“All authority has been given to me, therefore go.” Pastor Adam puts the weight on the therefore, and on verse seventeen, where worship and doubt are recorded in the same breath and the commission is handed to the mixed group anyway.

Matthew notes that the two men were so violent no one could pass that way. Pastor Adam builds on that: a blockage on a road, deliverance that clears a route — and a town that, having seen it, asks Jesus to leave.

Jesus says when you fast, not if. The message stays with a practice arranged around being unseen — and the scripture is read audio-only by a worker in the Middle East who cannot be seen without risking the people she serves alongside.

Jesus says follow me to a tax collector, and Matthew’s first act as a disciple is to fill his house with his own circle. Nobody was cleaned up first — and Jesus tells the religious professionals watching to go and learn what mercy means.

The disciples are in the storm because they were told to go there. Pastor Adam notes that what terrified them was the answer arriving unrecognisable, and that when Peter sank nothing had changed in the conditions — only in where he was looking.

Bryce Maurer, who pastors a revitalising church in Livingston, Montana, preaches Matthew 5 on salt and light — noting that both are stated as identity rather than instruction, which changes entirely what the warnings that follow are doing.

Eleven on a mountain, some worshipping and some doubting, and the commission handed to both. Pastor Adam opens Accelerate on the claim that precedes the command, and on there being no difference between believing for forgiveness and being sent.

Two young readers open Youth Sunday with the hardest sentences in the Gospels. Harry Wilson watches the smiles turn to frowns, preaches it with his own mother and grandparents in the room, and argues Jesus is insisting on an order of loves, not the abolition of the lesser ones.

Pastor Adam presses a question congregations are rarely asked directly: what are you actually asking God for? James 4 supplies the uncomfortable answer, and C.S. Lewis supplies the frame, that heaven is the land of substance and earth the land of shadow.