Dear Friends,
Last Thursday I was in Auckland with the Reverends Meg Harvey, Tim Handley, Margaret Neate and Archdeacons Katrina Hill and Dawn Baldwin for a Tikanga Pakeha consultation on flourishing small churches, facilitated by the Tikanga Pakeha Ministry Council. As we lean into Regeneration in our Diocese in this decade, it was important to gain wisdom from this event, some of which will be shared at our Clergy Conference next week, 12-14 May, at All Saints, Burwood in the Parish of Shirley.
Please pray for clergy as we gather for our conference. We will be focusing on some big questions as we engage with challenges facing our Diocese such as how we offer effective ministry and engage in the mission of Jesus in our communities while pressed hard by financial issues such as parishes unable to support a full stipend and increasing costs of property stressing budgets for all our ministry units.
While at our conference we will be enjoying meeting in the new building at All Saints’ and I remind you that all are welcome at the formal opening of this building on New Brighton Road at 1pm this Sunday 11 May 2025.
The Reverend Jacqui Stevenson announced on Sunday that she is concluding her ministry as Vicar of St. Aidan’s, Bryndwr on Sunday 3 August 2025. Jacqui will have been Vicar of Bryndwr for 12 years. I will say more nearer the time of her final Sunday, suffice to say for now that I am very grateful for Jacqui’s faithful leadership of this parish and consistent work in development of the mission of the parish in its local neighbourhoods.
This week is the last week for the Reverends Christine and John de Senna serving the Diocese as Chaplains to the Retired Clergy, Widows and Widowers. Thank you, Christine and John for your ministry in this joint role. You have pastored our senior clergy and their families with love, faithfulness and great care. I hope I can announce a new appointment soon.
Congratulations to the Reverend Graham and Alison Button who celebrate 60 years of marriage this week!
Last weekend we held our regular Diocesan Discernment Weekend at Te Waiora House, Hororata. It is always a privilege to work with those who are discerning a call to ordination and with those who advise me in this process. I thank our Diocesan Director of Ordination, the Reverend Jenny Wilkens for her leadership of the weekend, for the commitment of our advisors and discernees to good process, and to the volunteer staff at Te Waiora House for their warm hospitality and and excellent cooking.
On Sunday afternoon, Teresa and I participated in a Patronal Service for St. George’s Hospital, led by the Reverend Jeff Cotton, Chaplain to the Hospital. I think it is the first time I have preached on St. George – one of the more colourful saints and an intriguing figure for whom there are definitely more legends than facts, and who is claimed as significant by more nations than England. My researches for the sermon uncovered an interesting idea of Canon Wilford (the driving force behind the establishment of St. George’s) that St. George was a good name for the hospital because it would be slaying the dragon of ill-health. The name is also associated with the hope of Canon Wilford that invoking the patron saint of England might help solicit funds from England. This idea was not particularly successful. The hospital today, thankfully, is a great success as part of the network of hospitals, both public and private, across Christchurch which offer an array of medical services.
Nothing worthwhile in the service of our God is achieved without prayer. I remind you of two calls to prayer: A Call to Prayer for our younger generations, our first third, is being planned for 5pm, Sunday 25 May 2025. This is at the end of Youth Week and the invitation and encouragement is for Christians to gather in small or large groups to prayer for our tamariki, our children, our rangatahi, our young people. Then, the Reverend Tim Handley (Westland), on behalf of the Diocese, is working on a Day of Prayer, now confirmed for 9am to 5pm, Saturday 7 June 2025, which will see people across our Diocese joining with people from the Dioceses of Sheffield, Bondo [Kenya] and Argentina praying for God’s mission in the world as part of “Thy Kingdom Come” – a global, ecumenical prayer movement that invites Christians around the world to pray from Ascension to Pentecost for more people to come to know Jesus. Further details about this will be mailed out soon to ministry unit leaders and to all members of the Diocesan Prayer Community.
Licensed ministers being in supervision is vital for a flourishing church and for us to be a safe church. I am delighted to learn that three more people in the Canterbury region have completed the CAIRA Pastoral and Professional Supervision Training, including one of our clergy, the Reverend Victoria Askin.
This year is the 1,700th anniversary of the First Council of Nicaea, the first ecumenical or universal council of the church of God, which was decisive in determining the orthodox understanding of Jesus Christ as fully God as well as human, and thus dealt with the so-called Arian controversy in which Arius asserted that Jesus as Son of God was created by God and subordinate to God. When we say the Nicene Creed in our services we are reciting a creed substantially set out and agreed to by this Council. The creed we say is an amended version of the first Nicene Creed and was agreed to at the First Council of Constantinople in 381 AD. To celebrate the significance of the First Council of Nicaea, all are welcome, and especially from all churches, to a service at 5 pm Sunday 15 June 2025 in the Transitional Cathedral. Sunday 15 June is Trinity Sunday and thus a most appropriate Sunday for our ecumenical service.
The Conclave to elect a new Pope is underway. Please pray for the cardinals that they will clearly hear the voice of God in these proceedings. This morning I read a beautifully expressed article by local Catholic priest, Father John O’Connor in the online Press. John relates the proceedings to the movie Conclave which many readers here will have seen this year.
This coming Sunday, 11 May is Easter 4 (also known as Good Shepherd Sunday).The Gospel reading is John 10:22-30. In the last verse of this passage, the Good Shepherd moves on from talking about his role as shepherd to making a theological claim which turns the world of theology upside down: “The Father and I are one.” John’s Gospel turns on this claim about who Jesus really is, the human being from Nazareth is one being with the God of the whole world.
Arohanui,
+Peter.