Willow Creek is abandoning its famous seeker services after nearly 30 years of running weekend services tailored explicitly to the unbeliever. The tension between relevance and integrity very much lies with us here in Sydney.

God looks upon the heart. Unfortunately we humans are far more shallow. For us, we start with appearances.

Despite its harrowing subject matter - the world of evil spirits, demons, ghosts, magic and Satan - it is so well written that it is actually entertaining to read.

Although it was one of the best, most happy and certainly best run General Synods in memory, there were, of course, still some glitches and difficulties in Canberra in October.

The 2006 census reveals that people are increasingly reluctant to identify themselves with a church they don’t go to.

What is our relation to the world around us? What are human beings? What is our responsibility to others and to ourselves? The Christian faith has a very important contribution to make to these environmentally sensitive questions.

Jesus’ body was not “broken for us”. Why do I keep hearing ministers at Communion saying that it was?

The sheer success and power of the scientific enterprise over the last three hundred years are without precedent in human history, as we have seen. This raises the obvious question and temptation. Is the success of science a model for all other human knowledge? Should we not make the scientific way of knowing the only way of knowing? The very success of science tempts us to overdo it, to ignore the limits of science.

Sydney Diocese has always been a vigorous, albeit at times cantankerous, place, while still playing a role in the wider Anglican Church in Australia and the world. But there has not been, as Dr Porter suggests, some terrible shift of late towards fundamentalism or an effort to revitalise sixteenth-century English Puritanism.

Am I the only one who has noticed that clergy are dressing more and more ‘daggily’ these days? I am not meaning the casual style which is appropriate now that church is part of the weekend in Sydney. I mean a kind of dressing lower than the congregation. This can either be through humble godliness (“take no thought for what ye shall put on”) or a failure in confidence or understanding of their professional role as leaders of the church and part of the interface of the church to the community.

Sermon at the Commissioning Service for Rod Farraway, Assistant Chaplain Cranbrook School 8 February 2006 by The Rt. Rev. Robert Forsyth, Bishop of South Sydney, Anglican Church of Australia.

Bishop Robert Forsyth has used Sydney's annual Law Service in St Andrew's Cathedral to challenge the city's judiciary to see themselves as the Apostle Paul saw them - ministers of God.

A sermon series on the book of Colossians by the preaching team at St Barnabas Anglican Church, Broadway.

Don’t be put off by the title. This is not just another book about evangelism. Promoting the Gospel is a significant ground-breaking treatment of the whole matter of mission. This book will set the agenda amongst us for years to come.

Now I don’t mind Spong inventing a new religion. But I do wish he would stop trying to use the word ‘Christian’ for it. Surely someone from Consumer Affairs ought to do something about that.

In all the concern lately about churches growing, plateauing and declining I was struck by a quote from, of all people, the Archbishop of Canterbury. In an address last year he said, “[W]here Jesus is, there is the Church; the Church is the event of Jesus’ presence with its effect of gathering people around him and making them see one another differently as they see him”. Mission talk is essential. But not the heart of the matter.

In 2002 the Archbishop and Bishops of the Diocese of Sydney issued a clear call to the diocese for a renewed mission in proclaiming Christ. What is the place of Anglicare in the Diocesan Mission?

Sometimes things get so bad I feel like I am an American. They try to do good for society and the other nations of the world but so often they are hated. That’s exactly how I felt the other month at a Gleebooks event to commemorate the launch of The Chosen Ones: the Politics of Salvation in the Anglican Church by Chris McGillion.

How some ways of protecting the freedom of religion may actually diminish religious freedom.

Two lessons I have learnt from clergy in the South Sydney Region. 1. You don’t have to be in the Mission to be in the Mission 2. Culture is more important than programs

The very name Kristallnacht is itself controversial. It was the Nazi leader Walter Funk who apparently coined the term “Night of Crystal” for the pogrom of violence against Jews, synagogues and Jewish buildings that had broken out in Germany and Austria on November 9 and 10, 1938 . “Kristallnacht” was an euphemistic reference to all the scattered broken glass from smashed windows and shop fronts that littered the streets after the violence.

In the Bishops’ Statement of 19 June, 2003 on sexuality and the Anglican Communion issued by the Archbishops and Bishops of Sydney, reference was made to Canon Gene Robinson, the Bishop-elect of New Hampshire.