The five congregations of Waitakere Parish came together recently to celebrate Wesley Day. More than 200 people attended the event, ensuring the hymns were sung with good Methodist fervour.

Each congregation was given responsibility for different parts of the service. 

Rev Norman Brookes provided the children and young people’s talk, and the reflection. His talk focussed on the busy Leigh household. Samuel and Susannah had 19 children (although not all survived) and raised them without any of the benefits of modern timesaving conveniences. Susannah still found a way to take time out to spend time with God in quietness and prayer.

The future of our parish was demonstrated with 30 of the Ekalesia Sunday School providing a musical interlude of songs and hymns they had learnt during the year.

Later, Rev John Wesley (aka Rev Norman Brookes) arrived to address the gathering. He reflected on the disaster his time in Georgia had been and like Jacob, how he had wrestled with God. After Aldersgate he wrestled less with his state of being and more about the state of the Church. At that time many who attended church did it out of duty or because they believed that doing all the right things made them Christians. Wesley proclaimed that one had to have personally experienced God’s love to become a true Christian.

John Wesley outlined the five hallmarks of Methodists for the congregation:

1. People who knew the love of God shared abroad and who had experienced God’s forgiveness.
2. People with a knowledge of the Bible who read and re-read it but didn’t take verses out of context. An instruction to be wary of any preacher who considered their own views important. To have a love of the Bible and be wise in how you understand and interpret it.
3. To have a love of all people, different races and creeds, including our enemies.
4. To be ecumenical in spirit but to love and pray for all fellow Christians, without letting disagreements become a barrier to co-operation.
5. The world is our parish, not our parish is our world. The expectation that Methodists would engage with the real world and challenge injustice.

Calm, ordered and well organised, John Wesley challenged the parish to consider whether we follow his five hallmarks of Methodism over the coming months and what the parish might need to change in order to live up to being a Methodist.

As we celebrate 200 years of Methodist presence in New Zealand it is fitting to consider whether we are “kindled with a living faith or are we dead set on having a form of religion without power, unless we hold fast with the spirit and discipline with which we first set out”?