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Dunedin Methodist Parish
Finding good in everyone Finding God in everyone
www.dunedinmethodist.org.nz
Presbyters: / Rev. Stuart & Rev. Cornelia Grant / 453 6762Parish Stewards: / Dr George Davis / 453 6540
Dr Richard Cannon / 477 5030
Mrs Fay Richardson / 489 5485
Tongan Steward: / Mr Palanite Taungapeau / 456 3144
Parish Office: / Stuart:
Cornelia:
Sarah: / 466 4600
WORSHIP FOR SUNDAY 1st AUGUST
9.30am / Mornington / S Grant
9.30 am / Mosgiel / C Grant
11.00 am / Glenaven / S Grant
11.00 am / Wesley / C Grant
1.00pm / St Kilda / Comb. Wesley
6.00pm / Broad Bay / S Grant
EXPLORERS GROUP
Meets today at 4-30pm in the Mornington Church Lounge, and it is anticipated that the discussion will centre on Karen Armstrong's "Charter of Compassion." All interested people welcome.
MORNINGTON METHODIST WOMEN’S FELLOWSHIP -
Next Meeting will be held in the Church Lounge at 2 p.m. on Wednesday 28th July.
Come along & hear about the "Biking Adventures in Central Otago" by two very fit women - Joy Clark & Sue Galloway.
MORNINGTON LEADERS MEETING
This coming Tuesday, 27 July, 7.30pm.
INVITATION: ON PEACE SUNDAY 8 AUGUST
Glenaven is having a pot-luck lunch after the 11am service, with hot drinks provided. All welcome to Chambers St, NEV. We are also inviting parishioners from All Saints, where Rev Michael Wallace is now vicar. People are welcome to come into the church during the 11-12 service, as worshipping together will be part of the experience, and we will stay in the church to eat at our new round tables.
MOSGIEL BIBLE QUIZ – NZ BIBLE SOCIETY
Join us for a fun night! Saturday 21st August, 7pm.
St Lukes on the Taieri. Quiz questions will be from the books of Jonah, Luke (chapters 5-8) and general bible knowledge. Entry $5 per person (4-6 people per team). Proceeds will go towards paper for Bibles in China. To register your team contact Stephen White (03)487-8177.
CELLISTS OF OTAGO
The Cellists of Otago concert will be held in the Southern Sinfonia rooms 110 Moray Place (Carnegie Building) at 3pm on Sunday 1 August. Please come along and help us raise some funds for the Southern Sinfonia.
The concert will feature the premiere of Anthony Ritchie'sTheme and Variations for Celloswritten specially for the group. Soloists will be Myles Chen (cello) accompanied by Dr Mark Bevin, and Genevieve Davidson (classical saxophone) accompanied by city organist David Burchell.
The Cellists of Otago is in its fourth year, having been started by Dr Gregory Hamilton and continued under the direction of Mrs Judith Davis. Twelve members of the 20 strong group will be playing in this concert. The next concert, and last for the 2010 season will be on 19 September, in the Roslyn Presbyterian Church, 19 Highgate.
Anglican Family Care will be having a small ‘40th birthday celebration” on 19th August 2010, at Mornington Presbyterian Community Centre, 16 Maryhill Terrace, Mornington, 4.00 to 7.30pm.
Any Methodist parishioners, ex-Board personnel that were involved when we were Anglican-Methodist Family Care, and would be interested in attending, please contact Lynne Campbell, Ph: (03) 474-7270; Email: .
CHANGES TO MORNINGTON MWF PROGRAMME
At our recent AGM, Mornington MWF decided to reduce our number of meetings to one per month. So the programme for the remainder of the year will alternate between Afternoon and Evening meetings.
They will be held at the usual dates and times of Wednesday 28 July 2pm, Monday 9 August 7.45pm, Thursday 29 Sept 7.45pm, Monday 11 October 7.45 pm, Monday 8 Nov 7.45pm.
There will also be a social event (Spring Outing) in October (but there will be no meetings on 25 Aug or 13 Sept).
