Rondi Pogue, who directs a ministry working in conferences, India and the local jails, preaches on the question her work puts her in front of constantly: am I bad? The distinction the message rests on is shame as a claim about what a person is.

Pastor Adam preaches Psalm 51 by asking whether anyone should be forgiven, and treats it as a real question. The pastoral core is the part after forgiveness: a believer who has been forgiven and cannot function as though they have.

At the time when kings go off to war, David stayed home. Pastor Adam builds on that one clause, on a legitimate season of rest curdling into stagnation, and on the fact that a plan for temptation has to exist before the moment rather than during it.

Harry Wilson preaches Psalm 119 on God as an authoritative Father, which is neither authoritarian nor permissive. The psalm is relentlessly about law, and yet its verbs are all affection, which is the tension the message works.

Acts 2 describes the earliest church in startlingly concrete terms: teaching, the fellowship, bread, prayer. Pastor Adam argues that is devotion rather than attendance, and asks whether devotion to a local body is genuinely required or merely encouraged.

Dr. James Smith III brings the early church into the room, letting the first Christian voices interpret John 3 alongside modern readers, and reads the passage from the end of chapter two so the famous verse sits where it actually belongs.

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.

Thomas admits he does not know where Jesus is going. Pastor Adam refuses to soften the answer that follows, redirects it from gatekeeping a destination to the destination being a person, and notes how much of Scripture is people standing in God’s presence without recognising it.

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.