Church Work and Life

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 757, 2 September 1929, Page 14

Church Work and Life

Messages from the Pulpits

PIONEER PRESBYTERIANS WAIPU CHURCH CELEBRATES 75TH ANNIVERSARY AUSTERITY OF OLD DAYS (From Our Own Correspondent) WHANGAREI, Sunday. The spiritual as well as the temporal progress of the Waipu district over the past 75 years was reviewed today, when well attended services were held in the Waipu Presbyterian Church—described as the first and only really Gaelic church in the Dominion. The Rev. Angus MacDonald, a former minister of the church, conducted the morning service and, tracing the history of the settlement, recalled the difficulties which beset the path of the early pioneer. God had guided His people to Waipu in the same manner as Abraham of old. As God had chosen Joshua, so He chose the Rev. Norman McLeod. He was the supreme man; his work was law. He was both judge and jury, and under his tuition in those days of old nothing was done without consulting God. Outside the Bible there was no better illustration of faith than these staunch people following the sailor on of the Rev. Norman McLeod. He was the true forerunner. He was the man who spied out the promised land. The speaker said he considered that God had chosen Waipu for these people centuries before they ever left their native land. They were not • lestiDed to live in the glens of Scotand, nor in their temporary home in Nova Scotia. The prayers, the preaching, conversation and singing were all done in Gaelic. There was no English spoken in this early church, and there was no more expressive language than Gaelic, the lang _age of the heart. The Book of God was not a dusty book on a shelf, but a real arid important part of the household. The Sabbath Day was the Lord’s day, and the man who worked on a Sunday was worse than a heathen. The early pioneers worked hard, there being no ploughs, harrows nor horses. They simply- hoed the ground between the stumps and grew their grain, which was crushed, winnowed and ground by hand. This produced good, wholesome food which was beneficial to the health of the people. The people present in the

church today were living monuments of the thrifty and industrious pioneers of old.

After the 100th Psalm had been sung in Gaelic the minister prayed in the same language. The evening service was conducted by the Rev. William MacDonald, who preached from Ezra, v„ 11. CHRIST, A MAN’S MAN “MEEK,” BUT NOT “MILD” COMMUNITY MISSION SERMON “I am intensely Interested in life. I am stirred by the thought of man’s ceaseless struggle toward a worthier civilisation. lam eager to be in that surge of effort and to make in some way my own contribution to it. lam constrained to believe in the ultimate success of the gTeat human quest for nobler forms of life embodied in higher individual character and in a more brotherly social order. Jesus attracts me strongly because He was so obviously concerned In that great human quest." With these words the Rev. George Jackson commenced his address on “Seeing Jesus” at the Community Mission service in the Zealandia Hall, Dominion Road terminus, last evening. He went on to point out that the personality of Jesus had often been obscured by over-emphasis on the doctrines associated with the Christian faith. The artists who had portrayed Jesus as pale and rather effeminate had done a grave disservice to religious faith. He brought to light an interpretation of the meaning and purpose of life that involved a religion for robust men.

He not only expressed that vigorous faith in His teaching, but He embodied it in His life. His was a rich and varied but splendidly unified personality. There was a strength and steadiness about Him that produced an irrresistible impression of highpowered manhood. Sturdily independent while craving understanding companionship; appreciative of the good in others and eager to develop it, while never weakly sentimental; possessing a keen insight into the needs and diflicultes of men and women, though fearless in His exposure of moral bankruptcy and social wrong; He was a man who more than any other had revealed the hidden capacities of human nature. To think of him as “Gentle Jesus, meek and mild’’ was hopelessly to

misunderstand Him. He was “meek” in the sense that he was entirely devoid of self-assertion, but “mild” He never was! He was a man of joy rather than a man of sorrows. The music of His life was never set in a minor key. His genius was evident on every page of the fourfold biography of His life. He was an amazing artist in the use of words and there was a marvellous depth and strength in His thinking. There was a whole philosophy of history In his His parable of the wheat and the tares, and yet it was so simple that a child could grasp it.

There was a profound political, social and even international significance In His teaching about forgiveness, and yet He compressed It into a couple of sentences and a story about a forgiving father, which had been wrongly called the parable of the prodigal son. There was a farreaching scope in His plans, which had enabled Him to “break his birth’s invidious bar” and revealed Him as one whose mind faced the whole of reality and whose heart embraced the whole of humanity. To realise the depth and power of His teaching and the passions of His love and the potency of His death upon a Cross was to be constrained to cry with the poet, Robert Browning:—■ “That one Face, far from vanish, rather grows, Or decomposes but to recomtose, Becomes my Universe that feels and knows.” REFLECTION OF GOD CHRISTIAN SCIENCE SERVICE “Christ Jesus” was the subject of the lesson-sermon in First Church of Christ, Scientist, of Auckland, yesterday, Sunday, September 1. The Golden Text was from Colossians ii., 6-9, “As ye have therefore received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk ye in him. ... for in him dwelleth all the fullness of the Godhead bodily.” Among the citations which comprised the lesson-sermon was the following from the Bible; “Jesus said unto them, If God were your Father, ye would love me: for I proceeded forth and came from God; neither came I of myself, but he sent me.” John viii., 42. The lesson-sermon also included the following passage from the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," by Mary Baker Eddy: “The advent of Jesus of Nazareth marked the first century of the Christian era, but the Christ is without beginning of years or end of days. Throughout all generations both before and after the Christian era, the Christ, as the spiritual idea,— the reflection of God, —has come with some measure of power and grace to all prepared to receive Christ, Truth.” (Page 333.)