Seekers and New Christians
How to search for God
If you are reading this page, then you are looking for God. And that, surprisingly, means that God is seeking you, too. It is no easy thing to find God in our culture. Post-modernism means that we are pretty suspicious of “grand narratives” which purport to explain everything. And the particular history of Christianity in Australia means that you have probably had to overcome a fair degree of scepticism about the whole enterprise to get here in the first place.
So, welcome.
We love to accompany seekers and new Christians in their spiritual quests at Northcote Uniting Church. Our basic thought is that, in this era of long-form podcasts, this, the most highly educated generation in history gets that simplistic answers are not always the best answers. That, whatever a Christian is, it has to be something which integrates your heart, mind, and soul.
This page has a few resources which some of our community have found helpful in their journey and we hope that you will find them helpful too.
Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis
This is the granddaddy of works trying to explain Christianity to a sceptical public. You may know Lews from his Narnia books and the films made from them, but you may not know that he was an Oxford, and later Cambridge, academic, and a very serious scholar in Medieval and Rennaissance English - his work The Discarded Image is a classic.
Mere Christianity was originally delivered as a series of radio talks in the depths of the Second World War, which accounts for the examples which sprang to mind for him. He is also a man of his time. But it is still the classic work, sparkling and witty and engaging, if you read it a little generously. It has helped millions of people all over the world for generations, and it might well help you too.
Unapologetic: Why, despite everything, Christianity can still make surprising emotional sense, Francis Spufford
A rather more contemporary work, published in 2014, from a contemporary writer and teacher of creative writing. It is heartfelt, and begins right in the middle of the human condition. It’s a beautiful book which has been very well received, and I commend it to you.