Sermons from May 2026
The Prisoner’s Friends
As we continue “Wesleyan Vile-tality,” we go back to the years before Bristol, when John Wesley and a small group of Oxford students spent their time among prisoners the rest of the city preferred to forget. This week explores what it means to show up for someone the world has written off, why trust between unequal people requires more than credentials, and how the very word “Methodist” was born from solidarity with the forgotten. Luke 4 and Hebrews 13 frame…
More Vile
This week launches a new six-week series inspired by Dr. Ashley Boggan’s book “Wesleyan Vile-tality.” In 1739, John Wesley decided to “submit to be more vile” and preach in Bristol’s open fields to people the established church had ignored. We begin this series on Pentecost with two passages about the Holy Spirit showing up among people no one authorized and in places no one expected. What happens when God’s Spirit refuses to stay where we put it? Scripture: Acts 2:1-21…
Emulate Christ
This week we close our post-Easter series Reckless Love with a look at what it means to follow Jesus’ example with our whole lives. In John 13, Jesus kneels before his disciples and washes their feet. In Matthew 25, he identifies himself with the hungry, the stranger, the sick, and the imprisoned. This week, we consider these core questions that undergird the entire series: whose examples are we following, and what does it look like to follow them with our…
Value the Vulnerable
As we near the end of our post-Easter series Reckless Love, we arrive at a question that has been building for weeks: what do we do with the people we’d rather avoid? This week, we are called to go further, toward the people our communities have written off. What happens when Jesus goes to the person everyone else has given up on raises questions about who we consider worth our time, our attention, and our love. Discover what it means…
Openhearted Love
As we continue our post-Easter series Reckless Love, we turn to John 4, where Jesus walks his disciples straight through Samaria and sits down at a well with a woman no one expected him to speak to. This week explores what it means to go where your assumptions tell you not to go, and to stay long enough to be changed. Discover what openhearted love looks like when reconciliation moves from theology to practice. Scripture: 2 Corinthians 5:18-21; John 4:4-30,…