New Team Called

A lot of water has gone under the bridge in a week but suffice it to say that our parish Calling was a very good occasion. District Supt Peter was able to report back that all four calls were accepted within 24 hours.

That's not quite a record but the event can be said to be very successful and people seemed to enjoy the experience. We did a few things a little differently this time.

Besides Helen who continues with Pastoral Care, We now have Ann and Michael, both of whom have had previous experience on the team, and Vanessa and Judy, both first timers. It's a very encouraging outcome.

There will be more to tell when Bev and I get over over the week we took away in the caravan to get over the busy-ness of the previous weeks. We had a great time for four days with some good visits with my Dad. Then one after the other we have gone down with some gastro trouble. At least we're saving on a lot of work getting meals. Eating seems very low priority right now!

Thanks for the Memory

Remember the caravan coupling that was getting shonky? (See "Running True" in July)

I took it to the local Engineer's and when we'd decided he would do the job he asked for my name, address and phone number. I gave them and then suggested, tactfully, perhaps he might like to write them down. "Oh, no," he said "I've got them." And he parrotted them all back to me perfectly.

Some days later I drove in to see how the job was going and he recognised me and recited my full details from memory. Isn't that fantastic? Wouldn't your pastoral heart like you to remember details like that?

Actually, several weeks later, he's forgotten to send me the account for the job.

Living with Prostate Cancer

Those who have been following my journey with prostate cancer will be pleased to hear that, for the third time, my PSA scores have become "unmeasurable".
My PSA first disappeared for a year after removal of my prostate before returning. It disappeared again for nearly three years after I went onto Zoladex implants. Now, after a couple of months on a daily Bicalutamide tablet as well as Zoladex, my PSA score is right down again.
Next time it creeps up there won't be another medication to throw at it - unless medical science has something secreted up its sleeve. But this is a very welcome reprieve.
And there's lots of living to do as we celebrate our Golden Wedding in October and November. We're having "drop in" events in Paihia, Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch, Dunedin and Sydney.
If you'd like to spend an hour or two with us and family and friends, ask us for details of the event that is "Coming to a Centre Near You"...

Making a Loss

Bev and I have been operating a business partnership ever since I stopped receiving a full stipend in 1990. We did book publishing, video production and consultancy work for a few years to help along with her full-time earnings until we qualified for NZ Superannuation.
The Partnership is still in place but in these retirement days it makes some losses as our actual costs for the bit of work we continue to do tend to exceed the income we receive for it.
So why keep the partnership going, I asked myself and the IRD recently. Well, the losses are a legitimate deduction from our superannuation income so there’s some tax compensation for some of the more worthwhile things we do in retirement.
That’s nice, but what has real value for us is the quality of what we do for people, not whether or not the partnership finances are in the black at the end of the year.
Our small church is moving into a deficit budget for the first time in a dozen years and we are having to ask ourselves questions about our day by day life as a parish. Where are the priorities? What will produce the best results from the most modest input? How do we match our resources to the needs? It’s a bit like the end of the year balance. And the full story will never be told in just the financial bottom line.

Worth a Thousand Words?

They say a picture is worth a thousand words but I am again finding that a picture is about a thousand times as much trouble to put into a book as the words.

The text of my”life story” is in its first complete draft and is being looked over by a good friend and editor. Meanwhile I am trying to make up some picture pages to support the rather large mass of words. Matching of words and images has been a large part of my life, so I really want to have pictures in there. But it’s a huge task to select them, clean up colour slides with half a century’s dust and fungus on them, and scan and process them to fit the page.

However, if the whole book project does nothing for anyone else, it has certainly done a lot for me. From the more dispassionate distance of decades, I have been able to see myself more as others would have seen me at various times. It has not always been a pretty picture. In a recent church service I was shown again how easy it is, in a moment of evangelical passion, to give the wrong emphasis in a sermon or conversation. I often failed there.

But I have also been reminded of quite a few good and worthwhile times and projects. I have continued to discover how much I have to be thankful for in family and friends and a calling that always went far beyond just an occupation.

In a week I have another blood test to see if the latest extra medication is slowing the growth of my prostate cancer. It might or it might not. But, either way, I have no sense of unfinished business in this life. I am looking forward to the future with anticipation especially as we celebrate our Golden Wedding in the next couple of months. And perhaps I will even have to write another chapter for the book and – oh, really? – struggle with some more photos.

And, yes, the title I hinted at in July will do: “In and Out of Sync”. What do you make of that, I wonder?

Lilian has left us

Nearly 98, she would be called a pillar of her community and a woman of faith. She was the ultimate example of the regular church attender, always in her special chair on Sunday mornings.
But she didn’t believe in the “bodily resurrection”. An avid reader of Spong and Geering, in many stimulating conversations, she articulated a faith that was not dependent on believing certain “fundamentals”. “When I’m dead, I’m dead,” she told me more than once. But she lived as if all traditional Christian beliefs were true…

I think that’s what real faith is about – not “believing” a bunch of stuff, but living as if the Gospel story were fundamentally true.

