Dear Friends, Before you go any further – just wanting you to know that tonight at St Pauls, Manuka, at 7pm there will be a special prayer service for the Ukraine. Today is also Ash Wednesday and the start of Lent! At prayers this morning we read parts of Matthew Read more…
Dear Friends, As many of you have heard, our lovely friend, Bev Galloway, died early yesterday (Tuesday 22nd February). She was able to come home from hospital last Friday and to spend her last few days with James, and her very good friend, Gina, and with her children and grandchildren Read more…
How is National Church Life Survey Week going? Have you taken 15-20 minutes to fill in one of the forms? This week – Sunday, 13th Feb to Sunday, 20th Feb – we are participating in the National Church Life Survey. This survey has been carried out for the last 30 Read more…
It is a steep climb down into our church baptistry! It is only three steps, but they take you down deep fast! I am curious if it was based on another architectural/theological feature of baptistries – that there should be three steps to represent being baptised, “in the name of Read more…
Each time I filled in the hospital admission papers, for giving birth, I was asked, “What is your religion?” and each time I would get into trouble with the Baptist chaplain because I wrote ‘Christian’ – not ‘Baptist’ – so she never found out that I was there. (I would Read more…
Dear Friends, Last Sunday we held Aboriginal Sunday, a day Yorta Yorta man and Aboriginal leader, William Cooper, called on the Australian Church to observe, on the 26th January 1938, to be in solidarity with Aboriginal peoples. And yesterday, on Australia Day, Common Grace sent out a list of the Read more…
Dear Friends, As I write this, bottle rockets are raining on the office roof launched by very happy and excited SMAD campers! 😊 It is wonderful to see (and hear) the programme happening again – even amid the concerns of Covid – and to see Penny able to be here Read more…
There is more significance to this coming weekend than having people in-person at church! (Though that is VERY exciting and it will be lovely to see those of you who live on streets with names between A and H!) This Sunday is the day before All Saints Day or All Read more…
Sunday’s service and the conversations we have been having about mental health emphasise how important it is to talk to friends. As I related in the children’s talk with the teddy bears and other soft toys, in the course of our lives around half of us will suffer from some Read more…
According to my Mental Health Month Calendar on Wednesday 6th October you are meant to “reminisce on a funny or joyful time you’ve had in the last year”. There are plenty of those! But there has also been one in just the last few hours! The incredibly wonderful news is Read more…