Further notice and a new programme will be coming, but in the meantime, please update your old programme with these dates.
OPEN EDUCATION PROGRAMME: Many thanks to Colin Gibson for a fascinating look last Wednesday evening at the oldest city in the world, Jericho. Thanks also to Judy Russell and team for another excellent meal. What a pity the lights went out before we could conclude the evening over supper!
There will be no Open Education event during August. The next one will be held on Tuesday 14 September.
JIM WALLIS IN DUNEDIN, 28 September 2010
An invitation has come from Andrew Bradstock, Director of the Centre for Theology and Public Issues, giving details of an event to take place at First Church, Moray Place, on Tuesday, 28 September.
Jim Wallis is the internationally renowned founder and director of the Sojourners Community in Washington, D.C. He will deliver a major lecture on faith, ethics and public issues as part of a half day conference hosted by the Centre for Theology and Public Issues. Jim is a leading author, speaker and international commentator on faith and public life, and one of President Obama’s advisers on religious and ethical issues.
His most well known book, God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It changed the US political landscape and was on the New York Times bestseller list for 4 months.
Full information on this event can be found at www.otago.ac.nz/jimwallis. Tickets can be booked online NOW at $20, including refreshments.
Early booking is advised, as it is expected that tickets will go quickly.
CONGRATULATIONS to Ian Bartlett on achieving 72% in Methodist Studies, a course he has undertaken through EIDTS (Ecumenical Institute of Distance Theological Studies); a great achievement for a man in his 80s. Perhaps Ian may inspire others to take up some studies. EIDTS offers courses in Hebrew Scriptures, New Testament, Church in history and Context, Theology, and Ministry Studies and is NZQA approved.
There are pamphlets available at church or from Stuart or Cornelia giving further details.
2010 PROGRAMME
Morning prayer each day Mon-Friday from 8am-9am upstairs in the Link. Contact Helen Harray 027 473 0042
Sunday 25th July 3-5pm Street clean. Meet on corner of Dundas and Castle Streets. Contact Josh Eyre 027 555 3766
Monday 26th July 12 -1.30pm Interfaith dialogue. Venue: Gazebo Lounge. Contact : Angela Loosli 021 161 7536 021 161 7536
Tuesday 27 8am-9am Prayer upstairs in the Link Wednesday 28th 12.30-1.15 pm Worship in te reo Maori (followed by refreshments) - linked with Maori Language Week, at All Saints Anglican Church, 786 Cumberland Street Contact: Greg Hughson 027 212 1048
Wednesday 28th 1pm “How the other half lives - a look at Global poverty” Neill Ballantyne (Global Poverty Project) and Jayne Pelz (TSCF) Venue: Burns 1 lecture theatre. Contact Neill Ballantyne: 027 6999 712
Thursday 29th 8pm Evening event with music, items, equipping & encouraging! Venue: The Hub (next to Elim Christian Centre in Harrow Street) Contact: Rabena Kini 027 697 3657 To be followed by “Bring the Love” from 10pm Contact: Aaron Thomson 021 843288
Friday 30th 8am-9am Prayer upstairs in the Link
EVERYONE IS WELCOME AT ALL EVENTS www.otagoccg.co.nz
Chocolate morality
Funny how your sense of morality can disintegrate, and sometimes quite rapidly. This month, perhaps encouraged by the Cadbury Chocolate Carnival here in Dunedin, I’ve thought often about chocolate and been left with doubt.
For me, buying fair trade chocolate has long been a no-brainer. If a given food can’t be locally grown, then I want the imported stuff to have been grown by workers who get a decent wage, have some self-determination and are not, therefore, slaves. That makes it sound like it is a brainer, but by no-brainer I mean the in-store chocolate-buying process is automatic: see fair trade logo, pick flavour, don’t read price and don’t read nutritional garble, does packaging trigger any plastic-related alarms? If no, proceed to checkout.
