Available Light

Sitting all by itself, at a crossroads in the South Eastern corner of Southland is this tiny church, the spiritual home, when I visited it,  of a small,close knit congregation of truly lovely people. I don't know whether they still meet there. Their existence was precarious a couple of years ago, and will be more so now. The rural church is disappearing. The tide of 21st Century secularisation is washing with as much vigour through the farm gates as it does through the streets of the cities, but out there, where no-one much is looking, there has been an additional pressure. Over the last 30 or so years there has been a revolution in New Zealand farming, away from mixed cropping, sheep and beef towards dairying. The transition is seen in the infrastructure of the countryside and in the change from small woolly  inhabitants of paddocks to big black and white ones. A significant part of the transition is not seen, and that is the change in the social structure of rural New Z...

Late yesterday afternoon I drove through the Southern Otago sunshine to Gore. The people at Holy Trinity church wanted to discuss their immediate future with me, so we had a pleasant and productive chat in the parish hall before I had a quick meal with Keith and Anne Gover and drove on through to Invercargill. At All Saints Gladstone a group of about 20 or so had gathered to discuss the issue of the ordination and/or marriage of gay people. There were no surprises in the views expressed, but I think that we are making good progress in our ability to live with difference. **** This morning I was in Lumsden to talk to the people from four very small rural congregations, also about their immediate future. In the face of shifting patterns of land use, wholesale but unreported changes in the rural culture of New Zealand and the spiritual shifts common to all the Western world, there has been huge decline in small country churches in the last decade. There has been no diminution ...

We had a late start so there was time to watch Attitude. This wonderful program runs on Sunday morning at a time when no one much will be watching it. I don't get to see it very often but it never fails to deliver.  Production values are superb and the interviewing and scripting is amongst the best you will see on New Zealand Television. And the stories! So moving! Today's was about a very high achieving young man with Down's Syndrome and his astonishingly whole and wise parents. TVNZ buries this on Sunday mornings and at prime time programs endless cooking contests or dating shows or people fixing houses . Go figure. ***** We left at 11 am to drive to Omakau: there via the Pig Root, home via the Ida Valley and Middlemarch. We stopped for a picnic lunch somewhere by a river under a deep blue sky and that still warm clear light which is the signature of Central Otago. We made it to St. Mary's church in plenty of time for the service at 2 pm. This was the ...

I spent the weekend in Central Otago. My caravan was nicely parked in the churchyard of St Andrew's Cromwell, a convenient central point for the various things I had to do. I had a meeting in Queenstown and a lunch in Arrowtown to attend on Friday, and a dinner and service in Cromwell to mark the 140th anniversary of St. Andrew's church. I also had an informal meeting in Ophir, which I'll talk about in a minute. The dinner at St. Andrews and the service the next day were a lot of fun. Upper Clutha Parish is in good heart right now, with an exceptionally capable vicar, an exciting project (the Wanaka Community House) well on the way, and a great sense of optimism and growth. The Cromwell congregation is filled with interesting people doing unusual things and boy, do they know how to cook. The little stone church might be deemed an earthquake risk, but it sits as robustly on its footings under the trees as it has done for 1.4 centuries and if it feels threatened it doesn...