E to matou Matua i te rangi,
Kia tapu tou ingoa.
Kia tae mai tou rangatiratanga.
Kia meatia tau e pai ai ki runga ki te whenua,
kia rite ano ki to te rangi.
Homai ki a matou aianei he taro ma matou mo tenei ra.
Murua o matou hara, me matou hoki e muru nei
i o te hunga e hara ana ki a matou.
Aua hoki matou e kawea kia whakawaia;
engari whakaorangia matou i te kino.
Nou hoki te rangatira-tanga, te kaha, me te kororia,
Ake, ake, ake.
Amine.
We are a group of five churches located in a dynamic part of Wellington, influenced by the movie industry and proximity to the airport. There are a lot of people, but not a lot to go to local churches. So we connect to encourage each other and do some things none of us alone is big enough to pull off ourselves.
Encouragement-wise we meet together each month to encourage each other and last year tried our first prayer retreat together.
Being smallish one way we’ve chosen to help each other is to share our Sunday services over January. Our people appreciate worshipping out of different traditions (at least once a year!), and it’s encouraging to have a full church at a time of the year when we’d separately be very thin on the ground. Sharing services in January also helps each pastor to get a holiday with most of us still having school-aged children.
A practical hospitality that has developed as well. One church, after a series of sermons on generosity, was moved to give another church a totally unexpected and very generous donation.
Another gave up one of their worship buildings to accommodate one of our churches who had to move out for earthquake strengthening reasons.
We’ve managed to put on together a Community Christmas Carol event for a number of years, and recently started joining in with our Catholic brothers and sisters in processing the cross during their Easter vigil. When we were individually approached by a local dementia unit to offer worship services it seemed natural to form a mixed church ministry group. A healing rooms ministry has also begun as a cooperative effort.
The key word for our experience of unity is encouragement. And so we thank God for each other.
For more information and inspiration from the Church in Miramar, email Paul Prestidge or Phil Coates.
This story appears in the City by City e-book. City by City aims to help connect, encourage and resource prayerful, relationally based, networking and mission in towns, cities and regions across the nation.
The Hibiscus Coast, 20 minutes north of Auckland, has a population of over 40,000. Good beaches and various leisure activities make this a popular place where encouraging things are happening for God’s people.
Men of Prayer. For 12 years, thirty plus men representing most of the local churches have gathered monthly, first to worship and pray and then enjoy fellowship over a shared evening meal. They go to a different church each month, praying for that church and it’s leadership. The overriding cry each month, however, has been for God’s blessing to be on His church on the Hibiscus Coast. A more recent prayer initiative, a monthly ‘Half Night of Prayer’, has increased the level of intercession for the Coast.
God has answered. We are encouraged by the steady increase overall in church attendance. New churches are being established and closer relationships are developing between church leaders. Three healing/counselling rooms have begun, as well as three Mainly Music outreaches (in Siverdale, Orewa and Whangaparaoa). We have also seen rapid growth of Kingsway Christian School with over 1100 students, most of whom have been absorbed into local congregations.
Easter Opportunities. At Easter last year a special Christian art exhibition was on display and local businesses sponsored an Easter themed sand sculpture competition. Churches on the Hibiscus Coast came together for this occasion. The first time for years!
Also, all the local churches combined to advertise their Easter services with a two page spread in the local newspaper. This coming Easter there will be a chalk art presentation depicting the Easter message in the middle of one of the busy shopping centres… We are grateful for the favour we have been receiving from the local business community.
Glory Girls. Glory Girls is made up of over 100 women from most of the churches on the Coast. They gather bi-monthly to encourage and empower women to be mighty in the kingdom. These Saturday afternoon meetings, with guest speakers from local churches, are an opportunity for women to invite unsaved friends and develop relationships. We enjoy fun quizzes, worship, testimonies and huge sumptuous teas.
I love what God is doing… He is breaking restrictions and mindsets, changing us from village church thinking to Kingdom thinking, one church Glorifying God on the Coast.
Karen
For more information and inspiration from the Church in Hibiscus Coast, email Lleon Downes, Graeme Gillies or Karen Colmore-Williams
This story appears in the City by City e-book. City by City aims to help connect, encourage and resource prayerful, relationally based, networking and mission in towns, cities and regions across the nation.
On 4th of September 2010 and 22nd February 2011 our beautiful city was struck by devastating earthquakes.
Churches across the city sprang into action to support those in need, offering comfort, hospitality and a place to pray. A meeting was quickly organised where stories were told and two hundred church leaders agreed to co-operate.
Since then, earthquake coordinators from a wide spectrum of churches have met regularly for support and to explore collaborative projects. It’s become known as the Canterbury Post Earthquake Churches Forum. Many key initiatives such as winter heating, Red-Zone door knocking, Government/NGO liaison and inter-church partnership have grown from the Forum.
New groups of church leaders began to meet. After one such occasion Steve Graham, Murray Robertson and Mike Dodge were approached to help provide a structure for deeper collaboration. It was apparent that rather than new central projects it would be better to discover grass-root schemes.
Collaboration would bring the many strands of activities together as organic movement rather than an organisation.
The concept of raranga (meaning weave) became a guiding metaphor. Leadership (rangatira) is he ability to weave the people together.
Te Raranga now exists as a space for support, collaboration and dreaming together for the future. Churches are discovering a new unity through working together in Christ-centred mission. This Maori proverb has become a key for us:
E hara taku toa, I te toa takitaho engari he toa taku tini
– My strength is not myself alone, but from the strength of the group.
