It has been sometime since I have written, and so, as a personal journal, it seems important to catch up on the ministry Marsha and I have been called to and are about to realize.
Our travels north at the end of January were not just to see the sites. With the support of the worship group here at Mt. Eden — the largest in Northern Monthly Meeting — we were traveling in the ministry. We arranged a Friday dinner in Warkworth with Friends who were beginning to consider a new worship group. Then on to Kerikeri to worship with the Bay of Islands worship group on Sunday, followed by a Tuesday lunchtime meeting with the worship group in Kataia. (Here we stayed for 3 nights so as to enjoy our trip up to Cape Reinga.) After a visit with a couple of isolated Friends, we ended with a shared meal and worship in Whangarei on Friday evening, returning home on Saturday. All told it was an eye-opening 8-day 500-mile trip, visiting around 30 Friends in Northland.
Since our return we have written a report of our travels and shared it with the monthly meeting’s Pastoral and Spiritual Care Committee (PSCC–yes, they are good with acronyms here, too), prepared a shortened version for the newsletter, and made a 90-minute presentation on the meaning and purpose of traveling in the ministry, describing our visits, and sharing what we had learned along the way.
What particularly struck us from these visits was a desire for greater inclusion in the life of Northern Monthly Meeting (NMM). NMM is a recent invention and Friends are still learning what this entity is and how to nurture it. Consequently we have become very involved in writing a new job description for PSCC and moving toward having all NMM events (such as NMM committee and business meetings) accessible to all NMM Friends via video conference. We are working on eliminating the technological kinks, but having older Friends adjust to speaking more slowly and more clearly so that their voices will be heard is perhaps the greater hurdle.
Other openings whilst traveling included initiating discussions about the framing of meetings for worship. When a worship group comprises just a few Friends and they meet only monthly, and any vocal ministry is rare, the chit chat before and after meeting does necessarily allow the group to know one another more deeply. So we invited Friends to consider a brief sharing before worship and a more extensive sharing after. Simply the sharing of gratitudes led to every person contributing something, and in one case more than had been heard for a long time.
And then there is vocal ministry. Both Marsha and I felt vocal ministry being called forth. Partly it was knowing beforehand how silent these meetings were. We could sense that they were starved of hearing the Word. We both felt that, unlike in our meetings at home where there is frequent ministry, we did not have the luxury of waiting; this was not the time to stuff those little nudges. We knew we had a limited time with each group to be faithful and we trust we were.
So we are now looking forward to an intense 3 weeks. This Sunday (March 18) we will be giving a piano duet recital at the Northbridge Retirement Complex. It will be an hour long, with music by Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, Dvorak, and Faure. Between the pieces we will share a little of our personal story of duet playing, a little of its history, and a little of the music itself.
Then next Thursday (March 22) begins the 4-day Opening Gathering of the Spiritual Nurture programme. Our fellow facilitation team members are Linley and Moira, and we have been meeting weekly for a while, as well as sharing many emails, as the content miraculously falls into place. We have a full class of 20 with Friends flying up from Dunedin and Christchurch on South Island and others coming in from most of the meetings on North Island. If you are interested in more detail, then you can access the first letters to the class here.
On April 5 we fly down to Palmerston North to offer a Friends Couple Enrichment workshop for couples, and to open up a conversation with the community on how Quaker Meetings can nurture relationships.
In all of this preparation, we have been enjoying the Pop-Up Globe Theatre. The productions have been excellent with Macbeth and A Midsummer Nights Dream being our favorites. As you will see from these short videos, we were among the Groundlings ($10 tickets, not bad!). In the fairy world of A Midsummer Nights Dream, the characters spoke Te Reo, literally, ‘the language’ of the Maori.
We also caught a little of the Chinese new year celebrations.
And did we say we have joined GALS (The Gay and Lesbian Singers of Auckland)? Lots of fun under an excellent conductor who insists on polishing the music, rather than just singing it. We are so grateful to join this community who so obviously care deeply for one another. There are some members who have been with the choir for more than two decades. Our first concert with them will be sometime in June.
Green Edges 