Weekly Rector's Message

Saturday, August 3, 2024

Dear friends,

I am very much looking forward to being back with you on Sunday. My wife and I have been on vacation in Sussex, England, where we met up with friends and family, including our three year old twin granddaughters. Our first day there we experienced torrential rain and temperatures in the 60s. The weather seemed to alternate sunshine and rain during our stay - not unlike English summers I remember from times past. In the meantime, I heard that you were all melting in a heatwave.

One of the places we visited was the Roman villa at Bignor in West Sussex. In 1811 a farmer was ploughing in the field and struck a large stone. When he dug around the stone the farmer discovered a large Roman mosaic, which turned out to be from the third century AD. The stone itself is believed to have been a water basin or piscina for one of the forty rooms within the villa.

Over the following years the site was excavated, revealing many treasures hidden beneath the soil. The tiled floors contain a mosaic depicting an eagle (Zeus in disguise) carrying off the youthful shepherd boy Ganymede to become a cup-bearer for the gods. Another room has mosaics of Venus and the Gladiators in a frieze of combat. There is a separate bathhouse and changing room which has a mosaic of the head of Medusa.

The owner of the villa (a word which means “farm”) had spared no expense in its plan and construction. There was underfloor heating, provided by a hypocaust which heated the water by burning coal. The hypocaust also fed into the hot baths that were common at the time. By the way, if you needed to cool off there was also a separate cold bath, called a frigidarium. It’s a strange feeling to be looking at a floor where in AD 230 people were disrobing to take a bath. The mosaics are a tangible connection to the people of the past.

The passing of time brings changes, even within a generation. During our vacation, all the churches we visited, including one monastery, had experienced falls in attendance. The church that had nurtured me for twenty years had had an interregnum of over three years, (without the benefit of an interim rector). While it was great to meet old friends there, I felt sad to see the once full and vibrant church struggling with a small congregation.

By contrast, and despite a fall in attendance, the church where I served my first curacy had gone ahead and revamped the back of the church, removing pews and creating a new entrance with large glass doors. They had also added a kitchen and bathroom at the side of the building. We saw the space with scaffolding inside and then a week later with the scaffolding removed. It looked fantastic. We had arrived when there was a garden cleanup day. Interestingly, on that day there were more volunteers helping from outside the congregation than from within.

I admired the friends who remained faithful and continued to serve and support the church. I don’t want to be one of those Christians who looks back and tells everyone “it was so much better in our day”. Decline isn’t always inevitable. Revival can always take place. Sometimes the greatest challenge we face is ourselves, through our apathy or through forgetting what a church is for. It’s easy to take our spiritual homes for granted.

As Church of Messiah is approaching a time of change, maintain your faith in God and find ways to serve the church. God helps those who help themselves. The more we can do to sustain our church in prayer, worship and fellowship, the greater our blessings will be, and the greater will be the legacy we pass on to the next generation.

With love

Father David