Woody's Words

THE CHALLENGE TO EVANGELISM IN 21st CENTURY By David Woodbury In my early teens my parents decided that along with my elder brother, I should make the acquaintance of my mother’s brother who had been a POW for five years during WW2, and now lived in Queensland. In due course, we arrived at Sydney’s Central Station to board the Brisbane Express and found our way to our allotted seats which were in a compartment accommodating eight people. As the long journey progressed the occupants of the compartment began to converse and the two girls sitting opposite seemed familiar and, during the dialogue, identified themselves as fellow Salvationists. This engendered a conversation about religious affiliations and all eight in the compartment identified with a denomination of some kind. I have pondered recently that if you were to put eight strangers together today, how many, if any, would identify with a Christian denomination? I suspect not too many. Why is that? Perhaps we

Session 2 – The centrality of the kingdom By David Woodbury. If we are to honestly pursue the path of personal spirituality then we must grapple with some of the basic questions; Ø   Is there a supreme being, who many simply refer to as God? Ø   If he does exist what relevance does that have to me in my spiritual journey? Ø   Can I relate to him and how does that work? On our journey of personal spirituality we need to find answers to these questions and discover keys that will unlock our way into the kingdom of God. The reality is that the answers we find may not suit our predetermined mindset and they may not be as comprehensive and clear cut as we would like. Perhaps that is the nature of personal spirituality; it is a journey where we discover answers and find that new questions continually arise.   There is a traceable core of guidance in relation to the kingdom of God running right through the Bible. It is a simple, sequential plan, embracing three b

Session 1 – Journey of discovery  Is there something more? By David Woodbury Is there something beyond the physical world in which we live? Human behaviour would seem to suggest that there is. As a boy I noted that in my mother’s women’s magazines there would be a small column on your future according to the stars. Today, many magazines devote numerous pages to articles on psychic predictions and spiritual mysticism. There seems to be within the nature of humanity a deep seated belief that there is more to life than just the physical and material world which we can experience through our senses.   Even in today’s cynical world there is still an overwhelming belief in God and the spiritual world. A poll conducted by the Harris organisation in 2006 and quoted on the website of the Coburg Atheist , revealed that 75% of Australians believed that there was a God [1] . Most of us have a sneaking belief that there is something more, something which cannot be easily exp