Prayers after the Christchurch Earthquake

(St David's Presbyterian Church Blue Lagoon, NEV, Dunedin 27 Feb 2011)

Thanks

• Thank you Lord when tragedy brings out the best in people
• Sense of community, willingness to do whatever it takes, willingness to reach out, to give blood, time, love, care, prayer, attention to what is really needed
• Thanks for acts of courage and sacrifice, hours of patience, blessings of preparation of civil defence,
• Thanks for the wisdom of leadership, those with the gifts of the right words at the right time, those able to divert the well-meaning into the actually useful, those able to look to the needs of the moment and prepare for the needs of tomorrow.
• While we weep with those who weep, we also rejoice with those grateful for narrow escapes, remarkable rescues, and stories of survival in extraordinary circumstances.
• We give thanks for help from around the country and around the world.
• Thanks for the aid of technology, for telephone, text and tweet, messages on facebook.

Lord there is much to pray about

• We pray for those who have lost loved ones and friends
• Those who know people and families affected personally
• Those traumatised by what has happened to people, pets, property
• Those who feel confused
• Those who feel bad about not feeling bad because the pain is too much to even think about.
• We pray for those making decisions for themselves and for others, decisions about priorities, about jobs and business, what to do about food and water and sewerage, those struggling to stay awake, those who cannot sleep.
• We pray for those making decisions about the future of their own lives and the life of their community.

Lord as time goes on other questions come to the surface

• Those dealing with the reality that is sinking in, of loss, of pain, of the time-scale of rehabilitation for themselves and for others; those for whom things will never be the same again.
• Those for whom this is a test of faith.
• Those for whom this makes it hard to believe that you are a good God and a loving Father. When we cannot blame people or even evil we wonder why you allow some things to happen, why you answer some prayers and not others, why some are saved and others are lost; we know that being spared and not spared in this life does not tell us about our relationship with you, yet still we are confused and sad.

Lord help us to be able to do things which point to the future and not feel guilty about enjoying the ordinary and the special things of life when others are suffering

• Show us how to acknowledge the needs of others and do all that you ask of us.
• Show us how to take time out from mourning what we cannot change and find the space to work for the future where our decisions still make a difference. Help us to still to laugh and pray, to love and enjoy, to paint and plant and plan, and trust you for a future that is not just the product of our desire to pull together, but a sign of your Spirit at work in the lives of ordinary people together.
• Lord help us to take rest. We remember that Jesus took time out when he could have been healing more people. We know that even those capable of doing search and rescue and cope with medical emergencies, work in shifts and give each other breaks. Help us know when to give others a break. Help us know when to take a break ourselves.

Lord we pray for churches, Christian leaders, and ordinary Christians seeking to know what it means to follow Jesus at a time like this.

• We thank you for sanctuaries and places to pray
• We pray for church communities whose churches are no longer places to pray and for those whose churches have been places where people have now died.
• We pray for those who need to make decisions about rebuilding, about working together with others, about accepting that the time has come to let go of buildings that have been precious in the past but are not needed for your work at this time.
• Lord in our letting go even of holy things, may we hold closer to each other and to you.

• We pray for the right word to say, and the right prayer to share. Lord it is easy to get it wrong, to say what people want us to say, or the brutal truth which is in our minds, when neither is actually your word for the occasion. Cover us when we get it wrong. Help us be forgiving when other's presence of mind fails them, and what is said is unhelpful.

Lord we bring to you our numbness and our hope, our desire for wisdom for the things we need to do, and wisdom for the things it would be better not to do. Help us know what to do with our desperate need to be useful. Turn our willingness into energy that you can do something with. Grant us the peace that we are doing what we can and what we should and that we are available for the times when our willingness will be called on.

What the Church is about

The Church is about worship and about mission and about being a sign of the presence and the coming of the Kingdom of God. We seek to be a worshipping community that nurtures faith, a faithful community that stimulates mission, and a missionary community centred in worship.

In music and word, poetry and movement, art and action, we come just as we are as we also strive to offer the best that we can be. In home and community, workplace and church, we serve others through being true to ourselves, claiming God’s promise to do more than we can ask or think.

