The PASSION Blog

One of the books I chose to review this year for my studies was Gordon MacDonald’s “Ordering your private world“.
I chose this book as it is a subject that I am interested in personally and I wanted to pick up some tips to help organise my inner private life more effectively. In the next few [...]

There is nothing like the feeling of emailing off your last assignment for a term. Every time I do it I let out a big sigh and sink down in my chair.
While I am loving this opportunity to return to full time studies as a mature age student, there is nothing like knowing that you [...]

I was doing some research for an Ethics assignment that addressed the issue of churches and copyright recently. In the process I came across some information on the Australian Copyright Council website that deals specifically with copyright and churches.
I thought I would pass on the link as increasingly churches are using movies, soundtracks and other [...]

This semester I have been doing a unit called Pastoral Care. It has been really good to take this time to reflect on what pastoral care is and also the role a Pastor plays in the church.
In one of our recent lecturers we looked at some statistics from a recent church life survey. Pastors were [...]

I was doing some background reading for an assignment recently and I had to look at the groups of people that were around in Jesus’ time. It was interesting reading about one of the main groups at the time - the Pharisees.
I found it interesting to read about what was important to them and why. [...]

Over the years I have had a number of people come to me when they are going through a difficult time. While I am not a trained counselor, there are certain things that I have found I can do just by being there and listening. It is interesting that how most people who have come [...]

In my Pastoral Care unit we looked at some examples of good and bad shepherds this week. In Ezekiel 34 it gives us a guide to what good and bad pastoral care is.
Ezekiel was told to prophesy against the shepherds of Israel that are taking care of themselves and not the people. Ezekiel 34:1-5 are [...]

In one of my lectures the other day we looked at the history of Pastoral Care. The lecturer used Clebsch’s and Jaeckle’s book “Pastoral Care in Historical Perspective”. I thought it was interesting that they noted eight “epochs” of time in pastoral care since the early church began.
In these eight epochs they noted that there [...]

I got some results back yesterday for my first semester of Bible College. I got two high distinctions and two distinctions and I am still waiting on one subject result to come through. I think it should be another distinction too from assignment results.
To be honest, it is not easy being a mature age student [...]

I did my first lecture in Pastoral Care the other day. It was an interesting exercise to find a definition that really covered it. Instead of coming up with a succinct statement that encompassed it, the lecturer gave a number of definitions that painted a picture to try and give us an understanding of Pastoral [...]