Herald Vineyard Liverpool

Sunday 9th April 2023 | On Easter Sunday, Dr Harvey Kwiyani brings us the third and final part in his series – the resurrection. Building on the previous two weeks’ themes of covenant and priesthood, he explains how Jesus’ resurrection in Luke 24 completes the holy narrative. In being resurrected, Jesus declares his authority over death, the new covenant, and us as his people.

Sunday 2nd April 2023 | Dr Harvey Kwiyani continues his 3-part series with the second instalment, focusing on priesthood. Together we explore Hebrews 8, which outlines Jesus as the new high priest, permanently fulfilling the traditional role carried out by those in the tabernacle during the Old Testament. Harvey also explains how this overturns the traditional rules of the old covenant, since Jesus was not born of the tribe of Levi. He highlights how Jesus likewise plays the part of the animals that were sacrificed by the high priests; and how becoming a follower of Jesus also makes us priests in our own right, since it is our duty to act as representatives of the kingdom of heaven.

26th March 2023 | Dr Harvey Kwiyani starts his mini-series on covenant, priesthood and resurrection. This week he explains the concept of a covenant, as laid out in the books of Hebrews and Genesis; comparing the sacrificial role of animals in Abraham’s time and that of Jesus in the New Testament. We then explore the deep meaning and bond within a covenant, and how this should shape both our relationship with God and our approach to living a faithful life.

Sunday 12th March 2023 | This week we hear from guest preacher Amy Hughes from Trinity Church Nottingham as she takes us through her spiritual journey from childhood to present day, exploring her encounters with the Holy Spirit and His healing power, and the process of making the life-changing decision to reject the lies of the world and place complete trust in Jesus and his plan for each of us. Teaching from John 15, Amy then unpacks the idea of abiding in Jesus, as described in the metaphor of the vine and the branches, and gives us practical steps for how we can do this.

5th March 2023 | Kath explores how we can be informed by the Spirit when reading the Bible, taking a range of examples from both Old and New Testaments. We look at the idea of scripture being God-breathed, and how it can be used as a tool for training us to walk the righteous path, as well as discerning God’s will for our lives and decisions. To finish, we go through the traditional practice of Lectio Divina (that is, divine reading) when meditating on a Bible passage – the 5 steps of which are to prepare, read, rest, reflect and respond.

Sunday 26th February 2023 | Week 2 of our three-part series on the Bible entitled: Word. Story. Spirit. Reading the Bible as a follower of Jesus. This week Jamie explores the idea of the Bible as Story—Story in the human sense, as a body of intentionally constructed literature; but also story in the divine sense, as the one true story about what life is all about, why we’re here, where we're going and what the meaning and purpose of our lives is. He begins by recapping many of the key insights from last week and then turning to think about three ways we need to read the Bible in light of its essential nature as story: reading it literarily, reading it narratively, and finally reading it subversively.

Sunday 19th February 2023 | We begin a new three-part series on the Bible entitled: Word. Story. Spirit. Reading the Bible as a follower of Jesus. Over the next few weeks we will explore the Bible as Word—The Word of God—and in what sense the Bible is authoritative for us still today and what it means for us to sit under it. We will explore the Bible as Story: as a library of writings, of all shapes and sizes and genres, that together tells a single, unified story that leads us to Jesus, and a story that puts into question all the others stories our culture is telling. And we will explore the Bible as Spirit: the Bible as the place where the Spirit wants to encounter us and to speak to us today and every day in a way that shapes us and transforms us and leads us towards loving God and loving our neighbour. This week Jamie explores Jesus' own approach to the Scriptures (Matthew 5:17-21), unpacks some helpful theology for us to understand what exactly the Bible is and the way it can be said to be the Word of God. We think together about the ways in our culture we sometimes approach the Bible unhealthily and look at what Jesus himself says to the Sadduccees and Pharisees who each fall into similar patterns in their own day (Mark 12: 18-27 and John 5:41-46), ending with a time of response and conviction before taking the Lord's Supper together.

Sunday 12th February 2023 | Rachel Kitchen, from Hope Street Church in Wrexham, comes to preach this week on Jesus’ heart for healing – looking specifically at two individuals in Mark 5; the daughter of Jairus, a synagogue leader, and an unnamed woman who suffered from internal bleeding. We look at how these people experienced the presence of Jesus, and the ways in which he acts to transform their lives, both physically and spiritually. This solidifies and renews our own faith that God both knows and cares for every one of us, is interested in the stories of our lives, and has endless compassion for us all.

Sunday 22nd January 2023 | As a continuation from last week, Jamie leads us further in prayer with emphasis on persistence and determination when waiting for God's response. Using the proclamations from Isaiah 35 as inspiration for a future of hope, we focus on the practice of remembering; bringing to mind ways in which God has answered our prayers and worked in our lives over the past year.

Sunday 15th January 2023 | Kath leads us in a time of reflection and prayer for the start of the year; exploring the questions of what we see God doing at the moment in our church family, where he is at work, and how we can join in. Here we also create some space for self-reflection and time to be led by the Spirit; asking where God wants to extend his kindness to us, where we can extend our kindness to those around us, and finding any areas of our lives that God may be prompting us to develop.

