Let Your Light Shine Through

Are you looking for fresh insights into Bible readings that will stimulate your thinking, warm your heart and support your spiritual journey? These engaging sermons by New Zealand Methodist lay preacher, and progressive Christian, Philip Garside will get you going.

Philip says, ¿I¿m fascinated with how the Bible readings for the Sunday arose: who wrote them, what political or religious situation they sprang from, and what did the writer intend as the message to readers and listeners in their day? I then add in related material from our lives today, from our world, and suggest ways we can interpret the Bible readings. What Good News do they contain for us here and now? I usually draw out a sermon¿s spiritual or devotional lessons as part of a short recap at the end. Head stuff first, then hands, then heart.¿

He follows the approach of ¿taking the Bible seriously, but not literally,¿ and writes sermons the way he speaks. This informal approach works well with congregations.

The 62 sermons in this book are arranged in the order they were preached over 12 years and follow the three-year cycle of readings in the Revised Common Lectionary. There are indexes of Scripture readings and of People / Themes, and a Bibliography of key books, recordings and other sources referred to in the sermons.

The book is supported by free online PowerPoints, images & photos, video clips, and audio recordings of many of the sermons.

Philip also hopes that this book will encourage other lay people to learn to lead worship and to take up the rewarding challenge of preaching.

Praise for Let Your Light Shine Through

¿Every Methodist preacher in Aotearoa-New Zealand should have this sermon collection by Philip Garside. And, if they are wise enough to purchase it, they can also put the link on their mobile or desktop device to access his online collection of additional resources.

Philip belongs to a small group of Methodists who have either printers ink on their fingers and palms, or it runs in their blood. Either way they have taken the time and care to collect their most important work and seen it into print. This latest book reminds me of one such character: the prolific and talented Deaconess Rita Snowden, OBE. She, who rode John Wesley ¿ her motorbike ¿ around New Zealand in the 1930s, wrote her first book in 1933. As Rev Donald Phillipps wrote, ¿For over four years she was the travelling representative of the Methodist Literature and Colporteur Society, taking books all over the country in her caravan.¿ She wrote at least a book a year for the next 56 years achieving international recognition. Tall poppy syndrome ensured she had a wider audience overseas rather than in New Zealand.

Well, Mr Garside doesn¿t ride John Wesley, but he takes his publications around Methodist Conferences and Synods, Schools of Theology and other church gatherings. He also puts them online; a resource Rita would have greatly appreciated. He has published numerous authors, religious and secular, and preached faithfully his own sermons, written his own hymns and music, and made various resources available over decades.

It is this latter collection that I want to encourage Methodist folk to buy. With a print copy in your hands you can dip into it, and discover a theological intelligence, a preacher¿s vision and a pastoral heart. Note, however, you will be hard-pressed to read it all at once. It¿s not that kind of book. There are 62 sermons let alone the other material. As I review it, I am dipping in and out of it, wondering why we do not see this kind of offering more often?

I move around these sermons, acknowledging they are lectionary based, yet all the while wondering `what is his concern with that which is beyond the biblical content?¿ I am never disappointed. What am I learning about how contemporary churchgoers and lay preachers see the issues for our day and age? Phi

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