From the Vicar…
Dear Friends,
Today we rejoice with Taylor James Cansdale as he comes to be baptised. We welcome his family and friends who are here to support him. Some of Taylor’s family are former pupils of S. Michael’s School. We welcome other visitors too as they come to Christchurch and to S. Michael’s on this holiday weekend.
John De la Bere is going next Saturday to England to visit his family for seven weeks. We hope that he has a wonderful time and warmer temperatures. We shall of course miss John’s huge contribution to our day-to-day running, and we are very grateful to those who are taking on extra tasks to cover John’s time away.
We welcome back from overseas Fr Ron Smith and Diana, who have been visiting family. We have missed them for themselves, and for the contributions they make to our community. In particular, we are grateful to Fr Ron for his willing help in our rather tight staffing situation.
Work is proceeding on the restoration of the church. Much of the work so far has happened underneath the east end of the building where the foundations are being stabilised and strengthened. The walls are also being more strongly braced by material applied behind the weatherboards. This work is revealing some badly rotten timbers down at ground level, and these are having to be replaced. The lead in the east window has been found to be much more seriously decayed than at first thought. We are having this great window completely restored while it is out, so that it may inspire our people for another hundred years. David Gray will speak to us about this project today and from time to time, and is willing to answer your questions at any time.
Two weeks ago, the Vestry spent most of a Saturday on a thinking day together with Canon Ken Booth. Through looking at our arrangements for worship, he led us to look at our community and its work in a bigger perspective. Among the resources he shared was the quote below from Archbishop Rowan Williams.
May God bless you all.
Peter Williams
“…it is about getting away from a view of the Church that is very seductive and very damaging—and very popular. This is the view that the Church is essentially a lot of people who have something in common called Christian faith and get together to share it with each other and communicate it to other people ‘outside’. It looks a harmless enough view at first, but it is a good way from what the New Testament encourages us to think about the Church—which is that the Church is first of all a kind of space cleared by God through Jesus in which people may become what God made them to be (God’s sons and daughters), and that what we have to do about the Church is not first to organise it as a society but to inhabit it as a climate or a landscape. It is a place where we can see properly—God, God’s creation, ourselves. It is a place or dimension in the universe that is in some way growing towards being the universe itself in restored relation to God. It is a place we are invited to enter, the place occupied by Christ, who is himself the climate and atmosphere of a renewed universe.”
