The Ugly Duckling Company

       As part of yesterday's seminar (which you can read about in yesterday's blog ), we split into small groups to explore different questions we were asked by our non-Christian friends. It's an extensive list, with topics moving from technicalities of the religion to our personal stories as Christians to how religion interacts with science to how religion interacts with other beliefs to conviction and truth to suffering and back again. We don't have all the answers.   Questions about suffering and evil: Why did God let this happen? Why is there so much suffering? Why doesn't God get rid of evil? Why does God not help us in the situations we are in? If God is love, why is there suffering? Doesn't that prove that God is selfish? If Christianity is true, how do you explain the terrible behaviour of people who claim to be Christian? Is God responsible for bad things that happen in our world? Questions about life as Christians: When did you...

After yesterday's slight lull, we went full tilt today. The morning began with a trip to Kew for a celebration of Kew Baptist Church's 160th anniversary celebration. Paul shared the message, and by the end of his talk about the power of prayer he had a quarter of the church down front, pretending to be their favourite Biblical characters in a demonstration of the "crowd of witnesses." Paul illustrates the crowd of witnesses with a crowd of witnesses at Kew Baptist Church Festivities continued with a BBQ in the church hall. Because of the special occasion, church members from all three services (the youth service, the traditional service and the Vietnamese service) and members from years past all gathered together. We got caught up in conversation with people from all of these groups, and Paul was so pleased to stumble into the pastor of the Vietnamese-speaking services. We're looking forward to working together to translate the Table Talk apps into Vietn...

Some great feedback about Table Talk for Easter We thoroughly appreciate it when someone writes to tell us what is wrong with what we have created or takes the time to list the many ways that something can be enhanced. Life is too short to let our egos get in the way of listening to people who might have a valuable contribution to make. Every now and then we receive an email that is an overwhelming encouragement, what follows below is one such correspondence... Message:  Dear Team I just wanted to thank you for making your Easter Table Talk app freely accessible.   We have just used it a Good Friday Messy Church session and it started some really profound conversations. It definitely sparked our small number of teenagers - they launched straight into some amazing conversations and involved their parents too, which was great to see.   However what moved me most was how younger children could really engage with these questions in a surprisingly...