’.

The main theme, of Gary’s message, was that we have to believe that the Father is working in the world around me, I just need to follow and watch God’s reconciliation. Our job is to work with Christ, lift up our eyes and see the work that God is doing! You see the Father is already going ahead of us to prepare the way for us, we just need to believe this truth. It gives you so much freedom.

Some great scripture verses that Gary shared were: John 20:21, 2 Cor 5:18 and Luke 10:1 .

Next week: ‘The Wounded Warrior’ is the third part of our ‘The Warrior’ series and we’ll be looking at this next week. Check out information on the series here.

Message: Pastor Larry continued with week two of our current series, The Warrior, with a message title “The Hesitant Warrior”. The main scripture passage used was Judges 6:14-15, with the classic story of Gideon.

Three points were highlighted:

1. Every warrior faces fears of failure
2. When a warrior’s internal fear of failure exceeds hi faith in God, he becomes hesitant
3. The warrior has what it takes

Next week: We’ll be taking a break from “The Warrior” series next week as we have a guest speaker, Gary Hourigan. Gary is the National Coordinator of Church Development in COC so it is bound to be an awesome day. Make sure you get along!

all You’ve done (Hillsong), You reign (Citipointe) and Worthy is Jesus (Rhys Anderson).

Message: Pastor Larry Blackmore kicked off the first message in our ‘The Warrior‘ series, with the title being ‘The Warrior’s Cause’.

The common potrayal of Jesus as being meek and mild is grossly under-estimating the incredible strength and power of the Son of God. He was a true Warrior to clean out the temple, to pass through the crowds when they wanted to stone Him and to die on the cross when He had power to consume all those before Him.

Larry made three main points to the men in the church:

1. God created you with the heart of a Warrior
2. Every Warrior has a cause to fight for
3. A Warrior without a cause to fight for will find the wrong thing to fight against

The men were then challenged as to what cause they are fighting for at the moment. Is it for their marriage? Is it for you children? Is it for your career? Is it for God?

Next week: We’ll be continuing part two of the series with the title being, ‘The Hesitant Warrior’. Make sure you don’t miss it!

There were the usual crazy games, of which SALT won all of them, woot!, and auditions were held for the upcoming VIP Talent Show. There was some really good talent and I’m really looking forward to the show.

Several things that really impressed me on the night. Firstly was the junior youth band, they rocked! They were fronted by a girl who would have been in year 9 and she led fantastically. Along with the other backup singers and the solid band they did a great job of leading us into the presence of God.

Then there was a drama play and it was incredibly powerful. The young people had been practicing it for 3 weeks and you could see their heart was really in it. It created a powerful platform for AJ to share from and there were numberous responses for the call to follow Jesus.

Couple of shout outs to the SALT gang. Chad you are legend for cooking all of those suasages! Dion, George, Abdullah and Michael for making sure we won all the competitions! And everyone else for just being there

I’m thinking we might head over to The FACT more often, so stay tuned.

Kestrel

Message: Pastor Larry preached up a storm today as he shared from Luke 1:17, “Come, follow me,” Jesus said, “and I will make you fishers of men.”

Larry challenged us several points:

1. if we are not fishers of men, if we are not making disciples, then are we really following Jesus? So many people come to Christ purely because they want their needs met, but Jesus never said He would fix all of our problems. He said “… I will make you fishers of men.”
2. we are not going to be a ‘good family’ church, we are going to be a ‘disciple making’ church!
3. we are not just to have the purpose of saving the lost, but we are to be passionate about it as well!

All in all it was an awesome message so make sure you get the CD or download the podcast.

Next week: We are starting an fantastic series next week called “The Warrior”. This series will be running through the months of August and September.

In every person’s life there is a cause worth fighting for and a victory worth claiming. What is yours? Discover how to not only prepare for the battles ahead, but more importantly, how to emerge victoriously as The Warrior.

For more information check it out here. You do NOT want to miss this!

The Tour kicked off at 12pm out the front of Patchi, at Melbourne Central, a store that has it origins in France. We did some taste testing of milk and dark chocolates as well as the sugared almonds you sometimes get at wedding receptions. Aside from chocolate, Patchi also sells art objects and glasswares of quite interesting designs.

From there we strolled to the old Melbourne GPO to go to Cacao Fine Chocolates. I must say that this was my favourite stop of the day with rather exquisite chocolate designs and flavours. Again, more taste testing and quite a few purchases were made by our Tour group.

Our final destination took us through to the Block Arcade and onto Haigh’s Chocolates. Haigh’s has the distinction of being the only chocolate company in Australia that imports raw cocoa beans that they process at their Adelaide factory. This stop had the most taste testing with a rather nice speakeled chocolate, a variation on the humble chocolate freckle.

Was a great day and we all had a lot of fun, though I think some of us might give chocolate a miss for at least a couple of days! If you want to book a tour, visit Chocoholic Tours here.

Bronson

We started the night off with dinner at Mambo’s and we were all in good spirit. Most of us were/are great fans of the Indiana Jones franchise and had high hopes for this latest installment. So, with dinner finished, we headed off to the cinema. Tickets were purchased, as were drinks, lollies, choctops and in we went. I’m not going to give a “review” of the film but lets just say that it didn’t live up to hype we had all expected.

And that’s the great thing about Pepper – even though the “event” might not have lived up to what we had all expected, spending time together, laughing, talking about our week, sharing a meal etc is what was most important… the relational aspect of the group.

Bronson

Enchiladas, frijoles, tacos, rice, quisadellas etc we had the lot! Viva Zapatas is a charming little restaurant with a lively atmosphere, helped by the Mexican music that sets the tone and also the Mexican memorabilia that is proudly displayed on the restaurant walls. Service is prompt and pricing is reasonable.

Highlight of the evening had to be the mini bongo’s that Zoe had given to David as a little present on her return from a business trip to Sydney. We all had a go at adding to the vibe for the background music.

Top night with good food but most importantly, good friends!

Bronson