We’ve been clearing some old documents out of the dank crypt this week and one or two interesting things have emerged. Not least a couple of photographs from 1962.
We forget now that we photograph anything and everything all the time that in previous decades a photo was relatively rare.
This one was taken at the church door in 1962 and used in a stewardship brochure. I’ve already posted it on Facebook and there have been a few comments to the effect that it is interesting that the congregation was using a picture of an ethnicly mixed group of people in order to ask for money in 1962. The internationality of the congregation has ebbed and flowed through the years and feels very much who we are at the moment so it does seem significant that this image was used at that point in the congregation’s history.
And then there is the dog. We do like our dogs at St Mary’s. Then and now.
The only other thing I have to say is – “hats!”
I have just been acting as a locum priest in rural Hawaii for the last month. I was not quite prepared for the ethnic diversity of that parish. Caucasian Americans of course, but also indigenous Hawaiians, third and fourth generation Japanese Americans, and three generations of Filipinos some of whom don’t appear to speak English well (or at all ) …brought in as sugar workers/farmers…
in our own diocese in Adelaide, South Australia, a colleague was telling me that the largest congregations are now Sudanese and Burundi refugees, with two growing Mandarin speaking groups, and others from the sub continent. The catholic diversity of the Anglican community is a wonderful manifestation of incarnation