CHURCH’S STRENGTH IS NOT ORGANISATION

Wanganui Chronicle, 8 November 1949, Page 4

CHURCH’S STRENGTH IS NOT ORGANISATION

Presbyterian Moderator’s Address TIMARU, Last Night (Spec.)—"The last two or three decades had seen a good deal of experimentation or questioning in regard to the organisation of the church,” stated the Rt. Rev. Ronald S. Watson, M.C., E.D., M.A., at Chalmers Church, Timaru. tonight, on the occasion of his installation as Moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of New Zealand. "Could we not for the most part let our organisation remain as it is for a time, so that we can use our present machinery for greater and more urgent needs, such as evangelism. In any case, we do well to heed the words of Professor K. S. Latourette: 'Always we need again and again to remind ourselves that the secret of the church’s strength is not organisation. Christianity spreads through organisations, but the real reason for the continuation and expansion of the Christian influence is our Lord Himself. Age after age it is men and women who have been captured by Him and have entered a new life through Him, who have been the centre of Christian advance, the active agents through whom the faith has gone on.’ NEED FOR RECRUITS. “Our church could use a greater and increasing number of young women who have passed through our Deaconess College. We require for replacements and extension a greater number of divinity students than we have ever had. "In order to augment the leadership of Christian forces we must stress the need for young people of vision, personality, the power of growth, who will stay in training longer than their predecessors, with great ethical and social passion and concern, and deep and genuine and personal experience of Jesus Christ. If larger numbers of men are to be secured we should regard recruiting as the most important single thing we have to do. CHRISTIAN WITNESS. "We must take the matter of Christian witness much more seriously than we have done. The younger churches of our day are feeling a new urgency and constraint load upon them. A permanent charge to the enthusiasm of the believing worshipping church is evangelism. The living church is always the missionary church. A man only begins to understand the Gospel when he understands that it is God’s good news for all sorts and conditions of men and cries: ‘Woe is me it I do not preach it.’ We have to witness, first to ourselves so that our Christianity may he real rather than nominal, and to children, and to the great multitude everywhere, which is largely pagan. The church must witness or perish.”