The year rolls on and October has arrived with Daylight Saving already in place.  Getting up in the dark still requires some adjustment just as we were getting used to the lighter mornings.  But they’ll be back soon enough, and in the meantime we can enjoy the warmth of these balmy spring evenings.

The seasons are just one way of keeping track of the pace of time: another is through the passage of the years: those of us with Auckland memories stored in our heads know that the transport hassles on the opening night of the Rugby World Cup could have been avoided if the advice of fifty and sixty years ago had been heeded and acted upon at the time.

With the pace of change and the change of pace we are apt to forget that we are in the second decade of the 21st century, and we should neither expect nor require that things will always be as we fondly remember them from back then.

This edition of SMILE comes on the weekend when we farewell our office staff and say thank you for their work in the service of our parish community.   Their positions have become redundant because the significance of a parish office to the parish community has diminished.  Twenty years ago it seemed a bold even controversial move to shift the Parish Office out of the Presbytery.  Today it possibly strikes those who are were not around then (and those who were as wise then as the rest of us are now) that incorporating the Parish Office into the Presbytery was odd.

There are some who may wonder with the advance of technology whether a space designated as a dedicated “Parish Office” was actually necessary.  Given that so much can be stored electronically, that technology enables us to virtually (if not quite really) hold the world in the palm of our hand, that the paperless society seems achievable and even desirable, a good case has to be made for persisting with a room called an Office.

Our parish Finance and Management Committee have not gone to the extreme of taking away the Parish Office.  The Office will still be staffed, albeit at a reduced level, but communication with and beyond and around the Parish will still continue.  Indeed, it is the Committee’s intention to enhance communication, to show that the Parish is relevant to and part of people’s lives in this second decade of the 21st Century, and that by using the means at our disposal and embracing the new technologies we can continue to be a vibrant source of and witness to Christ’s love and justice and goodness.   We will be focussing on our mission statement: Bringing people closer to Christ.”

It is my intention to explore further ideas that have been presented to me over the last couple of years in relation to the use of technology to streamline administration systems, and how and what to communicate to parishioners through SMILE and the weekly notice sheet.  Both are currently part of our way of reaching out to our community and beyond: are they effective? How can they be improved?  How much information do people actually want on pieces of paper?

In the course of exploring how to change and what to change, I have been encouraged to take “one step at a time” and to “keep things simple.”   When I have not done this, and things have gone awry, I have been asked, “Are you really keeping things simple? Was that an example of one step at a time?”

Jesus after all did keep things simple, and realised he could only go one step at a time: his frustration grew when his disciples did not keep things simple, and tried taking more than one step at a time … He understood, as I read recently, that “before the new ways of the Kingdom could be adopted, the old ways had to be shown to be deficient and abandoned.”

It is not necessary to see the whole staircase, before one takes the first step.  But having advanced one step up, one does not have to remain satisfied with the view from that first step.