BAPTIST LEADER

Press, Volume C, Issue 29513, 15 May 1961, Page 13

BAPTIST LEADER

Transfer To Dunedin

The Rev. L. S. Armstrong, president of the Canterbury and Westland Baptist Association and minister of the Bryndwr Baptist Church, has accepted a call to the South Dunedin Baptist Church. He will begin duties there on August 31. Mr Armstrong is one of the best-known and most widely-travelled Baptist ministers. Born in Christchurch, he attended the Christchurch West High School and then the Timaru Boys' High School. He was a South Canterbury hockey representative and treasurer of the South Canterbury Hockey Association. From 1941 to 1946 he served as a Y.M.C.A. secretary in most theatres in which New Zealand forces w’ere engaged. After training in New Zealand he worked in New Caledonia, the New Hebrides, and Fiji, then in ♦he Middle Eeast, and in the latter part of the war was attached to the Indian Army in India.

On his return. Mr Armstrong trained for the ministry at the New Zealand Baptist College in Auckland. His first appointment was to the young Taita Baptist Church for four years and six and a-half years ago he came to Bryndwr as church extension organiser for the Baptist Union. (This is a scheme whereby the ministry for a newly-formed congregation is directed and subsidised by the union). When Bryndwr achieved independent church status

Mr Armstrong was invited to stay on as minister. In recent years Bryndwr has developed the largest Baptist Sunday school in Christchurch with 200 children on the roll, it has strong Bible classes, and a growing church membership. Plans for extensions to meet this demand are at present frustrated by difficulties over a building permit. Mr Armstrong is at present chairman of the New Zealand Baptist Sunday School Council, he has been prominent in Bible class work throughout the country, and is recognised as one of the denomination’s leaders in other youth work. He is a chaplain to the forces and spent two periods of three months each as a chaplain to compulsory military trainees at Burnham.