The Abbey

I am still learning how to be wise. On Friday I went away for a three day weekend, Friday night to Sunday at El Rancho, Waikanae for The Abbey, a national Anglican youth leaders and young adults event, and then onto Auckland for a night (family) and day (various appointments) trip. I thought I could put a decent out of office message on my email and travel lightly electronically - including no laptop.

My (less than wise) bad. A stretch of important emails threaded into my Inbox including some attached documents to read - challenging when no laptop on hand!

Also, tricky to post a blog post per usual on Mondays. Now on laptop ... but it is Tuesday.

The Abbey was a lovely event - about 250 people present - from different parts of our church, though most from the Wellington, Nelson and Christchurch diocesan regions.

Main speakers were Lillian Murray, Dallas Hareama and Lorna Gray. There were lots of workshops facilitated by experts in many fields. Great MCs and an excellent band (co-ordinated by Paul Hegglun, a member of our Diocesan Ministry Team).

Thank you everyone!

One way to review such an event is to pose the question, What gave me hope?

Two things stand out in answering that question.

1. That we have in our church a wonderful group of people aged well below my age (!!) who love God, love the church and want to reach their communities with the Good News.

2. This group (along, of course, with many others) are very, very comfortable with a bicultural expression of our faith in Christ. Most of the songs we sang at The Abbey were in English and Te Reo. Quite a bit of the content of the plenary addresses was about how we who identify as Pakeha can fully engage in our bicultural society. 

If only some of our politicians could see this way of being Kiwi in action and worry less about removing Te Reo words from ministerial letters and road signs!