ANNUAL SYNOD OPENS.

Auckland Star, Volume XLVI, Issue 280, 24 November 1915, Page 7

ANNUAL SYNOD OPENS.

«CHAIRMAN'S OPENING ADDRESS. IF CHRIST VISITED SYNOD. QUESTIONS HE WOULD ASK. The Auckland district or the Methodist Church of New Zealand opened its. annual the Pitt Street schoolroom this morning. The Rev. C. H. Laws, 8.A., presided, and there was a large attendance of clergy and laymen from all parts of the province.

The president, in the course of his address, paid tribute to the splendid work in Gallipoli of Major-Chaplain Luxford. Ho dealt at length with the business before Synod, and referred to the development of foreign mission ,work. Despite appeals in other directions, the work of the Church had been well maintained during the year. The Mount Albert Orphanage was proving itself an ideal children's home, and were now twenty-eight children under its roof. The finances of the institution were in a healthy condition, and steps were being taken to acquire the freehold of an adjoining two acres of land, thus providing an ample area for all future requirements. The Board of Wesley Training College was giving close attention to the development of the valuable endowments now under its control, and preliminary steps were being discussed for the transfer of the institution to the very fine site at Paerata and the erection of buildings there to equip the work in the most modern way. WHAT IS THE CHURCH DOING?

Continuing, the speaker said:—"But all the varied business of our Synod, important as it may be in itself, is but the means to an end. We cannot rest in externals nor trust in temporalities. What are we really doing as a Church?

What impact are we making upon the life of the people; how far are we really seeking the lost, the wayward,the rebellious; by what efforts do we endeavour to get Christ and His Church into touch with the great and increasing masses of non-churchgoers; what are we doing to hold our youth and attach them to good thingß in their golden years; to what degree » the spirit of prayer and sacrifice, and service deepening among our members; in a word, what is the state of vital religion among us? It was with these things that Christ was deeply concerned. When we review I His teaching, it is almost startling to realise how little He made of many things upon which His Church lays emphasis to-day. In His Sermon on the Mount there is no mention of temple or priests or sacrifices—the ordered forms of religion in His day. There is not one flutter of a sacerdotal robe across its pages. Stately processions, vestments stiff with gold, the swaying of incense, the tinkling of bells—religion in that day was full of those things as it is to-day. But they were, I believe, less than nothing to Him. To His great insight, religion lay in the viewless depths of the soul, in the inner state of each man's secret life, in the daily regulation of that whole interior realm of thought, and feeling, and volition, and choice, upon which the eve of the world never rests, but out of which flows the stream by which men judge us." IF CHRIST WERE HERE. If He were here to-day to answer our common question as to the state of the work of God among us, we may be assured that He would not send round a newspaper man to count heads in our churches, nor make much of our collection plates and balance-sheets, nor boast with us of the heightened organisation and multiplied machinery which' we so closely scrutinised in Synod and Conference. These things have their place in church life, but it is not the first place, scarcely even the second or third. True religion lies without the circle of the formal, the external, the temporal; still less can it be blatant, trumpetsounding, a seeker of rewards, a cultivator of denominational competitions, and strifes and jealousies. If the Master were here to make inquiry for that which He most seeks among His people, He would pass from scat to seat in this Synod, and from pew to pew in our churetws, and search us with His unescapable questions as to how far we are really meek and forgiving, and considerate, and temperate, as to what place secret; prayer holds in our life and inward fellowship with God; as to our unrevealed purposes for ourselves and our families; as to whether our place in the Church and our service for it is born in an inner sense of God and devoGon to Him as a living Lord and Person, or from some lower motive. Let us find some time, while we arc together to return upon these great things of the soul and of life"