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.

Sunday August 29, the different congregations at St Mark’s Pennant Hills combined for a special “Care Sunday” service, where we reflected on the fact that Jesus told his followers “They will know you are my disciples by the love you have for one another”. Peter Kell, CEO of Anglicare (pictured), was our speaker and you can listen to his talk here.


We’ve posted a video capturing some of the ways people at St Mark’s care for one another here.

St Mark’s Pennant Hills is a church willing to consider the claims of various ‘celebrity atheists’. More importantly, we’re open minded enough to consider the issues that ordinary local people might have with the Christian message. So we asked a bunch of ‘non-celebrity atheists’ what their big issues with Christianity were and they we explored the ‘top 5’ on Sundays.

The topics, in order, were:

“Christianity can’t be true because…

1. it depends on a bunch of fairy stories that contradict one another (aka the Bible)
2. it fails the test of science
3. bad things happen to nice people
4. it has caused so much violence and oppression
5. Christians hate gay people

If you missed the talks, you can listen to them here.

As part of our HAWK holiday kids program in July we ran a parent cafe called The Nest. They served great coffee and yummy treats and hosted a free series of parenting seminars and interviews.

You’ll find some photos of The Nest here and resources from one of the seminars here.

While our HAWK children’s holiday programme is on, were also running a series of seminars for parents at our Nest Cafe (where they also make a very nice cappuccino and serve a very nice caramel slice!). Thursday’s talk was by technology guru Steve Kryger. He mentioned a bunch of useful resources which he’s posted on his website here. Worth a look.

See here for all the seminar topics for the week.

Why did they execute the guy who said “love your enemies?”

Jesus: An Introduction is a short course St Mark’s runs for people who want to take an adult look at Jesus and what he was on about.

have people said about our Jesus: An Introduction course?

• “Very clear and easy to understand”
• “Great course, well structured”
• “Very helpful in my struggles with Christianity”

You don’t need to know anything about the Bible and you won’t be asked to read it out loud or to pray. You do get a chance to ask any questions you want.

• 6 sessions, Sundays 3pm – 4pm
• Cnr Rosemount Ave & Warne St, Pennant Hills
• St Mark’s is pleased to offer this course at no cost and to throw in afternoon tea and a free Bible.
• To get the date for the next course or more details, just contact our pastor Craig Schafer here.

At our last men’s dinner Jim Ramsay challenged us to consider whether we were pursuing a ‘do it yourself religion’ and whether God would be very impressed with that or not.

It was a great snapshot of the heart of Jesus’ teaching and a very engaging talk, so we thought we’d make it available to…well the world really.


Here it is:

Some people don’t believe the stuff we celebrate each Easter at St Mark’s Anglican Church Pennant Hills actually happened.
If that’s you and you’re open to thinking a bit more about it you might want to have a look at some of the clips which the Centre for Public Christianity have collected here.

Friday night, March 12, nearly 130 local women enjoyed some ‘food for the body’ as professional chefs Claire and Katrina demonstrated some great canapes and desserts and some ‘food for the soul’ as Lesley Ramsay helped us see how the ancient message of Jesus is profoundly relevant to us today.

You can see some photos from the event here and you can listen to what Lesley said here:

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.