TLC for PNG
FROM a low-church background in Torquay to giving vital back-up to a part of the Anglican Communion which has sometimes been reported (quite mistakenly, she assures me) to be paddling its canoes across the Tiber, Chris Luxton’s journey still seems to surprise her.
After 22 years, she is handing over the secretariate of the Papua New Guinea Church Partnership to her successor, Louise Ewington.
“In all those years, Chris has been unfailingly kind to the parishes and people throughout the UK who have supported the mission in that wonderful country,” the Very Revd Gerald Stranraer-Mull, former Dean of Aberdeen & Orkney, tells me.
She has been the sole paid worker for the Partnership in Britain, keeping people in touch with its news and recruiting suitable mission partners for the country, which has 863 languages. Mrs Luxton is keeping up her involvement with the Pacific Islands Society and the Melanesian Mission. So she may yet worship again in the shade of the popondo tree, but her usual choice is St Philip’s, Earls Court Road.
She was in two minds about taking the job all those years ago; but any doubts were spirited away when she noticed that the first Anglican missionaries, Albert Maclaren and Copland King, landed in New Guinea on 10 August — which happens to be her birthday.
That was a red-letter day, indeed, in 1991, when she found herself on Kaieta beach with her bag, camera, and anti-malarials, for the great centenary celebration with Dr Carey — and the news came through, via John McCarthy, that the hostage Terry Waite was alive and well.
Since then, she has visited several times. She has photographed a Companion of the Melanesian Brotherhood in his fur hat and tanget of croton leaves (“as gras” in Tok Pisin, the local pidgin). At remote Mamusi, the Melanesian Brothers took the people clothes: they were glad not to spend all day making fires, and also wanted metal axes, which would be labour-saving for the women.
Rome regards its relations with Anglicans in PNG as a model, I gather. The old Comity of Missions agreement divided the country into denominational areas, but now the Churches work together closely, particularly on HIV/AIDS.
The Partnership still has a big part to play in raising awareness of a country that people rarely hear about, Mrs Luxton says. Her message is: don’t give only to the big aid agencies. “I’m lucky to have worked for such an interesting place.”
pngcp.com
Fanfare for a bride
IT IS a long way from Suffolk to the gum trees at Mungabareena, but they seem much nearer now that Archdeacon Peter Macleod-Miller, Rector of St Matthew’s, Albury, in Australia, has stepped in to rescue wedding arrangements that had been spoiled by rain.
There was a break in the drought that had lasted for a generation; so a change of venue from under the gum trees was required for a Wiradjuri bride, Liz Cameron, 28, and her groom, Ariel Barbas, 29, who migrated to Australia from the Philippines when he was 13.
Archdeacon Mcleod-Miller, who moved from his Suffolk parish in January to Albury, on the border of New South Wales and Victoria, shared the liturgical honours on the big day with Pastor Darren Wighton from an Aboriginal church.
“He wore our new St Matthew’s cope made by Mary Collings in Suffolk, and he is designing a new altar frontal for us,” which she will also make, the Archdeacon says.
Below is a picture of the group, including Pastor Wighton — easy to spot with his didgeridoo. What’s a gum tree when you have music?
Below is a picture of the group, including Pastor Wighton — easy to spot with his didgeridoo. What’s a gum tree when you have music?
Clapton sect
OUR legal report (News, 10 September) about a will referring to the Ancient Catholic Church, in Clapton, north London, intrigued the Revd Dr Kenneth Leech, who draws my attention to its former association with the Abode of Love and John Smyth Pigott.
Smyth Pigott was one of those disreputable clergy characters who demonstrate why it is sometimes the best thing to unfrock a priest, brutal though that may seem.
But Dr Leech knew the church during its later occupancy by Archbishop Nicholson. The “Patriarch” who consecrated Nicholson was probably Hugh de Wilmott Newman, Patriarch of Glastonbury, who, like other episcopi vagantes, took the view that the more lines of succession you could establish, the more valid your orders were.
“I think the people in Clapton and Stoke Newington had no idea what to make of it,” Dr Leech says. But the painter Sir Alfred Munnings was a strong supporter, and it specialised in animal services, which in the 1950s and ’60s, I suppose, were not part of “real life” in the C of E.
We, the jury
AN ELEGANT room was set out as if for a bring-and-buy. Queen Mary looked down benignly from a full-length portrait. Perhaps she thought she was in Gorringe’s again.
By the magic of PR, I was at a jury event for the Product of the Year, at the Institute of Directors in Pall Mall, judging about 25 products out of 100 or so, most of them testimony to someone’s ingenuity in devising variations on a theme — a lighter kind of Twix, for example, or a new variety of Heinz Salad Cream.
Lunch conversation had settled into shopping-channel vein when I was introduced to a thoughtful former Big Brother housemate, Ben, and had the chance to find out what I’ve always wanted to know, which is how the housemates manage for Sunday worship when they are stuck inside the house on TV.
The nearest to it, he said, was the conversations that they had with a born-again housemate whose commitment and inner joyfulness were compelling. He himself likes the sort of church that I like; but it doesn’t seem that anyone suggested being let out for an hour or two to attend one.
To my mind, you must have at least a hint of Leonard Wilson or Terry Waite about you not to go bonkers in the Big Brother house. But I would also say that of a retreat house I once stayed in.
Ruffled diner
I HEAR that Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamsk, chairman of the Department of External Church Relations of the Moscow Patriarchate, gave the Nikaean Club a wigging at its dinner in Lambeth Palace last week.
The club, which exists to further Anglican relations with other Christian Churches, listened meekly to the Metropolitan’s admonitions regarding women bishops and priests, and Bishop Gene Robinson; but when he also complained of the Church of England’s backing for euthanasia, the Archbishop of Canterbury was prompted to reply, politely but firmly, that it was innocent of anything of the kind.
Beckett shrine
THE human-resources manager at Canterbury Cathedral has married and is now T. Beckett. It’s Tanya rather than Thomas (and definitely not Traitor). Her husband is Peter.