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Never too old…

by Nick Mattiske

‘Ah, retirement. That will be sweet. Finally, some me-time. Fishing, relaxing, a bit of travel, and pursuing my interests …’

It’s a seductive image. Yet in his forthcoming book, Australian Christian writer Rodney Macready bluntly states that the common Australian cultural understanding of retirement is not ‘a biblical concept’. Macready suggests that Christians have been too willing to endorse the idea of ‘leisured retirement’. Too often we can simply assume the values of our surrounding culture and (sometimes unconsciously) legitimise them by ‘Christianising’ them a little. It’s not that retirees are consistently selfish, but the sentiment is often expressed that, ‘if I have served the church in my younger years, I deserve something of a break in retirement’. This has had a noticeable impact on the life of the modern church, particularly when it comes to volunteering. In the past, participation has traditionally increased when members reach retirement age— but some congregations have begun to notice quite the opposite.

I’ve always been convinced that the church, whether local or corporate, is Christ’s body on earth, and that my chief call is to serve this body

In his insightful book The Good Life, social researcher Hugh Mackay makes a distinction between living with purpose and being happy. No doubt a certain amount of happiness can be derived from retiring and focusing on oneself, but this is not exactly what makes for a ‘good life’. Serving others is the purpose for which God has placed us on earth. One volunteer church worker in a city congregation— let’s call her ‘Irene’—says, ‘I’ve always been convinced that the church, whether local or corporate, is Christ’s body on earth, and that my chief call is to serve this body’.

Irene goes on, ‘I firmly believe that in my latter years I’m not called to serve my needs and whims’, though she concedes that ‘the freedom to manipulate one’s time means there can be more of these pleasures, perhaps’. She travels, attends concerts and is always willing to share her thoughts on movies she has seen. But when it comes to serving God, ‘whether you are retired or not’, it is ‘a continuum’. She savours the extra time retirement has given her to better discern how she can serve.

Retiree ‘Jack’ volunteers in his local church, helps out with disability support, ferries elderly neighbours to appointments and spends time at an inter-denominational drop-in centre that provides emergency food parcels, financial assistance and (just as importantly) a sympathetic ear. He perhaps proves the old maxim that if you want a job done, you should ask a busy person. When asked what inspires him to volunteer, he simply quotes Matthew 25:35: ‘I was hungry and you gave me something to eat’. At the drop-in centre Jack is clearly inspired by various churches working together—beyond the doctrinal

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A day to remember

by Rachel Kuchel

Picnic … a day of nerves and excitement.

In the 1800s the annual school examination was monumental for students, teachers and congregations alike, for everyone was invited. In 1857, teacher Martin Basedow and his pupils assembled in Dr Carl Muecke’s independent Lutheran Church (Tabor) in Tanunda, South Australia, along with 150 parents and friends as witnesses.

The day began with an anthem and then the visitors chose the subjects on which the students were to be examined. This included scripture, geography and natural science—the latter examined in English. During pauses in examination, the children sang or recited poetry in both English and German. After three hours the witnesses were convinced of the children’s proficiency and thus the end of the examination was declared—but they could have requested it to continue if they felt it necessary.

Now the nerves could finally settle and the excitement could begin! Presents were given to the students before the commencement of the annual school picnic. More residents of the district joined the occasion at the local ‘wooded lands’, swelling the numbers to 403. Games, shooting at the mark, music, dancing and choral performances were the order of the day.

And now we jump to 1984 and Murray Bridge Lutheran Primary School, South Australia. A request was made to author Colin Thiele to write a short story commemorating the Lutheran Sunday School picnic. His handwritten manuscript The Picnic, donated to the school, was recently deposited at Lutheran Archives. Colin’s story formed the basis of a picnic held in Tanunda in 1986 as part of South Australia’s 150th Jubilee celebrations. Many schools came together, donned period costumes, and relived the old-style picnic, so vividly portrayed by Colin:

As far as Eddie Nitschke was concerned the picnic was one of the highlights of the year. He always reminded his father about it in plenty of time. Sunday School was always held on Saturdays and so it was natural that the Sunday School Picnic was a Saturday function too.