The church exists to call people to worship God, to follow Jesus Christ, to recognise God's Spirit at work in their lives.

Despite everything God is with us.

We recognise the authority of the Word of God over the church and the world, and our responsibility to discern, obey and proclaim that Word. We bear witness to the grace of God in Jesus Christ and to the gift and gifts of the Holy Spirit. We are thankful for the goodness of creation and acknowledge our responsibility to heal its wounds, respect its integrity and share its gifts.

In lands of beauty and uncertainty, of living covenants and broken promises, of renewed hope and slow justice, of open spaces and shifting values, we seek Jesus, and ask that he teach us to pray. We want to live lives that make it more easy and not more difficult for others to believe. Not for ourselves only do we wish to build communities that make it possible to live the Christian life. We want to seek and to share truth, to encourage faithfulness, to facilitate a sense of wonder, to stir curiosity for the things of God and of creation, and never to lose our respect for wisdom.

We acknowledge our inability to be all things to all people, yet we aim to be a safe place for lovers and children, for the elderly and the awkward, for the hurt and the handicapped, for the different and the simple, for friends and the friendless, for those who have found success, and those for whom there is no place to rest. Without one another we are incomplete in Christ.

We recognise our responsibility to respect the cultures of our heritages, to affirm what is good, and to challenge all that makes people less than human. We confess that we see justice in different ways, and perceive paths to peace through different routes. We struggle with the burden of discernment through prayer, study and debate. We acknowledge the pain of change and the cost of renewal. We need the gifts of urgency and of patience.

In every age the Scriptures speak with fresh relevance and unexpected ways. We join the prayers of the Psalms with the passions and anxieties of our lives. We identify with the wanderings, faith and failures of the people of Israel. We see ourselves in the joys and struggles of the early Christians.

We hear Jesus’ promises in the beatitudes, his challenge in the Sermon on the Mount and the wit and wisdom of his parables. In communion we know afresh his presence as we share memories of his life, death and rising again. Like the first disciples we worship even as some of us have doubts, and also like the first disciples we acknowledge his call to go, to baptise and to teach.

We recognise Jesus’ authority in the present and to the end and we claim the promise of his presence. We pray that the Spirit of the Lord, which came upon him, may also be upon us, to bring good news to the poor, liberty to captives, sight to the blind, and to inspire words and deeds which say that the time has come when the Lord will save his people.

The men and women who brought us to this land also shape us. We recall heroes of conviction, the struggles of ordinary life and the stories of costly faith. May we learn from failings as from success, and imitate the faith of our ancestors not their foolishness.

May we too take risks to find pearls of great price as we seek to love the Lord our God with all our heart, with all our soul, with all our mind, and with all our strength, and our neighbour as ourselves.

Discovered this from Bosco Peters on http://www.liturgy.co.nz/resources/badge.html

"Worship, I contend, is essential in the church's mission - whatever your denomination. Parish and other Christian community mission statements regularly highlight this centrality. Worship, liturgy, especially the Eucharist is understood by most to be "the source and summit of the Christian life" (Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, 11). St Ignatius Loyola understood "The human person is created to praise, reverence, and serve God" (The Principle and Foundation).

Sometimes, however, and most surprisingly, worship does not feature in significant church and denominational mission statements. . . I would argue there has been a loss of the pivotal place of worship and liturgy, Along with this loss of worship's primacy has been the loss of the unifying power of common prayer, of common worship.

In the (even recent) past a variety of interpretations could be held around common spiritual practice. WORSHIP FIRST is a call to restore the central and unifying aspect of our Christian life and mission - whatever our denomination."

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Some similar concerns of mine are on http://roxborogh.com/mission.htm

John

Telephone Evangelism: I have just been trying to contact a retired Anglican church leader. Various numbers and no English accents (it used to be you could sort out the Presbyterians and the Anglicans just by accent).

A retreat house answerphone repeated a cell phone number as if announcing a hymn from Ancient and Modern. "Please ring cell phone number xyz, pause, number xyz."

A diocesan answerphone declared in authoritative tones "Please make your choice carefully after the tone." I felt my eternal life depended on a correct answer and fully expected to hear "press 2 for heaven, press 3, number 3, for hell."

