METHODIST CHURCH

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXXVII, Issue 19374, 24 December 1932, Page 14

METHODIST CHURCH

> e REVIEW OF THE YEAR’S ACTIVITIES

The purpose of the Methodist Church is to help build the Kingdom of God. To accomplish this the Church is prepared to stand shoulder to shoulder with other Churches in battle array against the forces of evil. On the stage of life, in God’s great scheme of things, we believe we have a part to play. We ask, not for the whole stage, but simply the opportunity of standing beside other Communions, as together, instinct with the presence of the Master, we endeavour to offer our tribute of loyal service to the people in the Name of our common Lord. Central among our manifold activities is the work of the pulpit—the proclamation of the Gospel with all that that entails. That Gospel never changes, though our presentation of it must necessarily change to make it intelligible to the age in which we live. To make Jesus Christ know, loved and obeyed is the supreme task confronting us, for we believe that the world will be better as men’s hearts are better. For this purpose the Church is organised and equipped in her various Departments to give effective witness for her Lord. The Young People’s Department is so organised that from earliest infancy stage by stage, the child is nutured and cared for, spiritually, socially and physically. The Church does this, believing that the Creator is interested not only in our spiritual welfare, but also in our material wellbeing. The Choirs also in the various Churches, in their ministry' of music, seek to brighten the choral part of the services, and to bring cheer to many sick-beds. Each Church, moreover, has its Flower Committee recognising that flowers have their message in God’s House.

The trustees and other officials in the care of the property and in making the people welcome have manifold duties. Their task is onerous because at considerable expense are the properties maintained by the freewill gifts of the people.

One cannot speak too highly of the painstaking devotion of the various Ladies’ Guilds. Month by month through the years these guilds have organised and planned to advance the spiritual, social and material wellbeing of the Church and community. In every sense the Church and community are indebted to the self-deny-ing efforts of those splendid women. Believing that we have a duty in the “Religious Beyond," the Church has her missionary organisations such as the "M.W.M.U.," who month by month, forward gifts in money and in kind to extend the Kingdom of God in Home and Foreign Lands.

Homeless children are cared for in our Church Orphanages, sustained, for the most part, by the voluntary contributions of the people. Hundreds of chfldren are thus given an equal opportunity in life.

In social work among those in unfortunate circumstances, the Church expends much effort and money. Quietly and without ostentation, the Church undertakes this task through her ministers and other workers. It is done in secrecy in obedience to her Lord’s command, thus also avoiding the appearance of what is called charity.

The work of the minister to-day differs altogether from his work of yesterday. To the credit of the Church members, be it said that they cheerfully back him up in his social work, believing that thus in these difficult days the Church can give more effective witness for Him of whom we read—“He went about doing good.”

Reviewing the work of the year, contemplating the vast amount of voluntary work and cheerful giving—for it is all freewill offering, their being no coercion—we thank God and take courage. With open doors and open hearts of friendliness, we invite the people to come and worship, thus to honour our Creator and to assist our brother man. A CHRISTMAS MESSAGE From the Rev. Harold T. Peat, Superintendent of Timaru Methodist Circuit, and Chairman of South Canterbury Synodal District Many years ago, Christmas found me facing the task of addressing a mighty parade service. I naturally tried to visualise the needs of the troops presently to parade. On what text should I base my address? A vision of the Great Nazarene came before me, looking in sorrow upon the battlefield, but I was without a message. But the illumination came, and with it the message.

We again approach the season of goodwill, when, under the baton of the heavenly Chorister, we shall once more be called upon to sing—“ Joy to the world the Lord has come.” And what a world! Chaotic, suspicious, distrustful, a world at war. Not the thunder of cannon, and the splitting crash of high explosive, but war nevertheless—commercial war. Nation against nation, people against people. Kingdoms rocking on their unsteady foundations, and civilisation itself imperilled. Are we without a message? Is this world after all, the devil’s world? Are we, leaders of the Church representatives of the Prince of Peace, to be tongue-tied in a disordered world? Have we a message in these difficult days? Days that fling out a challenge to the Christian Church, challenging us to prayer, and renewed devotion to our Lord, the Master of men. The world is looking to the Church and all she represents for light and hope and guidance.

Increasingly the thoughts of earnest men and women are turning to the great facts of religion as revealed by

Jesus Christ, as constituting the one hope for humanity. It is our business to see that they do not look in vain.

Dare we speak to-day of peace on earth, good will to men? or “Peace on earth to men of good will,” or “peace on earth to men in whom God is well pleased.” Take whatever rendering you choose. Dare we turn the thoughts of men to the age-old message of Bethlehem? Is it true that the world has “turned down Christianity” as a thing effete? Something to be laid aside as an outworn garment, or maybe, a garment out of fashion. Yes, we have a Christmas Message, a message of cheer, of hope, of good will. I would speak to your heart reminding you that far from turning down Christianity, the world has yet to turn up Christianity. The world has not yet taken the Christ seriously. Therein lies the real trouble, and His teaching is the panacea for the trouble.