Preparations began weeks beforehand. By the time the day arrived the baskets were bulging and the jars were full to the brim; big freshly-baked loaves of bread, a pound or two of butter squared into perfect shape with wooden butterpats and finished with pretty patterns, sour cucumbers with an abominable smell and a heavenly taste, cheese, ham, mettwurst, black pudding, preserved fruits, cream, biscuits, cake and a dozen other delicacies.

They arrived in good time. Mild pandemonium was already erupting in several directions. Children were running about in a frenzy of freedom, dogs were barking and being told to shut up, horses were whinnying, cars were chugging proudly into place.

Albert Eckermann was in charge of the arrangements. He was an assistant to Pastor Eisenstein who was the real head of the Sunday School. But the pastor liked to delegate his picnic responsibilities because he wasn’t very comfortable out i by Rachel Kuchel n the scrub.

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Treasure

by Vicki Rochow

Many of you will remember the Child In Our Hands conferences, in 2001. These conferences encouraged congregations and families to be partners in nurturing the faith.

One of the great legacies from this time of rejuvenation is the gift of the faith chest, presented by congregations to children at the time of their baptism. Many churches embraced this idea as an opportunity to encourage families to nurture faith at home.

There’s no set style for a faith chest; it might be a big paper-covered shoebox or an ornate wooden chest lovingly hand-crafted by a member of your congregation. Inside it are the spiritual treasures given by your church and family, to be used to nurture faith at home as your children grow.

At Grow Ministries we believe that, by the power of the Holy Spirit, families have the greatest influence on our children’s faith. We also believe that all members of the church family are called to partner with and equip parents and grandparents to be the primary faith nurturers for our children, as intended by God (Deuteronomy 6).

Items that may be placed in a faith chest include: your child’s baptismal candle, devotion books, Bibles, music (such as DVDs) and Sunday school projects. It becomes the storehouse for resources used by your family to nurture your child’s faith.

ELLA

Every couple of months, four-yearold Ella takes out her faith chest (or ‘baptism box’ as she calls it) and sits on the lounge room floor, eager to look through it with her mum Naomi. The day I visited, she took great delight in telling me all about the things inside. There is an embroidered towel that the pastor used to ‘wipe the water off’. There are some prayer books and a DVD, and a beautiful letter from the lady who puts the boxes together for Ella’s congregation. All of the baptism cards Ella received are in there too. She displayed great enthusiasm in showing me her favourite one with a baby on the front: ‘She is so cute, isn’t she!’

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Death & resurrection

by Rosie Schefe

‘Everything changed—my relationship with God, my relationship with Tina and my relationships with the congregation’, Rob Merritt says, recalling the day of his baptism in March 2011.

‘I finally felt complete—that I knew God and knew myself. It felt like I’d had to do some hard work to get to that point, a bit like a baby bird does when hatching out of its egg.

‘Even later, in the following months I was still dusting the last few bits of shell off’, he grins.

Rob and his wife Tina, members at Holy Cross Lutheran Church, Birdwood (in the Adelaide hills) look back over their lives and marvel at how, even when they weren’t looking for God, he was looking for them.

‘I did believe in God, but my only exposure to Christians was Religious Instruction at school, with the “Catholics” or the “Methodists”’, Rob says.

‘Then I joined the Navy. Anyone who was known to be Christian had the mickey taken out of them, and again, with the chaplains, you were either “Catholic” or “Protestant”.’

Rob and Tina have experienced the pain and crushing disappointments of broken relationships, but it was one of their children who opened a new door for her parents. Their daughter Nicole joined the Australian Army where, posted to Victoria Barracks in Sydney, she linked up with inner-city St Paul’s Lutheran Church and Pastor Fred Veerhuis. Nicole became a regular volunteer among the young people running the church’s Sunday night Eternity Café for homeless people.

Posted back home to Woodside, South Australia, Nicole continued attending a Lutheran church. Eventually both Nicole and her younger sister were baptised by Pastor Steven Liersch at St John’s, Woodside.