Sometimes I am forced to question the “don’t read price” part. Some people see it as inherently moral to save money. I don’t, if I think the ethics are right in the spending or giving of it. Still, one recent night I had a couple of friends around, and they noticed a price sticker that was on a block of chocolate I produced for us to eat.
“You paid fifteen dollars for this,” one of them said, shocked.
“Really? Fifteen?” I said. It has been a while since I’ve checked the price of chocolate but I thought that sounded steep.
They confirmed we had in our midst a fifteen-dollar 100g block of raw, organic, vegan, unbleached-paper-packaged, kosher (certified by Rabbi Meir Gershon Rabi), single-origin (Satipo Peru), fair-trade criollo dark chocolate. I wondered if I had gone too far in my quest for ethically correct chocky; if I had inadvertently become my own bête noir, the ostentatious displayer of wealth.
After a munching pause, one of my friends said, “That probably just reflects the true cost of producing chocolate; sustainably anyway.”
It was a statement I could latch on to, and eagerly did. Back in the saddle of my moral high horse, I was able to ride happily off into the sunset of that wintry day.
Then a week or so later I met a poor woman. I knew she was poor because, she said, she was living with her six kids in one rented room in a student flat not far from Glenaven, and the flatmates had mould on their toothbrushes such was the state of the bathroom. She did not like to shower there, so would shower instead at the place where she earned her limited means from sex work. Her kids she would encourage to sleep – and wash – at their friends’ houses.
The woman spoke matter-of-factly; the occasion was a festive one and, though intent on getting out of her desperate predicament, she was not looking for pity. Which, I suppose, is how come the conversation also traversed the topic of chocolate. She liked Reese’s Pieces by Hershey, she said. I had tried them and could honestly agree: peanut butter and chocolate was a good taste combo. I was not about to raise my concerns about the exploitation of workers in faraway places, nor even about how all the main chocolate brands are gradually degrading the quality of their product to save money (inherently moral?) and consumers should demand better. These Reese’s Pieces were obviously little pleasures in a life that had few.
Besides, maybe I was a hypocrite with my lofty commercial righteousness. I hadn’t managed to make that woman’s life any better, for all of my targeted spending. Why hadn’t I thought about New Zealand’s domestic refugees (which in practical terms, she and her family were) when I skipped lightly through supermarket aisles?
I’m still waiting for my melted morality to set firm once more, I’m afraid, so I have no solid-as-chocolate conclusion to offer. It’s got as far as this: I still don’t want my luxuries to be dependent on foreign slave labour, but poverty forces many New Zealanders into a reliance on foreign slave labour for theirs. The only thing I am sure is wrong is The System.
– A. C.
Oxfam this week launched a campaign called “Save the Fair Trade Banana”, as the sole importer is not succeeding in selling its Ecuadorian cargo to enough stockists to make fair trade bananas worth bringing to New Zealand. Saving the fair trade banana, therefore, can involve: 1. buying fair trade bananas from existing stockists (Centre City New World is one), which helps show potential stockists the demand exists. 2. Asking non-stockists to stock the bananas.
AND MORE on the theme of chocolate, from the Fair Trade Association publication, “Fair & Square”, see next page.
The Stop the Traffik campaign is continuing to encourage consumers to ask chocolate manufacturers to sign up to the ‘Traffik Free Chocolate Pledge’.
With thousands of trafficked children forced to work in the cocoa industry, the campaign seeks chocolate companies commitment to ensuring the cocoa beans used in their products have not been harvested by trafficked labour.
To download a copy of the ‘Traffik Free Chocolate Pledge’ and for more information go to:
www.stopthetraffik.org.au/campaigns/chocolate.asp
A recently released UN Global Impact report on human trafficking has also revealed the extent of the situation and the need for businesses across the globe to realise and respond to the ways in which their operations and dealings may be positively or negatively impacting the situation.
TRAFFICKING
IS THE
FASTEST
GROWING
MEANS BY WHICH
PEOPLE ARE
CAUGHT IN THE
TRAP OF
SLAVERY