KIRK PARLIAMENT

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 518, 22 November 1928, Page 6

KIRK PARLIAMENT

GENERAL ASSEMBLY BEGINS MODERATOR’S ADDRESS Not another person could have got within St. David’s Church last evening when, with appropriate dignity, the sessions of the parliament of the Presbyterian Church of New Zealand, the General Assembly, began. Every seat was occupied long before the service, and a chair brigade worked industriously to get everyone seated. The retiring moderator, the Rev. James Aitken, of Gisborne, preached after the singing of Psalms. He took for his text Ephesians ii, 8: “By grace are ye saved, through faith.” This, he said, was a very simple hut profound expression of Christian experience. Pain, sorrow, anxiety and disappointment were the common lot of men, making a pilgrimage through this valley of many perils. At the end of the pilgrimage death waited, a shadow which had not been penetrated, an experience on which none had reported. Christ had come as a deliverer, and as an unveiler. of Go.d to man. Death to the Christian man was merely a dark passage from one mansion of God’s House to another. Laying down the office of moderator, Mr. Aitken reviewed the work he had carried out and said that in. future the moderator should be relieved of his own charge for a portion of the year. He then welcomed the modera-tor-elect, the Right Rev. Professor William Hewitson. The clerk of Assembly, the Rev. J. H. McKenzie, laid on the table the roll of Assembly, containing the names of 319 members. “UNITY AND DIVERSITY” Professor Hewitson, having been formally elected by the congregation, gave an address on “The Church, its Unity and Diversity.” He said that in the modern Church the number and diversity of. operations was sometimes bewildering, and the tendency seemed to be ever to increase them. “Think for a moment of the diversity of operations and the differences of administration in our own little church,” he said. “We began In the South just 80 years ago as one congregation. Now we have 257 charges and 117 mission stations. Later, we organised a presbytery, now we have 20. Later still, several presbyteries were organised into a synod in the South, into an assembly in the North. Now we have a General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of New Zealand.

Turning from exposition to history, from the ideal to the actual, the moderator drew attention to the great and painful contrast between these. That contrast existed in Paul’s own day, and when they passed out of the New Testament into the stream of Church history they were soon met with fierce doctrinal discussions. “If we look at the relations of the Free Churches to one another in England we shall find that, although very great advances . have been made in recent years in friendship and co-oper-ation among them, yet, in many villages in England, where there is room for only one church, there are several, sparsely attended and feebly manned. We need not go to England for instances of that sort of thing. “The Bishop of Gloucester, in speaking of the Conference at Lausanne last year, said nothing was more pathetic than the appeal that came to them from the peoples of India, China and Japan to allow the different Churches to unite in those lands, and so put beyond them the divisions of religion, which in Britain might mean something, but meant nothing at all on the missionary field.” SCRIPTURAL IDEAL “What then can we do to promote a realisation of the Scriptural ideal? I do not know that we can do anything better than what Paul did, and what he recommended the Corinthian and Ephesian Chuxches to do. “We can try to grasp clearly and strongly God’s purpose for the Church, to make all persons and all things one in Christ, one Church with many and diverse members, but all interdependent. ‘Forbearance in love’ was the Apostle Paul’s last and most difficult word for keeping ‘the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace.’ “We can recognise that there must be diversities of operations and of thought, where there is a growing and expanding life. We can strive tomake all these diversities interdependent, so that there shall be no conflicting sectional interests, that disregard the good of the whole. We can determine that there shall be no parties, not even a young New Zealand party, which would surely be a strange feature in a church which was founded by men from older lands, some of whom have served us with great ability, far-seeing leadership, and unselfish devotion. "We can strive so that our Church shall be one from North Cape to Stewart Island and not broken into North and South by the troublous waters of Cook Strait, nor by the wide, wandering stream of the Waitaki.” A motion of greeting and congratulation to the Rev. G. Brown, of Onelmnga, the veteran Presbyterian minlater who recently celebrated his 97th birthday, was propposed by the Rev. A. S. Morrison, of Rakaia, and was carried by acclamation. The Assembly agreed to adopt the Parliamentary method of disposing of motions, in contradistinction to the usual Presbyterian method. The business session of the Assembly to-day was preceded by a combined Communion service. At the Assembly’s luncheon to-day, delegates were welcomed by the Mayor, Mr. G. Baildon, and representatives of the Council of Christian Congregations.