This week we continue the Advent season by lighting the candle of Peace. In this act we recognize our longing for peace to come fully to this world, often gripped in the horrors of violence and hatred. We will be exploring the calling to peacemaking in Jesus teachings, and how scripture guides us towards peace as an outward expression of the peace in our own hearts. We will ask questions like; how can the state of our own hearts guide our outward approach to peace? And does scripture bring anything meaningful to our search for peace in ourselves?

As we enter into the season of Advent we light the candle of Hope. What does hope look like in a world that seems to be unravelling around us? Is it just a feeling or is there something more practical to it? Join us as we examine how to have defiant hope in a chaotic world.

This Sunday we are excited to have Heather Morgan join our gathering to teach on the theme of Disability Justice and the Church, and invite us into a conversation to grow in our understanding and practices as a community. Heather shares her time between co-pastoring at Vox Community Church in Barrie and working on her PhD at Emmanuel College at the University of Toronto, where she draws from her lifelong experience of disabilities and neurodivergence to think about the intersections between bodies and systematic theology. Together, we’ll be considering the ways we read scriptures that deal with disability, and exploring how what we believe about who Jesus is might help us respond better to our own bodies - disabled and able-bodied alike.

We’re coming to the end of our journey through Romans, and we’re not offering easy answers or skipping ahead to a happy ending. In a world of political polarization, climate anxiety, and systemic injustice, we often feel a sigh too deep for words—a feeling the first followers of Jesus in the Roman Empire knew all too well.

This week, we courageously sit in the sacred space of Lament.

We’ll discover that lament isn't the end of the work—it’s the essential catalyst for true peacemaking and the birth pangs of a new creation.

The book of Romans is a letter given to a community searching for peace in the midst of a world caught in the grip of violence, hatred and division.

This week we will be asking questions about how this first century church in Rome wrestled with their identity in their social and political environment , perhaps in similar ways that we do today.

Together we can will explore how Romans emphasizes the same subversive, peace-loving resistance taught and demonstrated by Jesus.

What if the point isn’t to endure pain, but to dismantle the things that cause it? This week, we’re revisiting Romans 5-8 through the lens of Subversive Love. This is an invitation to resist the world’s broken logic by embracing the counter-cultural way of Christ that leads to mutual liberation and collective care.

Discover a hope and purpose beyond the empire’s grip, in the now and not yet kin-dom of connection and flourishing, where our shared belonging is the source of our power and no one is outside the circle of love.

This week we continue our exploration through the book of Romans. Continuing out of order, we will explore the first two chapters of Romans. We will ask how the ideas we have talked about so far in this series can inform these earlier chapters. We hope to look at this passage with compassion towards those it has been used to harm over the years, as we search for the message given to this small community so long ago, and what it might mean for us today.

The reason Romans was written was to address the conflict within the church of two factions, both of whom had complicated relationships with the Roman Empire. Join us this week as we gain a deeper understanding of this conflict and ponder how we handle church conflict and our relationship to power today.

In our introduction to Romans on September 7th, we saw that this letter was delivered in person through Phoebe to a multi- ethnic group of believers that included Jews and Gentiles, women and men, slaves and free.

This week we will study Romans 12 and see that this eclectic group of individuals are called to be transformed into a unified yet diverse body that fully reflects the character of Jesus and the values of his kingdom.

The lessons of Romans 12 remain relevant, as we are also called to be transformed into the image of Jesus.

The book of Romans has had an incredible impact on the history and theology of the church over the centuries.

This week we will begin our series on the book of Romans by looking to the end of the letter. Here we find one of the longest lists of names in the New Testament. What can be learned from this seemingly innocuous list of people whose experiences have been mostly lost to history? How does this list belong in a letter given to a community searching for peace in the midst of a world caught in the grip of violence, hatred and division? 

Perhaps understanding the stories behind this community can help guide us as we approach this letter together in the coming weeks.