Thought for the Week 12 November 2023

With two weeks to go before our AGM I have been thinking about our vision and future sustainability of our parish. At our last parish council meeting we invited Alpine Presbytery Executive Officer Martin Stewart to lead us in discussion around the challenging issues of how we continue to resource our mission and ministry in Timaru. The hard fact is that we have around 2 years before we will no longer be able to fund deficit budgets and we will need to make tough decisions to significantly trim our costs. This was signaled at the presentation of the budget back in August.

But this is not just about money. It’s actually about what kind of church we want to leave for the next generation. It’s about how do we connect to  a community that is more and more removed from any Christian heritage and bring them into the fold of God’s love and care. It’s about how we transition from maintaining properties and the status quo to building effective missional communities that reach the lost. Martin Stewart is fond of saying ‘something is dying and something is rising’; the church as we know it is dying, but God will raise a new kind of church in its place.

We don’t really know what the new will look like but we can ensure we have sufficient ‘oil in our lamps’ to fuel the new thing God will do here.

Nga mihi nui,

Brent Richardson