DARK CLOUDS'

Otago Daily Times, Issue 27082, 17 May 1949, Page 6

DARK CLOUDS'

WORLD HORIZON NEW DUTIES FOR CHURCH BRIDGING OF IDEOLOGICAL CHASMS PA WELLINGTON, May 16. “ There are heavy clouds well above the horizon, so heavy in some places that one half of the world finds it hard to know what the other half is really thinking and meaning and fearing,” said the Primate of New Zealand, Archbishop West-Watson, in his presidential address to the thirty-first General Synod to-day. During the past year there had been some lightening of the sky and there seemed to be increasing hope that Western Europe would recover to play its part in the building up of a new world. Mean- ' while, wherever the Christian Church, was, there were common ground, a common language add a common hope which bridged the yawning chasms cleft by rival nationalisms and racialisms. Now was the time to use those opportunities to the utmost. After referring to the international situation, the archbishop said that whatever might be the success of the United Nations, all were assured that the Church had a mission of its own to point the nations to a higher and deeper fellowship than man could offer or contrive. Though the Church might have fallen far short of its ideals, it could at least look back thankfully to a happy unity of Christian bishops from the four corners of the world in .the Lambeth Conference of \ 1948 and also to the wider world fellowship realised at the Amsterdam assembly of the World Council of Churches.

“ The human hopes of a world economy are foundering on the rocks of national assertiveness and self-suffi-ciency or sinking in the quicksands of moral confusion and uncertainty,” the archbishop said. Thank God the Christian Churches are recognising their need of one another and are bound together by their common faith in man’s dependence on God, in His eternal will and in the certainty of His love.” K . Addressing, the synod, the Primate suggested that a message of thanks should be sent to Bishop Yashiro, presiding bishop of the Nippon Sei Kokwai, who had invited him to attend the triennial general synod of the Episcopal Church in Japan, also that an invitation should be sent to the Japanese bishop to visit New Zealand. It was his earnest hope that some Japanese students would be enabled to study at New Zealand theological colleges. He announced that a Board of Missions had appointed the Rev. R. R. Clark, former chaplain with the occupation force in Japan, as liaison priest with the Japanese church to serve under Bishop Yashiro in the Kobe diocese.