For Rob, this was a moment of encounter: ‘It opened me up to the light—to what Jesus did and to what others are doing in his name’, he says. But it was when Nicole—and then Tina—began attending Holy Cross that the way was fully opened.

‘Nicole came [to Holy Cross] first, then I did. My first reaction was “Finally, a pastor that’s a pastor”; he was a teacher as well’, Tina says. That pastor was [then graduate] Ben Hentschke, now serving in the Ipswich parish, Queensland. ‘The people were awesome too—no pretences, just genuine Christian love and friendship.’

Eventually Tina talked Rob into coming along to worship and he ‘merged in’. When musicians at Holy Cross discovered that Rob was a talented semi-professional guitarist they invited him to join a praise band, opening up a whole new avenue for learning about God through modern Christian music.

Rob also became involved in Men’s Shed activities at Holy Cross, where he found a very supportive group of mates who helped him navigate symptoms of depression after he lost his job.

‘After seeing my daughters baptised I thought, “I’m ready for this” and I began asking lots more questions of Ben and others’, Rob says.

‘Eventually I asked Ben if he would baptise me, and I chose to be baptised by full immersion, as Tina had been and my daughters were at Woodside.

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Christmas with Tattoo Man

by Rebecka Colldunberg 

Mark and Laura went to a prestigious school. They were raised in firmly established, upper-middle-class homes and wanted for nothing.

They married young and decided to immediately jump into the property market. With few savings, they bought a house in a suburb considered one of Australia’s worst.

‘Our families were horrified’, Laura recalls. ‘They tried everything to talk us out of it. They said it was unsafe, dirty and crime-infested.’

It was during their first night in the house that their parents’ words came rushing back to haunt them.

‘It was a Saturday night,’ Laura says, drifting into an anecdote she’s clearly told umpteen times before. ‘I hadn’t until that point realised that we even had a footpath in front of our house, but all of a sudden it become a thoroughfare for drunks. I don’t know where they had come from or where they were going, but it was certainly interesting.’

‘Then the sirens started’, Mark chimes in. ‘We must have been woken at least once an hour by police cars screaming around the area.’

‘Then … then …’, interrupts Laura, ‘the neighbours! At about midnight we were woken by a woman screaming! “F— this” and “f— that” and “you’re a c—”! I had barely been exposed to that word before in my life. I had no idea that there were so many adjectives one could use to describe a “c—”: dumb, lazy, worthless, good-for-nothing … ‘

The next morning we saw them sitting on their veranda. He was covered in tattoos. Covered. I really hoped they wouldn’t try to talk to us, but he did. He yelled out “Morning! Where ya off to?”

‘I was tired and cranky. “Church”, I yelled back, and promptly got in the car, feeling as though I had delivered a bitter blow to that pair of obvious heathens.’

Laura’s smug pride was soon replaced by intense guilt. When they returned from church, her tattooed neighbour made a beeline for them.

‘I was certain it wasn’t going to be a pleasant scene’, Laura says, ‘but he barely got out his name, Anthony, before he launched into a mile-a-minute diatribe about how happy he was that “people of God” would be living next door.

‘He told us all about how he had been in prison several times for armed holdups, and how the last time he got out he just felt called to go sit by a river, and how somehow a man appeared and shared the gospel with him and baptised him that same day in that same river. It was enthralling. He peppered his

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I never say no

by Peter Ghalayini

To baptise or to not baptise – that is often a question that vexes the pastor.

The phone rings. It’s a person you’ve never heard from before.

‘Hi, my family are Lutherans and we want our baby christened. What do I have to do?’

I have never said ‘no’ to a request for baptism.

Maybe that’s because my own baptism is very special to me. It is a critical part of my faith walk with God that first led me to worship at the age of 19 and then to be ordained as a Lutheran pastor.

Just as any parent would not stop searching for a missing child, this becomes the challenge for the church—to search for her child that has gone missing

 

My mother (a German Lutheran) and my father (a Lebanese Muslim) came separately to Australia in the early fifties as part of the post-war assisted migration program.

They met here, got married and had three children.

The question came: what to do about the children’s religion?

