SUNDAY SERVICE AT SAINT GEORGES

From a survey conducted amongst attendees on three Sundays in October about service time in Summer, Vestry resolved to change back to 9am start from Labour Weekend.

Easter Week Schedule

View the Schedule (PDF file)

Resumed Annual Meeting

Sunday March 18, 2012

10.30am

Saint Georges Church Hall

(following the 9am Eucharist)

Handel's Messiah

@ The Church of St George the Martyr – Thames

Saturday March 24^th 2012 at 5.00 pm

More Information

Audited Accounts and Budget

Click to view the PDF file.

Spirited Conversations

– let’s have more of it!

These are the key elements in Spirited Conversations:

·         Open-ended, non dogmatic and non proselytizing

·         Conversational style – not just one person up front and some space for interaction with others that gather

·         Creation of an open space not a ‘club’ – no pressure to participate, ‘join’ or come again.

·         It is a conversation – it hasn’t got an end or a resolution, it is just a beginning and an invitation to keep thinking and talking in other contexts.  In some ways the evenings can be frustrating, because it feels that we just scratch the surface and then its time to wind up.  However people have found that the slight dissatisfaction and sense of incompleteness means that the conversation keeps going with other people and places over the following weeks.

·         Focus:  it is good to have a particular focus – while a small core of people will come to a lot of the events, others will choose to come to ones they are interested in. 

For more information, contact:

Ceri  0275 73 80 73

WEDNESDAYS at Saint Georges Hall 602 Mackay St

With the Selwyn Foundation, the Parish opened a Wednesday Selwyn Centre in the Church Hall.
602 Mackay Street
Wednesday 9.30am-12noon in September.
The Selwyn Foundation is committed to Quality Care for the Older Person and this centre is one of 26 through the Auckland Anglican Diocese.

Thames High School IT Projects

Senior Students at Thames High School have the Vicar as a clients as they produce DVD and CDs about Saint Georges Church as part of their 2011 external examinations projects.

Between 4000 and 6000 visitors enter Saint Georges every year (it’s the only church in the town open during the day) and many come from overseas. To help those visitors gain some understanding of the church’s story, both historic and current, the High School students are preparing 8-12 minute productions they will be able to watch before they move around this significant neo-Gothic Kauri (wooden) building.

Visitors are surprised to find such a jewel in the ‘provinces’ with it’s clean, light look and traditional furnishings in a modernized worship and performing arts venue! When the church was built Thames was a bigger town than Auckland and the district supplied the Auckland settlement with much of its food and other supplies!

THE DIOCESAN SYNOD 2011

The September 1-3 Synod /session had a small Agenda, but the content was anything but lightweight!

There were the usual motions to change aspects of rules and regulations, budgets, Overseas Mission support and parish boundary changes.

The Care of Creation council is looking for 20% funding for a fieldworker to help city parishes be more sustainable units and more resourceful; much time was given to discussing the Government’s Green Paper about the impacts on children of development projects as well as Auckland City’s development strategies that don’t seem to be overly concerned about children’s welfare.

A long and deeply respectful debate about the issue of sexual orientation and ordination took nearly a whole day along with a debate about the Anglican Communion Covenant coming up for ratification by representatives of the international Anglican Communion next year.

The current practice in this church is not to process candidates living in same-sex relationships until the International Anglican Communion was come to an agreed practice about orientation and ordination in the church.

The ordination debate challenged that practice and the New Zealand Bishops' voluntary moratorium in relation to training and ordination and instructed the Auckland representatives to General Synod/te Hinota Whanui to prepare motions that allow for further debate there following more discussion in parish units through this diocese to help parishioners understand some of the background and justice issues as well as the biblical and theological material around the debate.

