Sunday School on the Move in Ashhurst

Here at St Mary Magdalene in the Parish of Pohangina in Ashhurst we are on a restore and rebuild journey with God as our partner and at our side every step we have made, writes Parish Property Rep Neil O’Fee.

We are blessed with the beautiful 120-year-old historic St Mary Magdalene church, stunning on the inside but recently so badly in need of some care and paint on the outside. No one really wanted to talk about it as understandably none of our aging parishioners were up to such a mammoth task, and the cost to professionally prepare and repaint seemed daunting. 

We also had a small unattractive 1950’s era hall with good bones but with a leaking roof, rusty louver windows, no hot running water and a non-compliant kitchen. 

And finally, a separate Sunday School building that was a former school room moved onto the site some 50 years ago and lately used as a dumping ground for damaged Christmas trees, unloved furniture, ancient trestle tables and so on. 

It was pretty hard to have any serious missional aspirations for the Parish and village when our hall in particular, was not fit for purpose. I am sure this scenario may be very familiar for many of our parishes out there. 

It all seemed pretty daunting so we prayed, invited the Holy Spirit into our situation and things started to happen and fast. God came to the rescue, in so many ways. 

First, the David Luke Trust, (David Luke is the grandson of the original Architect of our church Frederick de Jersey Clere) granted us the bulk of the cost of preparing and painting the church. A wonderful firm of painters scraped, sanded and finished the church in gleaming historic white for a very reasonable sum and to a very high standard.  

Second, our Parish leader, Lay Minister Lyn O’Fee, supported by our vestry and parish leadership team, had a vision to turn our aging hall into a larger functional and welcoming venue for our growing village, fulfilling our Parish mission statement to be “A Place to Belong”. This would be a missional place where we could welcome the many young families to our parish and to the Lord. It is our belief that sharing experiences both as a church and village is an important part of our Christian life and a valuable means of fulfilling our aim to grow as a spiritual community. We encourage opportunities for our fellowship to gather with our ever growing wider community for shared food, discussion, prayer and other social activities.

We first started the journey by restoring the existing hall to be that welcoming place. We re-roofed, fitted new soffit, new spouting, new aluminum windows and doors, and gave it a modern plaster and paint job on the outside. With work delayed by Covid the renovation still came in at the quoted pre-Covid pricing. The goodwill and grace of suppliers was amazing, one even only billing us for half the agreed amount as a donation to the church. Again, the Lord’s hand was with us every step of the process. And now one more step, we are on the cusp of adding another 13m to the hall with a prayer room, commercial kitchen, new toilets and disability facilities. This project, council building permits permitting, will break ground early in 2024. 

We do have funds in hand along with generous donations and pledges from parishioners. This extension is to occupy the space where the old Sunday School was located, therefore it had to go. We had an estimate of up to $40,000 to demolish it, or we could try and sell it. Before we could get it on Trade Me one of our leaders knew a bloke who knew a bloke that might be interested. 

Well God works very fast sometimes, the interested party turned out be a local Christian farmer Daniel and his family (not one of our parishioners) who have an open home policy and a heart for those in need. Our Sunday school would be moved to his farm for accommodation for a man recently released from Corrections. A fair and appropriate donation to the church was agreed upon. 

Within three days he had organised a local (again Christian) house moving company to pick it up and move it the 5km to its new home. With the building gone we were left with the daunting and potentially expensive prospect of getting rid of approximately 30 very heavy concrete piles. So another call to Daniel and yes we could dump the piles in a gully at his place and could we please borrow a tractor loader and farm trailer to get them there. 

No problem, within an hour and a half he, wife and daughter with John Deere loader and farm trailer arrived, removed all the piles, posts and miscellaneous concrete and graded the site clean. Now only the massive pile of excess timber and fencing to deal with. As we stood chatting by the loaded trailer another local farmer Bradley stopped his tractor at the gate and walked across to say gidday, Daniel introduced him to me then says to him, “you have a burn pile don’t you? We need to get of this pile of timber and pull out this fencing?” 

Bradley says, “no problem, I will take care of it”, again such amazing generosity from our community. When we arrived at church the next morning it was all gone, a clean slate for the new building. 

One of our current favourite songs is “Yet not I but through Christ in me”. God must have wonderful plans for this building, we can’t wait. 

By Neil O’Fee