CHURCH BOMBED

Otago Daily Times, Issue 26916, 30 October 1948, Page 8

CHURCH BOMBED

REPAIRS BY PARISHIONERS

EXPERIENCE OF ENGLISH MINISTER

Only one of many, the church he had been minister of for 22 years, Rye Lane Chapel, Wickham, had been bombed in 1943, said the Rev. T. M. Bamber. of London, in an interview with the Daily Times yesterday. Both the roof and the ceiling had been almost totally destroyed by the bomb. A licence for rebuilding had not been issued by the authorities until 1947, when the roof and the ceiling were almost immediately repaired by builders: but it had taken 100 of his parishioners almost six months to finish cleaning up, Mr Bamber added. “It does not sound very much,” he said, “ but it really was a wonderful community effort.” The main speaker of the annual assembly of the Baptist Union of New Zealand and the New Zealand Baptist Missionary Society which is now being held in Dunedin, Mr Bamber is an ex-president of the London Baptist Union, chairman of the Regions Beyond ‘Missionary Union, a member of the Council of Spurgeon’s College, and he was a recent speaker at Keswick Convention. When his tour of New Zealand is completed, Mr Bamber will go to Australia, where he will speak at the Upwey and Katoomba Convention.

Saying that as an Englishman who had been in Edinburgh, he was very glad to be in Dunedin, Mr Bamber expressed appreciation of the welcome accorded him by the Mayor, Sir Donald Cameron, and added that he hoped to visit Baptists throughout New Zealand. The reason for his tour, he said, was to impress on the minds of the people that until man realised God there could be no peace and no stability on earth. He added that the apparent unwillingness of the individual to accept God was to be deplored and that there must be a spiritual basis for the fulfilment of life. As an individual, but more so as a minister who had aided in the distribution of food parcels to the needy in Britain, Mr Bamber said that there was a feeling of the profoundest gratitude to the dominions for the way in which they had stood by the Mother Country when she had most needed their assistance. The parcels had gone to those living on the bare ration, which was little better than that of the war years.