Vicars Letter 7th March 2025

Rev. Summer Benton

Kia ora All Saints Whānau,

​I don’t know about you, but a highlight of my week this week was our Shrove Tuesday “Pancake Party” at All Saints. We have done this several years in a row now and it always brings such joy to my heart to see all the people that turn up. This year there were several faces that I have seen join us for other events, like the parish picnic. There were also so many people from our local community; our neighbours, school families, and friends. What a great opportunity things like this are for us to be able to open our doors and serve our community!

At one point in the evening some friends of mine asked me, “why pancakes?”. And that conversation naturally led to us talking about Lent. Later that night as I was reflecting on the evening, I thought about the fact that when I was growing up in church, despite us ALWAYS having a pancake dinner (it was an Anglican church after all!) the whole event seemed to mostly just mark an opportunity for our church family to get together and talk about what we were giving up for Lent. While the spiritual discipline of fasting or abstaining from something for the 40 days of Lent is a beautiful and valid way of reflecting on our desperate need for God, it’s not something that we regularly focus on or talk a lot about in our family. I’m not really sure why, or at what point that drifted away in my life. And as my mind went down this path, my first thought was that I was missing an opportunity with my own kids and I felt a bit guilty about it. Gosh – my kids have not one but two priests as parents and they aren’t even in a practice of giving things up for Lent?!

But then I felt the catch in my spirit that I often feel when God is trying to show me something. And I thought about the conversations I have with my kids that my parents never had with me – not because they missed an opportunity, but because the world I’m raising my children in is so vastly different than the world where I grew up in the 1980s and 90s in the “Bible Belt’ of America. My kids come home from school and say things like “Mum, why do so many people not believe in God?”. They feel fear and sadness at issues like climate change. They see people on the bus or the street that are very clearly finding life tough. Now every one of us saw hard things as kids and wrestled with the state of the world at some point in our life. And this newest generation isn’t the first to experience these things. But the difference is, they’re growing up in a world where most of their friends don’t know God like they do, don’t know the hope of the gospel. As much as I think it would do them good to give up sugar for Lent, they don’t need that in order to know the truth about how desperate this world is for Jesus. They live that every day – we all do.

Watching people pour into the doors for pancakes on Tuesday and then experience joy, community, and love was such a beautiful picture of God’s Kingdom. It was exactly what we are meant to be doing as a church - open our doors to those around us and love them like Jesus loves them. May our church always feel like a refuge and a place of joy and hope for this broken world.

Nga Mihi,

Summer