Although a Muslim, my father felt we’d have more opportunities as Christians, so I was baptised in 1960 in Trinity German Lutheran Church, East Melbourne.

The next time I entered a church would be in 1979 when, searching for answers to the big questions of life, I walked into St Paul’s Lutheran Church Box Hill. Why a Lutheran church?

Because I remembered being told I was baptised in a Lutheran church. That day I walked into St Paul’s Box Hill was the beginning of a life-long journey in faith, including some years at Luther Seminary, studying for my ordination.

At Ringwood/Knox Lutheran parish, where I am the pastor, we have an annual baptism remembrance celebration, where we invite our baptised members to worship with us and receive a baptism blessing. During the service they come forward to the font to be splashed again with the life-giving waters of baptism and to hear Jesus’ clear, sure promise, ‘Whoever believes and is baptised will be saved’ (Mark 16:16).

This year at Ringwood we adorned the altar with symbols of baptism: blue shawls draped over the cross and … because God said yes to me Just as any parent would not stop searching for a missing child, this becomes the challenge for the church—to search for her child that has gone missing

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Cross purposes

by Greg Priebbenow

In many parts of the world today, and for centuries in the ‘western hemisphere’, intergenerational families and communities were considered the norm.

The church is one place where generations can still come together, but we cannot assume that people of different generations have sufficient natural opportunities to relate to each other beyond the limits of Sunday morning. Many congregations have actually made generational disconnection worse through agesegregated programming. Children and youth are sent off to separate activities after worship. Adults meet for various purposes during the week but little focus is given to connecting with other generations. Congregations have become part of the bigger problem. Changing our focus to a cross generational approach is not about adopting a new program; it is more about adapting existing activities with a new perspective. We want to encourage people from at least two generations to intentionally gather for the same activity in the name of Christ, interacting in ways that reflect mutual respect and appreciation. There can be formal and informal aspects, but it is much more than merely having two generations share the same space.

A cross-generational approach to the practice of faith has deep and biblical theological roots. Romans 12 and 1 Corinthians 12 speak of the ‘body of Christ’: each person is uniquely gifted to serve other parts of the body, regardless of age or stage. God gives his people gifts in the form of each other.

A cross-generational focus provides for those people who do not slot into agespecific programs and those who may not have natural opportunities for intergenerational contact. A cross-generational focus provides connection into a larger ‘family’, in which all are welcome and where those without biological connections can live out their calling to be faith brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers to others within the congregation.

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Memories of a friend

by Tom Pietsch

Leo Seemanpillai knocked on our church doors over a year ago.

It happened to be a Thursday, the same day he was released from detention into a house over the road from our parish in Grovedale, Victoria. No-one answered that day so he tried again every day until Sunday, when he came in for our service, along with his Tamil housemates. As a baptised Christian, Leo knew that he could find help at the church.

Without wanting to sound trivial, it was something of a novelty for us to meet asylum seekers. Like everyone, we had heard about them and about detention centres on the news, but had never had any contact in the flesh. That day, and in the coming days and weeks, our parishioners sat down with Leo and his friends to hear their stories, to help them in ways material and spiritual, and to receive together the grace of God through Christ Jesus in worship.

Soon there were many more asylum seekers in our neighbourhood and our Pietsch parish was, and remains, enriched by friendship with them.

On Saturday morning, 31 May, I played golf with my brother. I overhead a young man apologising to his friends for being late—someone had set themselves on fire just down the road. It was only when I got home that I got the call that this was Leo. I reached his bedside a couple of hours later, where I prayed with him and anointed his charred forehead.

The tragedy has been deeply felt in our parish because we had come to know Leo so well over the past year. We had heard about his life in Sri Lanka and then in an Indian refugee camp. He had worked alongside us, digging ditches in our car park. Some members had employed Leo at their business, as Leo was fortunate enough to have a bridging visa that gave him working rights. Some of us had also counselled Leo during his darker times. We loved him, not as an asylum seeker, but as a brother in Christ. Through Leo, many of the Hindu Tamils came to our church and heard the gospel.

