NEW MODERATOR URGES CHURCH TO GREATER NEEDS

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 14, Issue 61, 9 November 1949, Page 5

NEW MODERATOR URGES CHURCH TO GREATER NEEDS

(Special to Beacon) i T.IMARU, last night. “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.S., 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,” he added. “In any case,” the Rev Watson continued, “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 organisation, 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 “The Church could use a greater and increasing .lumber of young women who have passed through the Deaconess College, the Rev Watson said. “They were required for replacements and extension for a greater number of divinity students than there were at present. “We must take the matter of Christian witness much more seriously than we have done,” the Moderator added. “The younger Churches of our day are feeling a new urgency and constraint laid 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 Good’s good news for all sorts and conditions of men. and cries: ‘Woe is me if I do not preach it.’ “We have a witness, first to ourselves so that' our Christianity may be real rather than nominal, and to children, and to the great multitude everywhere, which is largely pagan. The Church must witness ior perish,” the Rev Watson concluded.