Ringing down the ages comes the Divine call—“ Turn ye, turn ye, why will ye die, O house of Israel?” “Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts, and let him return unto the Lord and He will have mercy, and to our God, for He will abundantly pardon.” It is man’s inhumanity to man that makes countless thousands mourn. It is graft and intrigue, and dishonesty and unwisdom that heaps burdens upon the oppressed too grievous to be borne. With the lazy type of man I have but scant patience. But here, even in this country there are thousands of men and women earnestly seeking the right to work that they may exercise the right to live. Only to find themselves hedged about, headed off, crowded to the wall, desperate and at bay. Too long the great corporations and syndicates have made a fetish of dividends, but they are dividends against life. On the other hand, some men, smarting under oppression, have adopted unworthy methods of gaining their ends. This has led inevitably to the erection of class barriers of hatred and suspicion. These barriers must be removed. God is not dead, nor is He asleep, and to-day these great combinations of men, each seemingly securely entrenched, are discovering that their supposedly impregnable fortifications are crumbling. The pity is that in the process of disintregation, so many helpless people are being crowded to the wall. Prom out of the wreckage a new civilisation will emerge, cleaner and more just than the world has yet known. It is our business, in the Name of God, to demand that oppression cease, that the evil things now sapping the lifeblood

of the people be banished, and that justice and integrity be enthroned. In a word we plead again for the reign of righteousness.

To the people therefore we say—“ Do. not lose heart, be strong and of a good courage. The day of our emancipation is nearer than some imagine, and we shall presently discover that this is the dark hour before the dawn. Let us dare to exalt the Cross with all that the Cross signifies. A fitting symbol lies there. Once the symbol of shame, now the symbol of the mightiest power in the world. Friend of the friendless, Emancipator and Wise Counsellor in infinite love, calls,'us from the worship of mammon to the worship of God; from cur petty striving after the tinsel and the bubbles of God; from our petty striving after the tinsel and the bubbles to be still for awhile and glimpse the majesty of life and the glory of the Most High. “In quietness and in confidence shall be your strength.”

As we commemorate the birthday of the Blessed Redeemer, let us remember that the "Spirit of the Christ can be born anew in each of us. However frail and faulty we may be, or however strong; whether rich in this world’s goods, or perplexed by the spectre of want, the spirit of Christ Himself can be born in each of us. Then we become masters of life, lifted up above the commonplace, and radiating courage and cheerfulness. By thus radiating thoughts of love, of courage, of cheerfulness, of success, we become living magnets to attract similar powers.

It is not God’s will that His creatures should suffer or be defeated. In our highly-strung civilised state, we must protect ourselves or perish. God has implanted within us the means of defence. In our spiritual and intellectual faculties, God has endowed us with the means of attracting those things that will be beneficial to us. We are coming to recognise that it is gloriously

possible for us to determine the nature of our environment. One of the great lessons we must learn is that prosperity begins in the mind. If we are to emerge from these difficult days we must begin to think straight. There is creative power in right thinking. The Creator seeks only the welfare of His people. Let us arise and lay hold upon the strength that is in God. Let us face the sunlight of His Presence, and all things that minister to our welfare will be attracted to us. We reap what we sow, and what we send abroad comes back to us. “Give to the world the best you have and the best will come back to you.” It is still true that the surest approach to happiness is to try and make others happy. Let us face the season of goodwill in this spirit. • Thus will it be a happy Christmas and the New Year increasingly prosperous.

CHRISTMAS AND THE COMMONPLACE By the Rev. H. L. Fiebig, Woodlands Street, Methodist Church By every known test the Incarnation is the Divine indwelling the human. It is—God manifest in the flesh. Nothing greater can be said. Nothing less satisfies all the facts of the Christian Gospel in its entirety. It is the breath of life from another sphere coming as an illumining, saving, grace. The few may be perplexed by its mystery; the many in humble acceptance are gladdened by its message and delivered by its spirit. In the fulness of its message, the Incarnation is the redemption of the commonplace. It is the confirmation

of the truth of the Book of Genesis which declares that God having brought to completion His creative work regarded all that had been brought into being, “and behold, it was very good.” The Incarnation is the sign and seal of God upon our human nature; our human lot; upon every created thing. Jesus in declaring “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father” revealed God at home amid His created works. Just as what the astronomer seeks in his search for the secrets of the heavens, is not more light, but better focussed light, so man’s deep need is not more light on the mystery of his being; but the perfectly focussed light of the Gospel. Seeing all things as Jesus saw them, the way and secret of life are made plain. To think with Jesus is to think with God. which is eternal life. Thus the Incarnation spells the redemption of man amid the commonplace things of his own life and environment. Christianity is not a way of escape from the world but of mastery over it.

