MESSAGE FROM BISHOP OF WELLINGTON

Bay of Plenty Times, Volume LXXI, Issue 13773, 16 October 1942, Page 2

MESSAGE FROM BISHOP OF WELLINGTON

The National Campaign Broadcasts are over. On with the preaching. So the Campaign advances step by step, and the preaching is onlj another step forward toward a goal which is far ahead of us. We have hardly yet begun to catch the ear of the nation. If the press is any indication of the trend of public opinion, the public is not yet interested in what the churches have to say, so small is the space given in the daily papers, with some few exceptions, to the work of the Campaign. The Church’s message is not yet “hot news.” And it will never become “hot news” until it is through deeds and not through words that the Church declares its message and reveals its power. That is where the Six Weeks Preaching comes in. It is a mission to the men and women who form our congregations. There is a dead Aveight of moral and mental inertia within the churches as well as within the nation which has to be lifted. That can only be done through the Holy Spirit giving us all such a vision of the purposes of God for human life and society as we realise the glory of the task to which. He is calling us and the greatness of the demands which He makes upon us.

Vision of God

There you have the significance of these six weeks. It is a time ih which we shall see that God is bigger than we thought Him to be, and that His love is so profound that no aspect or department of human life can be outside His concern or beyond His reach. We shall see that if His love is to reach the heart of our common life and make it what he would have it be, it must be through the dedicated lives of men and women who are so purged themselves from the evils that afflict our social order that they can be fearless and unashamed in calling their fellow-men to share with them the great adventure of accepting God’s way of life.

Only a Beginning

That will be the beginning of Christian Order in New Zealand. There is no hope of it unless there is a body of Christians who have such a flaming faith in God’s will to bring Christian Order about that all the prizes of life sink into insignificance compared with the glory of being humble agents in achieving something of His purposes. It is arrant nonsense to suggest that the Campaign is not concerned with making Christians. How can there be Christian Order without Christians any more than a cricket team without cricketers? And Christians are only made when they have seen God in Christ, accepted His forgiveness and entered His service.- In this stage of the Campaign we are humbly seeking so. to present the vision of God that the spiritual apathy, listlessness and indolence, or in Professor Sinclaire’s words “the sheer slackness and indifference,” which mar the lives of so many professing Christians may be swept away and a great army enrolled to pray and work for God’s ordering of New Zealand’s life.