St Marks Anglican Church

Welcome to the website of St Mark’s Anglican Church Pennant Hills. You can watch a short welcome and introduction to St Mark’s from our Pastor here.

If you’re around the St Mark’s building at Pennant Hills you might notice some builders doing their thing. It might also strike you that our foyer looks like a bomb site.

We’re doing some refurbishment works for a few weeks to make our foyer more welcoming, functional and flexible. While the work is happening all our Sunday services will be on as normal and – as normal – you’re welcome at all of them.

Rick hall, our new Associate Pastor: Youth & Young Adults, just preached his first sermon at St Mark’s. He shared some really helpful reflections from God’s word the Bible on what it means to be a leader in God’s church. You can listen for yourself here.

There seems to be something in human beings that means we don’t just want to drift along through life. There seems to be something in human beings that makes us hunger for a vision of who we are and where we’re going.

As our programs at St Mark’s Anglican Church Pennant Hills kick off at this time of the year, we took some time to focus on the vision that God provides to meet that hunger. You can hear a ‘Vision Sunday’ address by our pastor Craig Schafer here.

Karl Marx said ‘religion is the opiate of the masses’. Karl Marx said a lot of things. Many of them killed a whole lot of people in the end and are now considered pretty dumb.

But this one lots of people would agree with. Church leaders want to control people and they spend all their time telling people exactly what they must believe and discouraging them from thinking for themselves.

It’s one of those stereotypes that has little to do with reality. It is certainly not true at St Mark’s Anglican Church Pennant Hills, where at this time of the year we invite you to join a weekly Growth Group.

Growth Groups are small groups of people that meet in a lounge room together once a week to read the Bible together, think through what it says together (without a church leader in sight) and work out how it applies to their lives. They generally have a cuppa and eat Tim Tams while they do it. How subversive is that?

We call them Growth Groups because the idea is that they aid spiritual growth.

We have day time groups and night time groups. We have mixed gender groups, men’s groups and women’s groups. There is a group with a crèche. There is even a group that Karl Marx could join because it’s for people who are not on board with Jesus and his message yet.

If you are interested in reading the Bible with a group of local people in such a subversive manner, get in contact with Craig Schafer our pastor. We promise not to let him take control of you and turn you into a mindless zombie.

But then, we would say that wouldn’t we?

Rick Hall has joined us at St Mark’s Pennant Hills in 2010 as Associate Pastor: Youth and Young Adults.

To help us get to know him and his family a bit, we went and asked the really important questions:

At our last Men’s Dinner, our pastor Craig Schafer gave a talk called ‘men mastering busyness’. Craig shared some very practical hints and tips. But his confronting, challenging ‘big idea’ was this; the busyness problem that so many people wrestle with is fundamentally not a problem of planning or time management but a spiritual problem.

If you’d like to know why, you can listen to what he had to say:

Nearly 90 women attended our recent ‘Christmas Pudding Afternoon’ at St Mark’s Pennant Hills.

They made their own Christmas Puddings under the watchfull eye of master pudding maker Madelin Sinclair. And they heard Alison Napier (pictured) who ministers among women at St Andrew’s Cathedral give a short talk entitled The Proof is in the Pudding exploring the spiritual significance of Christmas.


The women were so impressed with the things Alison had to say that wanted to make it more widely available to those who couldn’t be there on the day.

So here it is:

You can also find a few photos of all the fun here.

This years marks our parish’s 100th birthday. Pennant Hills, Thornleigh and Westleigh have changed a lot in the last 100 years but God’s plans and purposes for the human race he designed remain constant, solid and eternal. To hear our Pastor’s centenary address on those plans and purposes of God for human beings click here.

Urbane, British, ‘celebrity atheist’ Christopher Hitchens was in Sydney over the weekend explaining ‘Christians bad, atheists good’ (we may have missed some of the nuance, but not much).

To celebrate we’ve posted the video clip below of Mr Hitchens in discussion with William Lane Craig (more of a ‘Jesus right, atheists wrong’ kind of a guy) where Hitchens dances around the great sinkhole of his atheism as Lane Craig tries to nudge him into it.

If you’re an atheist up for a discussion about the evidence for Jesus and the things he claimed about himself why not contact our pastor Craig and have a coffee with him (we’ll make sure he pays). If you think you need to know more about Jesus and what he claims before you could have that conversation, why not sign up for our next Jesus: An Introduction course and have some of your questions answered. The guys at the last one had a ball.

You might have seen this ad on TV recently, which claims “Jesus has answers”:

Maybe some of the questions in the ad have got you thinking. Maybe the claim “Jesus has answers” has got you thinking. If you’d like to think a bit more about some of the questions raised in the ad, we invite you to have a look here, where you might find some answers that keep you thinking.

If you’d like to talk about any of the big questions or even the little questions raised by the ads, Jesus, life, the universe or anything, come along one Sunday or arrange to have a coffee with our pastor Craig (contact details here).