GK Chesterton said: “Faith is believing three impossible things before breakfast”. Actually, Lilian was closer to the truth. Faith isn’t really about believing - it is acting as if the three impossible things were actually possible. That’s how Lillian lived. That’s what we will be celebrating at church in a couple of hours.

The hiding has had its day - To smack or not to smack

I found John Roughan’s article in the NZ Herald last weekend really helpful. He emphasised that parental “correction” is already legally acceptable in the context of an immediate response to a serious situation. It may involve a degree of apparent violence to restraint a child from being hurt or from hurting someone else or it may be a simple but firm physical re-direction of the individual.
But parental “correction” in the style of “You wait until your father gets home” and the violence that usually follows this threat is dissociated from the unacceptable action that provoked it. It has no corrective virtue at all. Indeed, it may teach entirely the wrong things.
The present law allows appropriate parental correction in the context of an immediate and relevant situation. A change in the law might result in a style of parental “correction” which would contribute to the cycle of meaningless violence which we must repudiate.
The law does not need to be changed. And it should certainly not be relaxed on the central issue of violence to children.
“Should a smack as part of good parental correction be a criminal offence in New Zealand?” Vote YES - you won't criminalise careful parents and you will preserve the principle that violence against children is wrong.

Local Shared Ministry - the Vision and the Chores

I was putting up a row of slots for holding patch cords and was confident they were straight and level as I banged screws into the study walls.
When I stood back, I could see immediately that they were not quite straight at all. I’d been too close to the job to make a good judgment about them.
In a lot of life in the local church, we can’t always stand back and survey the whole scene in its context. And that means that sometimes the pressure of the little chores makes it impossible for us to see the wider vision. But just standing off and scrutinising the distant vision doesn’t change anything.
We’re coming to another Calling for our ministry team and there’s the usual anxiety:

“We’ve been doing this for nineteen years – isn’t it time to try something else?”

“Who will turn up for the Calling Workshop?”

“Where will we find someone to replace so-and-so?” And so on….
Of course we’ll take time to rekindle the vision for a lay led congregation. But we’ll also have to grapple with the specifics. In both, we have to remember that we are not alone; as we review the vision and take some tentative steps towards it, we put ourselves into the hands of God.

A Right to Smack?

The upcoming referendum is a thoughtless waste of taxpayer resources. The question is worded in such a way that even if the referendum is carried, it won’t necessarily change anything.

The current Act certainly appears less precise than may be desirable but it says that any kind of violence against children is wrong. If everyone votes “YES, it should be a crime to smack my child in any circumstances” the law also does not need to be changed. It clearly rejects violence against children.

Even if the entire electorate votes “NO, it should not be a crime to smack my child in certain circumstances”, the law does not need to be changed or done away with. It provides specifically that the Police have discretion about bringing prosecutions. Only a handful have been brought. The law is working and it is not turning parents into criminals all over Aotearoa-NZ.

It may be an imperfectly drafted law, but it is better than what we had, and if the 30,000 who signed the referendum had asked a more explicit and direct question we could have voted more usefully next month.

I would rather vote on “Every parental act against relationships with children should be a crime”. As the referendum is I think it is clearly better to vote VES than to vote NO. To abstain or spoil the ballot paper (as some have suggested) is probably as good as voting NO. Whatever the imperfections of the present law and whatever I feel about the referendum question, I have to say that I have come to see that the present law is better than a change which might deliver parents the clear right to beat their children.

Vote YES!

Running true?

We were away in the caravan this last weekend and I noticed that the front tyre of our “thirdwheeler” was badly worn on one edge. When I stripped off the cover of the towing assembly there were pieces of flat greasy stuff sticking out of the rotating unit. A thing called a “damper” has been broken up and spat out. Worse, the central pin on which the assembly turns, has become slightly bent.

I guess that pin has been through over twenty years of taking the bumps on some fairly rough roads and I shouldn’t be surprised that it isn’t as straight and true as it once was. But even this very small lean away from “true” has virtually ruined a new tyre. There’s more noise than there should be when we’re towing and the van’s been hard to manoevre by hand.

So tomorrow a local engineer will pull the assembly apart again and straighten the pin. It will have to be heat-treated in a gas torch to enable it to be brutally forced back into square. While the unit is apart we’ll check out other components and make sure everything is working as it should. It’s just something that has to be done after a couple of decades of hard work, especially if some regular greasings have been overlooked.

I suppose churches are much the same. It doesn’t take many things “out of true” to upset the balance of things that should normally run smoothly. Ignoring problems can often make matters worse but dealing with them can occasionally involve some uncomfortable heat and pressure. At the end of the day, every member needs to be “straight and true” for the local congregation to be faithful to its calling.