Wellington Cathedral
It’s the holiday season and people travel far and wide. I have travelled to many countries over the years on mission and on holiday but I think my favourite has to be New Zealand. My friend and I hired a car to travel all the way around the South Island. Beautiful scenery, glaciers, mountains, lakes - absolutely stunning. Then we got a ferry across to the capital, Wellington on the North Island.
It was Wellington that left the greatest impression on me. It wasn’t the beautiful scenery but it was here that I unexpectedly felt challenged by God. We went to the cathedral of St Paul on the Sunday for a service. It just happened to be the yearly commissioning service for an organisation called Urban Vision. These are people who feel called by God to intentionally move to local residential poor communities in order to serve those at the margins of their neighbourhood.
The Bishop of Wellington was there at the service- Justin Duckworth. I was so impressed by him - he was certainly not your usual bishop with his dreadlocks and bare feet! I read his book ‘Against the tide, Towards the Kingdom’. Justin is a Senior Bishop, an Archbishop of the Anglican church in New Zealand and Polynesia and the cofounder of this Urban Vision. What challenged me so much was that the people being commissioned or recommissioned included families with their children who had intentionally sold their homes and moved into poor estates in order to live and serve with the poorest of people, drug addicts or prostitutes to show the love of Jesus to them. The bishop was one of those who did that too.
It was a great trip in so many ways but alongside the absolute beauty of NZ was the memory of those people in Wellington Cathedral, who out of love for their city and its people were sacrificing comfort and security to live alongside needy people. Paul encourages us to be imitators of Jesus.
‘Your attitude should be that of Christ Jesus…who being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant being made in human likeness. Philippians 2:5-7
I may not be called to be as radical in that way as those people and the bishop, but I am called to be more like Jesus. We all are. Am I too comfortable I wonder?
Julie Shimizu