TO RAISE £300,000.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LVIII, Issue 95, 21 March 1938, Page 12

TO RAISE £300,000.

PRESBYTERIAN SCHEME. AUCKLAND, March 18. Paying his second visit to Auckland within a year, Mr J. Henry Lang, financier, of San Francisco, arrived to-day. He will remain in New Zealand for several months to organise a scheme to raise £300,000 on behalf of the New Zealand Presbyterian Church for the celebration of its centenary in 1940. Mr Lang was born' in Christchurch, but has been in America for the last 16 years. He came to New Zealand last year in connection with a campaign for funds for the Y.M.C.A., and, after his present visit, he will go to Sydney, where he has an offer to conduct a similar campaign for the Australian Y.M.C.A. Commenting on the message, Mr V. G. Chapman. Khandallah, general treasurer of the Presbvterian Church of New Zealand, said that the Genera] Assembly in November last had approved of a scheme to raise £300,000. The main idea was to clear the church of debt. Mr Lang, who had been trained in the church’s theological college at Dunedin, and who had done relieving work in New Zealand about the time of the Great War, had later gone .to Australia, where he had done Y.M.C.A. work. Recently he had become organist for the Community Chests, in California, a scheme in which all the business people combined in organised charity. Half the money collected in New Zealand, added Air Chapman, would be used to wipe out the church’s debt and various sums had been earmarked for foreign, homo and Maori mission work, improving ministers’ stipends and the pensions payable to them on retirement, and generally consolidating the position of the church. It was hoped that, after wiping out the debt, there would be a surplus which would form the nucleus of a building fund.