Tatura and Rushworth

July 5, 2009 (click on pics for larger view)

Once again we took the opportunity of being in the neighbourhood to visit a friend in Kyabram on the Saturday afternoon, before settling into a motel in Tatura and then enjoying the delights of a local Chinese restaurant for dinner.

Tatura congregation is vibrant and thriving, with a good range of ages, including about a dozen children and perhaps the same number of teenagers. In recent years they have already extended out the back of the church to create a very pleasant vestry / office / meeting room, and they are now about to begin work to extend their hall as well.

Rushworth, on the other hand, is a very small and struggling congregation. About half a dozen of them came to Tatura to share in this joint service and I found them to be a wonderful group of people, but they are not particularly optmistic about the future of their church when they can number their regular attendance at about 10 or 12.

The long ministry of David Schultz has borne fruit both in the number of people attending and in their spiritual maturity, but one of the particularly nice things - and I think this in itself is a sign of spiritual maturity - has been the way that Kevin Maxwell has been embraced these last 18 months. It's not easy to accept a different man and a different style after such a long and successful ministry, but the congregation has made the transition well and appear ready now to embrace 'generational change' in their leadership.

I preached on 1 John 1, speaking about three common heresies that creep into social and religious culture in almost every generation - including our own. One is the denial of the physical and historical reality of the life and work of Jesus, against which John spoke simply and emphatically of the things he had seen and heard - i.e. he bore witness to Jesus and this is the apostolic witness on which our own faith is built.

The second is our tendency to downplay the holiness of God, perhaps to make him a little more "accessible" or "acceptable" to our neighbours, against which John reminds us that God is absolute light and in him there is no darkness.

And the third is the constant desire of all generations to deny that what God calls sin is actually sin. We try to find all sorts of ways to justify the things we do, whether sexual immorality or greed or pride or whatever, and kid ourselves on that they are acceptable to God. John reminds us that we are only acceptable to God when we trust in Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of our sins - which includes acknowledging that our behaviour is sinful.

One of the great joys I've mentioned before has been meeting up with old acquaintences around the state. Here we met up with Richard and Jacqui Lamont, who I married 15 years ago at Scots' Church and we haven't seen since! Richard is now an elder at Tatura.

We also met up with Fairley Stewart, who will be known to many as the widow of Jim. Fairley has a cousin who lived in my former parish in Scotland, in the house that my in-laws spent their honeymoon in!! And her granddaughter is one of my daughter's best friends at PLC. It's a small world indeed!!

And just for good measure, we had previously met Kevin's parents on our moderatorial visit to Woori Yallock.