METHODIST CHURCH IN WELLINGTON

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXXIII, 12 June 1939, Page 10

METHODIST CHURCH IN WELLINGTON

CENTENNIAL CELEBRATIONS SPECIAL SERVICES YESTERDAY ! | United Press Association! WELLINGTON, This Day. Special services on the occasion of the centennial of the Methodist Church in Wellington were held in Wesley Church, Taranajci street, yesterday morning and again last night. The preacher at the 11 a.m. service was the Rev. M. A. Rugby Pratt, who took as his subject, “The Voice of Our Yesterdays.” The president of the Methodist Conference, Rev. Angus Mcßean, preached at the 7 p.m. service, his subject being “The Past and the Future.” The senior Maori superintendent of Maori missions, Rev. Eruera Te Tuhi, assisted at both services. A feature of the evening service was the singing of the Maori choir. “We are gathered here in a great service of thanksgivihg,” said Mr Mcßean. “To-day we commemorate the one hundredth anniversary of the beginning of the great Christian enterprise in this city. But we are here not only to share; in an act of thanksgiving, but to dedicate ourselves afresh to the great and endless task begun in faith and courage by the missionaries who proclaimed the first Christian message in this district just 100 years ago,”

The story of the first 100 years ot Methodism in New Zealand was a story of achievement and triumph. When Samuel Leigh, the first Methodist missionary in New Zealand, arrived at the colony in 1822, he came at the invitation of Samuel Marsden, the first Anglican missionary, who arrived in 1814, “From Marsden and the Anglican mission,” said Mr Mcßean, .“Samuel Leigh received generous hospitality and encouragement. We all gladly recognise that to the first Anglican mission belongs the honour of first unfurling the banner of Christ in New Zealand. But it is with pardonable pride, not I trust unattended with due humility, that \ye Methodists claim the high honour of first introducing the Gospel and the services of the Church to Wellington.”

Mr Pratt said that since the Revs. J. H. Bumby and John Hobbs, with their Maori colleagues, inaugurated the work of Methodism in Port Nicholson, New Zealand itself had been brought under British sovereignty, and the Church cradled by the pioneers had become a force to be reckoned with. “We have toiled up to an eminence,” Mr Pratt added. “But the height we have gained is not the summit of our aim. It is only a peak from which we can survey the fields we have traversed from the morning dawn of our Church’s uprising, and from which we can also gaze across the vast regions that lie toward the shadowy future.”