Thoughtful Moments

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 6, Issue 55, 12 March 1943, Page 2

Thoughtful Moments

OUR SUNDAY MESSAGE

(Supplied by the YVhakatane Ministers' Association).

FRONT LINE CHURCHES The Bev. \V. 1-:. Purcell tells the story of the way in which the Dov« er Churches work under the. constant. threat of she l'i lire from the French coast and of bombing by I lie Luftwail'e. Many a German pilot, zooming over Dover, must have noted beneath him the towers and spires of churches in the little town. German officers of coastal artillery staring through powerful glasses on a clear daj' from the coast of captive France must have seen the outline of them dim upon the opposite shore. And perhaps with a cynical "smile they may liave thought of those one-time houses of (Hod desolate and deserted by reason of the constant threat under which tiiev stand. Lf they have thought that, they have been wrong. Those churches are, for the most part, not closed. On the contrary, every one of them still physically able is maintaining undaunted its witness for the Faith it represents. Every one of them by the very fact of so doing, is learning anew the old. hard, but splendid lesson 'of how, out of suffering. faith can gr6w. They have suffered a good, deal, especially by reason of the fact that the violence which at any moment may come to any of them is as like'y as not to come by day, Avhjpn people are in them, as by night, when they are not. It is this •which, makes still of every service something of an adventure, of' every fumbling act of earthly worship something which' a stroke of the enemy may at any moment, transform into the ultimate experience of the' presence, of God. These churches are twenty miles away from enemy batteries easily capable of firing that distance, and certainly fond of frequently demonstrating the fact. They are churches which, since the awful summer of 1940, have been constantly and without relief in the front line of battle. It is scarcely surprising, therefore, that to the modest tale of their quiet lives, much of a startling nature has been added in the course of the war. There is a pillar, for example, near the altar of the parish church in •which machine-gun bullets are to this day embedded—bullets which tore through a stained glass window during morning service on Easter Day, 19-11,, narrowly missing the choir sitting near by. And yet it is a fact that no one in the crowded church stirred an inch—so strong was the sacred discipline of the place. The preacher paused in his address, a hymn was sung, and by the time it was over the furious noises of battle outside had vanished, for the moment, away. For the moment only. They arc - always returning. There was a wed- ( ding in the same 1 church whose be- ; ginning was delayed by a heavy < artillery bombardment which began ! out of the tranquil blue of a fine 1 Saturday afternoon. For some time < shells crashed down. Yet that wedding took place—late it is true, for I the bride sat out the bombardment s in one of the many caves cut in the s chalk cliffs which Dover uses as air s raid shelters. She came, to church i as soon as the lull in the gunfire c seemed to suggest that the Germans c had finished. The bridegroom had < sat the whole time in the church r a.waiting her. And so they were mar- f ried according to custom down to n

the last detail, even to the organ and the crowd in the street outside, and. tho confetti and the laughter. Baptisms, marriages, worship and prayer—unbroken the cycle, of the churches' work goes on in this front "line of battle, in circumstances which often render sadly strange and incongruous many things which in peace time are remarkable enough. A pram at the. church door and a family party inside intent upon the baptism of a child while aerial fighting goes on above and the planes can be seen—deadly steel birds. A congregation emerging into the quiet of a Sunday street, chatting, pulling gloves on, with all the time a bombardment, in progress over the town. A funeral up at the cemetery with shrapnel falling into the evergreens around even as the solemn words of committal are said. In the long record of this parish church's life —and it is a very long one—there has never been anything like these days. Not even the threat of Napoleon or his defeat at Waterloo, are mentioned in the church books of the times. But generations ahead will be able to read in our church records of these,, evidence of the darkness Avhieh came Upon us, their descendants when the Germans captured the Channel ports of France. "Shelling during evensong" is one entry in the. vestry book. "Twelve raids this day" is another. And "heavy machine gunning during service'" yet another. And yet it is not wholly darkness which has come upon us. There is light in it as well—the light that comes from a discovery of the unquenchable devotion and loyalty of people who will indefatigablv persist in the ways of their ordinary worship in days when the very act of coining to church at all means the excursion into front line conditions. I It is not an easy thing to sit in church and listen to. gunfire. May it. not be that many of those who do so think, in their simple way, after the fashion of Elisha, of whom it is recorded in the Second Book of Kings, the sixth chapter, at the sixteenth verse, that he, answering the fears of his servant who sees i the hosts of the enemy encamped around says: "Fear not; for they that be with us are more than they that be with them." It was a shell which not long ago shattered a window in a church. When the. pieces were swept up one was found intact. It was a head of Christ. There seemed to be a meaning in'that—the meaning that war can destroy much of the body of the churchy but never its heart; much of its beauty, but. never its spirit. It is people, after all, who make a church, and if they are people who will persevere through thick and thin in witnessing to their belief in God, they can make a very great church, however poor and impoverished it may be. These are the head of Christ in the broken window of to-day, the little piece which men will be glad to 'find when they search the ruins to buikl the future. Thus for the churches, of Dover the war has taken its " course, and still the. guns point at them, and still, too,, the old buildings seem to sum up the essencc of the fundamentally unchanging English society •which they exist, to serve, creations of the old order of free and God fearing man standing in mute and stony challenge to the fire and violence of the new order across the water.