Christmas and Next Year
Christmas season is upon us once again. A time when the year ends with a bang followed by a whimper, as we conclude with the heightened activity of Christmas followed by the long languid month of January holidays.
Thank you for coming out in numbers to support and help us with the ABC recording of our Christmas Eve Celebration. Please pray for the producer Noel as he edits it, that the force of the gospel may be enhanced and not lost in the process. Please make sure you advertise it amongst friends, family, colleagues and neighbours – “our Cathedral is going to be on ABC at 6pm on Christmas Eve”. And before you come to church for the 6 or 8 pm gathering remember to turn on your recorder to watch it later. A letter or email afterward to the ABC thanking them for their efforts in presenting Christmas from our Cathedral will surely help our relationship with them.
Christmas is the easiest time of the year to invite friends, family associates and even strangers to church. We have many gatherings over the next two weeks that will be organised specifically with the outsider in mind. Ross will organize wonderful music and the sermons will be simple and challenging explanations of what Christmas is about and why we celebrate it. Carol singing has a great nostalgic appeal to people even when we have been battered with Christmas muzak by the stores for more than a month. Joining in with the singing of people who believe the carols is a great experience that our neighbours will enjoy.
Next Sunday, and of course the Christmas weekend itself, will be taken up with our outreach to the community. We will be singing the music of Christmas next Sunday with talks that have a clear message for those who do not normally come to church regularly. Then on the Christmas weekend people travel in and out of Sydney in a wild flurry of catching up with relatives and friends. We never can be sure who will be around town that weekend – so invite everybody. Even if you have to go interstate to catch up with your family – still invite people to the Cathedral – “it’s definitely the place I would go to if I was still in Sydney.” “If it wasn’t for having to go interstate for the relatives, I wouldn’t miss Christmas at the Cathedral”.
However, because Christians have used Christmas to reach the community with the gospel for many years, we have steadily lessened the theological content of Christmas. So this Sunday we are looking at Christmas for Christians. We are looking at the great incarnation passages of Hebrews 1 in the morning and John 1 in the evening. These are passages that thrill Bible readers but are quite difficult for outsiders to comprehend.
Next year
January is the time when people holiday. As the Cathedral is a place where many tourists come, it is never a dull moment during the holiday season. From week to week it is impossible to predict who will be visiting us, so we need to keep the welcoming of visitors high on our agenda.
January is also the time for camps and beach missions and of course the Church Missionary Society Summer School at Katoomba. This year the Archbishop will be bringing the daily Bible studies, before time is taken to inform our prayer life about the missionary endeavours. Some of our own missionaries, such as the Sholl’s working in Mexico, will be present at Summer School.
At the end of January, Australia Day Convention on January 26th, is held in the Cathedral. It is a wonderful way for Australian Christians to refocus our thinking about God and his mission in Australia. Unfortunately our great friend and long time canon of this Cathedral John Chapman is sick and will not be able to speak. But there are four other great preachers who were going to be with him on the platform and they will be stepping into the breach.
February is the month when the regular church programme commences. Our small groups reform and start once more, praying for each other as we seek to understand God’s word together. Our Kathedral Kids and youth group programmes recommence, and our regular preaching programme comes into full swing.
The last few years have been tough because of the financial stress, reducing our staff and forcing us to restructure the way the Cathedral operates. I want to thank all Cathedral partners for your increased financial support, your willingness to make changes to our church lifeand your increased endeavours to undertake tasks that staff members formerly did.
Having cut back and restructured the Cathedral ministry, it is now time to rebuild and go forward. So next year we are going to welcome amongst us seven new student ministers and one new assistant minister.
Most of the student ministers are married and several have children. All but one is studying at Moore College. They will work at the Cathedral on Sundays and one evening a week. All of them have agreed to do this as volunteers, without pay, in return for some training that I will be giving them midweek. This is one of the models we used back in 2003/4 to start our growth process (including, by the way, three students called Andrew Lim, Lucy Lim and Chris Allan).
Our new Assistant Minister is Sarah Cheng. Sarah trained here before studying at Moore College. She served here as a student minister for one year before working at Mt Druitt, learning children’s work, and Fairfield learning more about cross cultural ministry. The focus of her work next year will be with the students at the Conservatorium, the women of our evening congregation and the younger mothers of the morning church in reaching the growing number of young families in the city. The Jim Glennon Trust is helping us to finance this initiative over the next couple of years.