danny’s space

Sunday was a pretty short day, sadly concluding our stint with St John’s Ashfield.

We awoke early to make it to the ‘classic’ or ‘traditional’ 8am service, which was run using AAPB (An Australian Prayer Book). It was vastly different to the church services at ND that I’m used to, especially the way communion was run. Communion was taken at the front of the hall, and bread was distributed by Katay to parishoners kneeling on a bench. Thankfully there were cushions. The ‘wine’ of communion was actual real red wine, so I pretended to drink it when it was passed around. Yes, one cup was shared amongst everyone (well, two to be precise to make the whole deal more efficient), with the ministers wiping the mouth of the cup after every sip. Not my cup of tea. I wonder what P-plate drivers do, if they need to drive away afterwards? Old hymns were sung from the hymn book accompanied by moving organ music, and Dan gave his testimony. A musically-talented bunch from our team sand In Christ Alone during communion and escaped the shared cup. I met a lady called Joyce who turned out to be one of the exam supervisors at USyd, and she recounted a few interesting stories from her time invigilating exams.

Katay gave a talk about Christmas, that it was better to receive than to give. Basically, Christ came to serve and not to be served (Mark 10:45), and so instead of trying to serve God to get his favour, Christ has already done the ultimate service for us so that we can get to God. We just need to accept and receive this.

The same sermon was preached at the 10am ‘family’ service, which was not as traditional-feeling in terms of the songs and even the attire of the ministers. Katay still wore the white dog-collar (I forget its official name) but no robes. The 10am service was smaller than the 8am service, and had a younger congregation. Grace was there, which was great, and she had questions about the sermon afterward, particularly what the word ransom meant. She was able to better understand what it meant that Jesus paid our ransom, and we were able to explain the gospel to her in broken Mandarin after she divulged that she had actually never been told the gospel. It was really encouraging to hear her say that she had learnt quite a bit over the last few days.

Katay also reminded Rachel and I after the service about the importance of building relationships as well as evangelising people, in response to us wanting to find a Mandarin-speaker to meet up with Grace to discuss things. I think often our tendency is to look at people as evangelistic fodder rather than real people with whom you need to build a relationship of mutual trust and love.

After a BBQ lunch and group photos, it was prayer time to conclude the past week at NTE and mission. Packing up was followed by group hugs and then goodbyes as people started trickling back to their cars for the drive home. Megan and I left together, and the GPS got us lost because an off-ramp was closed and it couldn’t appropriately accomodate for the situation.

Then it was back home for a lot of rest after a fantastically challenging, rewarding, eye-opening mission.