Last year the tennis court and vicarage land was offered for sale through a real estate agent. After reviewing the offers, we decided with CPT (Church Property Trustees) to work with a shortlist of two potential buyers. One final offer was too low and had some other issues. The other offer was for just the…
The first verse of Michael Card’s beautiful song “The Final Word” is:‘You and me, we use so very many clumsy words The noise of what we often say is not worth being heard When the Father’s wisdom wanted to communicate His love He spoke it in one final perfect word’ That puts it well, but…Michael…
Waiting for Christmas is not easy. These days it is quite normal to have the lights, the carols, the mince pies and the crackers early. But what about the presents? I was told about a young woman who would give all the Christmas presents to her children early. She was not able to wait until…
Throughout the New Testament and Christian tradition there are several Hebrew words that have not been translated, but rather transliterated, keeping (more or less) the original sound of the words and imbuing them with theological or liturgical significance. Some of these words are quite common words in the original language (mostly Hebrew), but have acquired new significance. Take the word “Immanuel”, which…
Around the family table my daughter told me about the Christmas one of her friends had a year or two ago. There were no presents for her friend that year; instead the parents had decided to concentrate on Christ that Christmas, leaving the distraction of presents for one year. My daughter was adamant that we…
While Anglicans should be regarded as Christians as well, for the first time there were more Christians in New Zealand who wanted to be just known as Christian, rather than Anglican. There were 364,644 who identified as just Christian and 245,301 as Anglicans. The number of Anglicans has been rapidly dropping in recent years, while the number of Christians has been steadily…
This year St Paul’s has been successful in receiving several grants. We normally receive an amount from the E J Price Trust and this year we received $4,086, which have been spent on computer upgrades, with the remained probably going towards the repair of the office roof. Doug Lamb has been successful in obtaining a…
On Saturday, 26 October, a few St Paul’s people braved the rain to make our way to the Living Faith Diocesan conference at Christchurch Boys High School. Over 300 people from throughout the Diocese of Christchurch came to this event, together with a few visitors from further afield (Dunedin, Blenheim). It was good to catch…
I do use social media, particularly Youtube and Facebook. This year I have noticed a somewhat disturbing trends. Some users are posting things that seem deliberately misleading, so that a lot of people feel that they have to correct them. This means that there are many comments under the posts, driving them up the algorithm.…