Leo died from his injuries the following morning, just as we were getting ready to begin our Sunday service. Since then, Leo’s death has been felt all over Geelong, in the churches and in the asylum-seeker communities. Our hearts are heavy as we remember him, and as we process his horrific death. But on the following Sunday, Pentecost, an Iranian family of asylum seekers were baptised in our church—a day of great celebration. In one week we experienced the fullness of St Paul’s words to the Romans: ‘For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord’ (Romans 6:23).

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The stew that grew

by Rebecka Colldunberg

Soup and singing. For centuries, millennia even, these two words have represented more than food and entertainment; they are well worn stones on the pathway to comfort and healing.

The Kolec household at Our Saviour’s, Knox, Victoria, was one very special family who stripped mission back to basics. In 2000 they began inviting members of their congregation into their home after worship on one Sunday each month, for a simple lunch of soup followed by a time of singing.

Sadly, after several years the fellowship event (which had grown steadily in popularity) ceased when circumstances changed and the home was no longer available.

‘After a period of the fellowship’s recess, at our 2012 AGM some members raised the question of how this activity might once again be taken up by the congregation’, congregation chairperson Judy Bowman explained. ‘So the investigation began into how we could recommence what had become known to all as “Soup and Singing”.’

While the congregation had members who were willing to provide soup and assist with the meal, a suitable home equipped with a piano or organ wasn’t available. Nor was it possible to use the church facilities, which were used by another church group on Sunday afternoons. However the congregation—Knox by name—did not take ‘knocks’ by nature and found a way around the problem.

‘We decided to offer Soup and Singing as a mid-week, monthly activity from our church building, as a communitywide hospitality program and part of our mission outreach’, Judy said.

A trial was commenced and it became clear that the hurdles the congregation had faced were actually blessings in disguise. The new Soup and Singing fellowship blossomed, with more and more people coming every month.

‘It soon became apparent that we were severely restricted in what we could do out of our church building, due to our very limited and small kitchen facilities’, Judy said. ‘We realised that if we wished to extend our hospitality activities we would need to make significant upgrades in this area. So we began the process of applying for funds through the Mission Stimulus Grant.’

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A return to hope

by Rosie Schefe

It remains one of the most remote of Lutheran parishes in Australia and New Zealand; they don’t call this part of the world ‘Far North’ Queensland for nothing. But Hope Vale’s history is rich and unique.

Sunday, 17 May 1942, was one of the worst days in the history of the interaction between the Guugu Yimidhirr people and European Australia. But the people have chosen to remember a different event instead.

On Sunday, 18 May this year, LCA Bishop Rev John Henderson unveiled a memorial outside St John’s Lutheran Church in Hope Vale. It carries the names of 36 men who ‘returned from Woorabinda to help build Hope Vale’ over a six-month period from April to September 1949. This is what they choose to remember.

In 1942 the Cape Bedford Mission (as it was then known) was a very different place than it is today. Established by missionary Johannes Flierl and lay helper Johann Biar in 1886, the mission was led by Rev Georg Schwarz from 1887. Schwarz was known as Muni (the Guugu Yimidhirr word for ‘black’, as the people couldn’t pronounce his surname).

The people of the mission lived in four small settlements: Elim and Hope Valley on Cape Bedford itself, Wayarego on the McIvor River to the north and Spring Hill, closer to Cooktown. On Sunday, 17 May 1942, the people gathered for worship at Spring Hill.

As worship ended, the church was surrounded by armed soldiers, who forced everyone onto American army trucks and took them to Cooktown. The people were held at the wharf for 24 hours before being loaded onto a steamship for the trip down the coast to Cairns. At Cairns they were loaded onto a train for the long journey south.

By the time the train reached Townsville, the Lutherans in the north were aware of what was happening. When the train stopped in the station, members from the congregation went there with food and water; this was the first proper meal the people had received since leaving Spring Hill.

The train continued through to Rockhampton in central Queensland and from there the people were trucked again to a mission station at Woorabinda, under the watchful eyes of soldiers with fixed bayonets. They were mostly welcomed by the people there, but were deeply troubled by the cold climate, especially as they had left Spring Hill with virtually nothing beyond the clothes they were wearing.

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