General Synod meets every second year and has the ultimate decision making role in this church. Representatives from each of the seven pakeha dioceses, the five Maori hui amarangi and the Diocese of Polynesia gather together for the inside of a week in a different location of the Province each time. Next year’s General Synod is hosted by the Anglican Church in Polynesia and is located in Suva. The Lay, clerical and bishop’s representatives from each geographical unit will caucus and then vote on the issue to send some message back to each diocese/hui amorangi for further debate. When a majority accept or reject the motion it becomes ratified as as the Church’s practice.

The 2012 General Synod is also receiving reports from units on whether to accept the Anglican Communion’s Covenant document for implementation. The Covenant is seen as a way of more closely linking the various parts of the world-wide Anglican Communion. The first three sections speak of the common reality of the church, the fourth is concerned with dealing with differences in life and thinking. The Covenant was created after the American Episcopal Church moved on the issue of sexual orientation and ordination by ordaining a gay man as a diocesan bishop, whilst the Canadian Church put together services of blessing for people in same-sex relationships.

Anglican Communion COVENANT

One of the seriously debated agenda items in September’s Synod was related to the Covenant that has been in preparation over the past eight to ten years. It is in its final draft and being ratified or not by Anglican Provinces throughout the Anglican Communion. It’s a document in four parts that details how the Anglican denomination is connected (Parts 1-3) and how the whole communion would work to deal with differences should they arrive.

Unlike the Roman Catholic Church, the Anglican Church does not have a central governing body or person. The Archbishop of Canterbury is accorded a central role that gathers leadership together. This happens in three ways: The Lambeth Conference of Bishops every ten years, The Meeting of the Primates (Archbishops) a couple of times a year, and the Anglican Consultative Council that is made up of representatives of lay, ordained and bishops from each of the 30 or so Provinces.

Over the past eight years commissions have laboured to find a mechanism to create communication channels to keep the constituent bodies talking when one section gets ahead of others! For instance, thirty years ago we in the New Zealand church were well ahead of other (self-governing) Provinces when we accepted that women could be priests {something the Church of England has only agreed to in the past decade and a half); and when we legislated for women to be ordained as bishops about the time England was starting to ordain them as priests, we were again technically out of communion with Canterbury and the rest of the communion!

The debate centred around the 4^th section that dealt with conflict resolution. A section that was punitive and out of character with the essence of Anglicanism of the past 500 years! Auckland’s outcome was to send a message to next year’s General Synod that, along with perhaps half a dozen pakeha and tikanga Maori dioceses, we couldn’t affirm the 4^th section nor the Covenant document as it stood.

The Old Girl’s had a health check!

Saint Georges, the parish church, has recently had an engineering survey done to ensure that she’ll last another hundred years. Built during 1871, the first framing was blown down in a storm not unlike that of July 2007 when the building shifted a degree or two out of the vertical, only to settle back in a matter of days. [The only evidence being three doors that jammed].

Bullied into the process by nath-sayers and a heritage engineer after evidence of dry rot and random leaks in the lean-to section roofs, Vestry applied for and gained Lotteries Commission support for 70% of the $90,000 survey by heritage trades-people and professionals.

The outcome of some thirteen months of inspections and deliberations was three fold ~~ a need to re-roof the lean-tos leaving an air gap above the sarking; a need for rewiring to eliminate surface electrical wires and replace potentially unsafe installations; and to drive piles through the buttresses to hold the building rigid. Work has begun to secure quotes and then funding for the re-roofing job. The other aspects will be looked at as funding is at hand. As a Heritage Building Saint Georges has thirty years to comply with any issues around earthquake protection and engineering related to being a public place of assembly.

Tarting up the place for Pentecost

Pentecost 2008 saw the installation of a stunning centre-piece in Saint Georges in the form of a 5 metre high mobile banner in Pentecost colours that moves gently with the various breezes that inhabit the building!

Adding to our Young Families Ministry group’s metre high colourful flames, the mobile was the work of the current and former Vicar’s wardens of the parish.

Saint Georges Nave Sanctuary and airy indoors lends itself to the drama of colourful worship-adjuncts like this year’s mobile.

The building is regularly used for concerts, recitals and drama/musical productions by the entire Thames community.