It is fatally easy to possess partial views of Jesus and His Gospel; to take out certain elements. and to stress them as the whole truth. We cannot separate the message and spirit of Christmas—that is of the Incarnation—from the spirit of the whole life

and message of Jesus culminating in the Cross. There is a golden thread running through the whole. To miss that is to miss the secret meaning of Christmas entirely, and to rob the world of the power of its message. That golden thread is the central element of consecration of Jesus to the purpose of God, and the cause of humanity. It is blind folly to look wistfully, as the world does, for some healing balm Tor its many wounds, and

to ignore Jesus’ own central words that He came to do the will of His Father and to be ministered unto rather than to minister—that is—to serve mankind. It is the common things of our existence untouched by the spirit of consecration, which are the cause of our miseries. It is exactly the same common things consecrated to the highest ends, and the noblest uses that are our personal and collective stepping-stones to higher things. It is a fine, act of spiritual perception that makes Maeterlinck in his ‘Blue Bird’ in describing the Palace of Night, put the Hall of Luxuries in close proximity to the Cave of Miseries, a passage leading from one to the other. It is our unconsecrated time and talents; wealth and possessions; impulses and instincts; science and commerce which produce hell on earth. Touched by the spirit of the Christ, the very self-same things produced heaven on earth, some fleeting glimpse of which we surely c-btain in the harmonious. selfless spirit of the Christmastide now being entered upon. Christmas then, belonging by right of name and origin to our Lord Jesus Christ, is no mere invitation to carefree enjoyment, real and lovely though its festive spirit be, than whom none would enjoy it more and share in it more fully than He of Cana of Galilee. It is a challenge to every man to possess, to extend, and to make permanent in the world that spirit which alone can save its life; give beauty and meaning to the commonplace; and satisfy the whole complex being of man. Mingled with the beautiful sentiment of Christmas is the hard, inescapable, fact that it has nothing to offer either the world or the individual except to men of goodwill, that is, possessing a particular mind and spirit. In humble faith let every man heed the message of Christmas in its fulness, and in it find the golden key which unlocks both for himself and mankind the door to, a larger, fairer, and happier world. NO ROOM IN THE INN The Birth of Christ was enacted in the hour before the dawn—in the darkest shadow of a degraded humanity.

Amidst the glamour of our Christmas —a glamour bolstered a good deal by tradition, we forget sometimes the seriousness that lies at the heart of the first Christmas. “For there was no room for Him at the inn.” Christ was born into the midst of a crowded and preoccupied world—a world with little

sympathy for poverty and helpfulness. No doubt wealth and power were safely bedded in the inn but a travellingwoman was sent to the stable.

No hospitality at the inn for Christ? It is a big word, hospitality. Somewhere in its definition there must be the idea of invitation. If we would

hospitise truth and beauty and goodness,, we must invite them—we must let them in. We may crowd them out, refuse to be their host, and our wouldbe guests just quietly go away. Tell me a man’s guests and I will tell you what he is. Men and societies are ever tested by what they let in—and what they crowd out. A man who regards Christmas as an excuse or an opportunity for inordinate revelry—he crowds out Christ. The society which opens its doors to war, and shuts out the Prince of Peace, will be known for what it is—but the guest it entertains will undo it!

We entertain old prejudices and invent new ones, congenial with the old. Our hospitality has been fastidious, often lavish. Room for old customs, old fears, old forces. Do we still want for guests, those we have been entertaining for the last fourteen years? Yes?, Then there is no room for Christ in the Inn. Is there room for Christ in our souls? Es there room for Him in our factories and exchanges; in our politics and diplomatic conferences. In “Life’s Inn,” more crowded than ever to-day, s there room for Christ? These are .lot pious questions, “The massive challenge” of twenty centuries of hisory to the present order is behind them. The test as to whether a people /ill endure greatly, or not will depend m the answer to the question: Have hey room for Christ and His range of deals and xlis interpretation of life?

Behind this modern glare of materialism, this hard unrelenting strife of business competition, verging as it does on bankruptcy, there is a softer light—the light of the wistfulness of life. Across regions of life, where shadows have long and deeply lain, the new light is rising. Right must ever struggle to win its way against the world. In His birth

our Christ, found no room in the Inn. In His Ministry, He had to strive against the very people He came to save. To consecrate His saving work He had to walk alone in the Garden of Gethsemane. To manifest His Birth and Life, He had to face His Calvary. But such a love must, in the end, burst out in all its splendour from the dark clouds of hate and discord that seek to obscure it. This (and other great truths), must be bom in mangers of poverty and be cradled in pain and trial; finding no room in the inn until they honour the inn that never honoured them. It is a message of faith and hope and love. That star-lit night saw God’s Christmas gift to the world. Every succeeding Christmas will see the company kneeling round the manger growing greater. First the Mother, then the Mother and the Shephards. It is still night; there is only the light of one feeble lantern, but as we look, we know that an incandescent glow radiates from the Infant and imperishably lights and warms all that rude, but sacred scene. From Him, bom in a manger, the light streams into all the common ways of human life. In that light, prosaic things are transfigured. Drudgery for His sake becomes divine and toil becomes sacred. One sweeps the words across the paper hastening to regale the imagination, and yet pause—it is not so easy after all. If Christ had never come! No fancy can correctly estimate the catastrophe of a Christless world! But He did come—the everlasting light! We may close the doors—we may shutter the windows, preferring i darkness—but even then we know it is the day for Christ is come.” T. H. CARR, Kensington Methodist Church.