It was a relief to get a helpful person with a neutral kiwi accent - and not to wind up in the wrong place.

Here goes with another reactivation! There are a number of other blogs I would like to link to, and some things to say and share.

I am now retired from the School of Ministry, renamed the Knox Centre for Ministry and Leadership, but chuffed to see how the transition to an internship model of theological education has taken shape. http://www.knoxcentre.ac.nz/ My succesor Jason Goroncy http://www.blogger.com/profile/13581661 will be starting next year and I feel that the teaching of Presbyterianism can be fun will be in good hands.

In August Jenny and I attended the 12th International Association for Mission Studies conference in Balatonfüred Hungary before visiting family in Oxford, catching a few days in Paris (Versailles and Chartres) a visit to Sissinghurst gardens in Kent, and a wedding of the daughter of Malaysia friends in All Souls Langham Place in London.

We are currently completing the renovation of our holiday "crib" on the Otago Peninsular. Jenny is hard at work - and I am meant to be marking papers.

New Zealand, like the States, is in the midst of an election. It will be interesting to see if Labour can pull off another term in office, but the McCain Obama show is a bit more exciting.

John

John and Jenny Roxborogh : Study Leave 2006

John will be on study leave from the School of Ministry until mid-December. From mid September he and Jenny will be based at Westminster College, Cambridge, one of the training centres for the United Reformed Church in the UK.

On the way over John will be visiting the Centre for the Study of Asian Christianity at Trinity College in Singapore discussing Archives for Mission and plans for consultations in Budapest in 2008 and Edinburgh in 2010. He will have 10 days at Seminari Theology Malaysia where he will be teaching a course on History and Mission in Southeast Asian Christianity, be leading a one-day library and archives workshop, and giving a seminar on Presbyterian Polity. He stays with friends in the south of Thailand before going to the 3^rd European Missiology Conference in Paris, 23-28 August and spending a couple of weeks trying to do something about his French at the Alliance Française.

Jenny and John meet up at Heathrow on the 10^th of September, have a week with daughter Rachel, son in law Grant, and the grandsons in Oxford before going to Cambridge where John will be working on leadership materials for training elders and a text book for his courses on Presbyterianism. We hope to sometime get back up to Scotland where we lived from 1975 to 1978, and also track down some of Jenny's ancestral sites in Ireland. Jenny returns via Melbourne and John via Dallas Texas.

We have both had significant adventures with our health in the last few years, and would value prayer for that, for the planning of archives ministry and for teaching courses in Malaysia, that they will inspire and equip people to catch a vision for this task. The Southeast Asian Christianity course in particular is extremely full on and John is concerned how he will manage it right through the day for 4 days on end from 16 to 19 August. Pray for us both settling into a new environment in Cambridge, for productive research, and for writing material that will be relevant and helpful, not to mention a good spiritual home in our absence from Leith!

Archives are about life and identity as Christians in different times and places, and are needed for developing resources which enable people to tell their own stories and empower the church in mission. The story of Christianity in Southeast Asia is one of "Faith without borders" (see the website http://roxborogh.com/sea ) but it is also one which needs more local scholarship. The missiology conference in Paris (in English, French and Spanish!) will help address the mission of the church in secularised and multi-religious Europe and is something I believe we can continue to learn from.

Remember also the School of Ministry and students in their field placements, doing clinical pastoral education, and awaiting news about first parishes. While we are away General Assembly will be meeting and decisions made which are likely to greatly affect the operation of the School of Ministry. We need confidence in God and in one another as these issues are processed.

John

Hi, I first set this up in 2003, and am reactivating it in September 2006. Jenny and I have just arrived in UK where we will be based at Westminster College, Cambridge until December when we return to New Zealand.

John has just had a month in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, and France. We are now catching up with family in Oxford before heading for Cambridge.

John

Hi I am John Roxborogh, http://roxborogh.com shared with my sisterinlaw author, Tania Roxborogh. I am a Presbyterian minister interested in archives, mission, southeast Asia, church history and lay training, computers and taming a Canon G3 digital camera.