Sunday 8th January 2023 | Dr Harvey Kwiyani shares at our first service of 2023 on the significance of prayer. Harvey explores key biblical passages including Exodus 30, 1 Kings 18 and Revelation 8, explaining how a thriving Christian life is always underpinned by daily rhythms of prayer morning and evening. We also need to learn how to ‘wrestle with God’ in prayer over a sustained period. There are things in 2023 that will happen in our lives only because we have prayed; but there may also be things that don’t happen this year if we do not pray. Harvey closes by praying for our church community that we would become a people of prayer this year to a greater degree, in order that we might see God do all that He desires to do through Herald and in our city in 2023.

Sunday 16th October | This week our good friend Alex Rayment, vicar of St Barnabas Penny Lane Church, shared his own story of coming to faith in Jesus and pointed us to the power we all have in sharing our own stories with others.

Sunday 11th December 2022 | Kath shares at our Carol Service this year: how the Christmas story is really a story of homecoming, how God sent Jesus into our world in order to bring us home to himself, and how He has now given everything of himself to us, holding nothing back. In the words of Mariah Carey: all he wants this Christmas is us.

Sunday 4th December 2022 | The closing talk in the series ‘A Distinctive Community: How To Be The Church In An Age Of Secularism’. Jamie begins by pulling out the key threads from the past seven weeks, retracing the steps in Jesus’ sermon (Luke 6) up until this point and bringing together Herald’s seven community distinctives that have been drawn directly out of this series. Jesus’ sermon builds today to its climactic challenge, “Now are you going to do it?” It is a call to put all we’ve heard into action. And so our final community distinctive is to be a People of Faithfulness. It looks like us becoming a community that actually ‘do the stuff’ but also those who resolve to ‘do it together’: something like a covenant community in an age of individualism. In the face of our culture this may yet be the single hardest thing we contend for as a community, but it is not only a crucial piece in the puzzle when it comes to the distinctiveness of God’s people, but also one of the deepest things our hearts long to find over the course of our lives.

Sunday 27th November 2022 | In the penultimate talk in this series Kath looks at Distinctive No. 6: being a people of Vulnerability in a culture of Self-Help. Today’s passage is Luke 6:43-45, and Kath asks the question: “How can we store up goodness in our heart?” She unpacks Charles Taylor’s paradigm of the ‘porous self’ and the ‘buffered self’ and points us to a renewed embrace of vulnerability in a cultural landscape that is more and more resistant to it. We are to ‘say it to God’, and ‘say it to God’s people’. Finally, Kath leads us in the Prayer of Examen, as a simple daily practice we can use as a way in to this journey with God in our own lives.

Cal explains as we launch our Sign of Hope library and gives us three encouragements for taking compassionate steps towards others in our city.

Sunday 13th November 2022 | In the sixth part in this current teaching series Jamie looks at the sin of pride and the virtue of humility that counters it. Preaching from Luke 6:39-42, he frames our fifth community distinctive, and explores what it looks like for us at Herald to become a people of humility in a culture of pride. In 2022 we are invited into the increasingly radical and counter-cultural act of following Jesus and choosing to sit under the authority of Scripture as the primary witness to Him. We are invited to be those who put our own life jackets on before helping others. And we are invited into a posture of humility before God that frees us from the cultural anxiety of self-reliance, instead casting all our anxieties onto him and letting Him ‘do it’.

Sunday 6th November 2022 | This week is the fifth in our current series, A Distinctive Community: How To Be The Church In An Age Of Secularism, following Jesus’ sermon to the crowds at the foot of the mountain in Luke 6. Jamie preaches from Luke 6:37-38 and unpacks our fourth community distinctive: becoming a people of generosity in a culture of pride. Ours is a culture full of ideals, but one that applies those ideals more often than not to ‘tear down’ rather than ‘build up’. Jesus invites us to follow his lead into a whole new way of being community that breaks free from this endless cycle of judgment. He provides us with a four-step pathway out of this kind of world and into the ‘new world’ of the kingdom of God: Stop, Forgive, Give, Receive.

On Sunday Kath continued our Distinctive Community series by exploring Distinctive Number Three: becoming a People of Blessing in A Culture of Cursing. Preaching from Luke 6:27-36 Kath unpacks the thread of blessing and curse that runs right through the biblical story beginning back in Genesis, and how God’s plan for new creation involves establishing a people of blessing in a world of cursing. Kath practically explores how Herald might become this kind of community, and how each of us might take a step forward on this journey today.

On Sunday Jamie continued our Distinctive Community series by exploring distinctive Number Two: becoming a People of Hunger in A Culture of Apathy. Preaching from Luke 6:20-26 (the Blessings and Woes at the start of Luke’s account of Jesus’ Sermon-on-the-Mount) he explores Jesus’ implied invitation to a life of spiritual hunger in light of his announcement of the coming Kingdom of God. He maps out how the opposing dynamic of apathy shows up in both first century and twenty-first century culture, and in particular how apathy in our culture can develop into something further: a hunger for self-fulfilment. While hunger for self-fulfilment perversely seems to be having the unintended effect of increasing anxiety in our culture, a life of hunger for the kingdom of God offers us a pathway to radical contentment in the here and now in a way that can be deeply attractive to those around us. In reality, our hunger is also our hope, and serves as a powerful witness to our city of the good news of Jesus.