For more information and inspiration from the Church in Christchurch, visit raranga.org.nz or email Anita Voisey
This story appears in the City by City e-book. City by City aims to help connect, encourage and resource prayerful, relationally based, networking and mission in towns, cities and regions across the nation.
Jeff Fountain – Weekly Words
A high Celtic stone cross marks the spot in New Zealand’s Bay of Islands where Christian mission in the last land on earth to be populated by humans began two hundred years ago.
The sermon preached on Christmas Day in 1814 to a large crowd of Maori was the start of a process that led directly to the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, February 6, 1840, and the birth of the nation of New Zealand.
Missionaries played the crucial role of midwife in this birthing process, as Craig Vernall, the national leader of the Baptist denomination, explained at the offical church service commemorating this treaty last week in Waitangi. At a congress of national church leaders I attended starting that same evening in the Bay of Islands, convening Catholics, Protestants and Pentecostals in an unprecedented spirit of unity and purpose, several historians affirmed that the treaty would never have happened the way it did without the missionaries. Evangelical missionaries initiated, translated and carried the treaty to be signed to various parts of the country.
The willingness to sign a treaty with the British government reflected the trust of the Maori people in the integrity of the missionaries.
In fact, the birth of New Zealand through this treaty can be traced directly back to William Wilberforce and his circle of social-reformer friends, including bankers, lawyers and politicians, often called the Clapham Sect. While mostly aligned with the Anglican church, they were generally viewed with suspicion by the ‘high’ church elite as evangelicals agitating to awaken the social conscience of church and nation to poverty and injustice in England and her colonies. They believed the Christian faith did not end with personal transformation but required practical social application.
Long saga
Wilberforce and his Clapham friends are best known for achieving the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 after decades of battling against entrenched elitist powers. They helped restore a sense of democracy in Britain in their affirmation of the equality of all people under God. They were also concerned about British treatment of indigenous peoples in their colonies and settlements.
Further, they were committed to promote efforts to take the gospel to the unreached, and to this end formed the Church Missionary Society in 1799, just six years after William Carey had sailed for India to pioneer protestant missions.
Wilberforce had personally recommended a young Anglican clergyman, Samuel Marsden, for a chaplaincy role in New South Wales. It was this same Marsden who delivered that first Christmas sermon on the spot now marked by the cross. Supported by the CMS in his vision to begin a mission in New Zealand, Marsden’s 1814 visit was the first of seven trips from Sydney to introduce the Christian gospel to Maori.
When Marsden expounded to his Maori listeners on Luke 2:10– Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people–he was continuing the long saga of the story-tellers who had brought transformation to his own people many centuries earlier. As he and others who followed began to preach up and down the country to animists and polytheists, just as Paul, Patrick and Boniface had done in the first millennium, hearts and individuals changed, families and tribes were reconciled and society began to change, as had happened in Europe.
Unity with diversity
By the 1850’s 60% of Maori were attending church regularly, a far higher proportion than among the European settlers.
In the Treaty House at Waitangi some years ago, I read a speech of the British Resident in New Zealand, James Busby, appointed to mediate between Maori and European. When preparing Maori leaders for the signing of the Treaty, he told them that the English too had been a nation of warring tribes, until the story of Jesus had brought forgiveness, reconciliation and restitution. The English tribes had come to recognise their common identity–all of them had been created in God’s image. They needed to learn to live together in unity with diversity, to love God and their neighbour.
Events in the Bay of Islands, and subsequently throughout New Zealand, form a microcosm of the narrative of Europe.. On that Christmas day, Marsden introduced Maori to that same transforming story that gave Europe its unifying identity more than any other single factor.
To disregard the role of the gospel in shaping New Zealand, England and Europe is to distort all three stories.
Jeff Fountain
©SCHUMANCENTRE. Weekly Words are the personal reflections of Jeff Fountain. They may be reproduced with due acknowledgment. Past WW’s may be read and downloaded at www.schumancentre.eu/category/weeklyword/
I was surprised to learn recently that being poor isn’t defined primarily by how much or little money a person has.
Poverty is about how dysfunctional or broken a person’s matrix of relationships is – with family, government, community, neighbours, those in authority, God.
The resulting isolation excludes them from all things that bring meaning and life and hope. Of course resources and money are part of this, but not the sole or even main driver of what we describe as poverty.
I’m often disappointed to see Christians and churches supporting apparently worthwhile causes that I know address only a narrow range of factors in the matrix of dysfunction. Too often we go for what is “sexy” and has a high “feel good” factor, and allows us to feel as if we are making a difference, rather than a project that has a longterm sustainable approach to addressing the range of issues that allow people to become more human.
My intent and prayers for Just Church, a March gathering at the intersection of faith, justice, worship and arts, is that people will leave the South Auckland venue knowing that God has spoken to them; that they know where to find the resources to guide and sustain them in their engagement with injustice globally, locally and personally; and how their community of faith can build for the Kingdom.
Just Church has no high-profile imported speakers. It has a wide range of local people with loads of knowledge and experience, some artists and poets, a group of Kiwi worship curators doing worldclass work in public places and in church worship, all of whom will be available for engaging with and questioning.
I’d love to meet you and to have you contribute to the conversation.
Mark Pierson – Worship Curator, ex-school teacher, ex-Baptist pastor, author (The Art of Curating Worship, The Prodigal Project, Fractals for Worship), writer, speaker on things worship and the arts, currently Christian Commitments Manager World Vision NZ, sustained by the community at The Upper Room, Auckland.
