1 Speech of thanks to Fr Dennis Webster at a Farewell Evensong 25 th November 2017 My theme this evening is Encounter which may seem at odds with our purpose of gathering here at St Stephen s to farewell Fr Dennis. How do encounter and farewell connect? Encounter: When two people meet, they acknowledge one another, perhaps with a movement of their eyes or with a smile, a handshake, a kiss or more casually a High five. We are all familiar with these instinctive responses we use to open up an encounter. There is another form of greeting, a very old one, that works as well for greeting as for farewell. It goes like this: When two people encounter, both hands come up and the greeting of Namaste is given respectfully with a slight bow. At that moment, the meeting becomes transcendental as each has acknowledged the God or the holy in the other, making the encounter one with creation and eternity and with powerful creative forces such as love and respect, giving strength way beyond human frailties and opening up the forces of trust. Welcome to our visitors and Namaste to you all. Dennis, as your vicar s warden and on behalf of your previous vicar s wardens and the people of St Stephen s parish and the people of Richmond, it is time to give you our hearty thanks for your eight and a half years of service to us as part of our blessing of you and sending you on your way to new encounters in God s name. Thank you for running an inclusive and welcoming church, especially welcoming of refugees, of us as individuals and of people in need of healing and support. In fact, only the other day, I entered the vestry to see you in tears of joy at the news that one refugee, whom you had supported for five years, had come to announce, with tears of gratitude in his brown eyes, that he had been accepted.
2 Our worship in the round strengthens the human side of sharing with fellow worshippers. You always say with conviction at the high point of the mass, This is the table, not of the church, but of the Lord. All are welcome. Come. And that is central and pivotal. Ollie Hodson, a former Warden, writes, Through this active inclusion, the parish was not about insiders and outsiders, but truly about equals, coming as they are, meeting Christ and meeting each other. We have been enriched by your great liturgical writing skills. Every week, we have worshipped from a service booklet containing beautiful, cohesive and nuanced liturgies, well aligned with the church season while also responding to current world or local problems and concerns through prayer and hymns. In Geoff Clarke s words, you have kept us moving liturgically and challenging us to think what we were doing in God s presence. Thank you. You have sought to share the assets here, opening up the gardens to passers- by and sharing the acoustically remarkable church interior to many groups and performers. You have connected us with the local community and the community with us. Your musical understanding inclined you to accepting the XL Arts initiative to provide promising young musicians opportunities to consolidate their training and expertise. Many other groups practise and perform here too. You have been an open-minded priest. You have welcomed groups fighting addiction in their search for wholeness, allowing them to meet here in secure and private conditions. When parishioners have indicated a new direction in their faith journey, you blessed them on their way.
3 You have encouraged a wide discussion of issues and theology. You have advocated strongly for a safe injecting room in Richmond and also for the Docker Street park, both enriching quality of life. As chairperson of the Richmond Churches Food Centre, you have led it from strength to strength, which has been essential given the everincreasing demand for food aid. Currently, the Food Centre assists over 500 people each week and your work establishing a constitution has given it the strength to meet new guidelines and requirements. You also chaired the meetings dedicated to appointing the first paid manager of the Food Centre. You put real time in at the Centre and helped to resolve conflicts and problems. Your commitment to people having a second chance in life shone through in this setting. Your arithmetic even stretches to third and fourth and fifth chances in life. You were willing to try out work for the dole appointments which have been a great success with skilled workers dedicated to the Food Centre ethos and needs. Because the Food Centre is an ecumenical project, when chairing committee meetings, you ensured that each church had a chance to report on their plans and activities and to organize ecumenical events such as the Good Friday Stations of the Cross held in each of the churches along the way. I valued that sharing and cohesiveness as a well-spring of our witness to God s love through the Food Centre. During your incumbency here at St Stephen s you have overseen the restoration of our historic church, whose erection commenced in 1849 when we were still part of the colony of New South Wales. You adjusted to worshipping in the hall in the first instance and, during the subsequent maintenance works, you tolerated scaffolding, dust, construction sounds while keeping parish life and worship alive and healthy. More recently, you have encouraged us to take on the conservation of our historic 1865 Walker organ which will commence this Summer, and we look forward to inviting you back to enjoy playing on the conserved instrument. You will be leaving the site of St Stephen s far more beautiful than you found it and far more likely to endure through buffeting of time and season.
4 Having been a prison chaplain earlier in your ministry, you were willing to take aboard the services of Corrections Victoria teams to help with restoration of the Church grounds. It was part of your second chance philosophy and over the years it has developed into a quiet and effective ministry. For many of the participants, the fact that we treat them with respect, entrust them with jobs to do and express our thanks and appreciation, it is the first time in their lives that they have experienced such things. You like to talk to the team members and to answer their questions which is also appreciated. The whole garden renewal initiative culminated in September with the blessing of the new memorial garden by Bishop Genieve. So the site is externally transformed as well as internally and your initiative in being ready to welcome the Corrections Victoria teams has been decisive. A good priest must be multi-skilled and you lavished your skills upon us: your facility with legal and constitutional matters when responding to the Parish Governance Act of 2013 for instance, or applying for Heritage Victoria approvals, the Cy Pres application, other grants and ensuring our parish met new regulations. Your problem- solving skills and IT skills. Besides parish work, you have served the VCC Emergency Ministries, the Interfaith Church Council, the Victorian Council of Churches as their Vice-President and shared Friday worship with the Community of the Holy Name at Cheltenham. You have supported the Supervised Theological Field Education programme, training, with the help of parish committees, Elizabeth Brakey and Judith Lake who have gone on to ordination from here and Moe Win Tunkin to be ordained next year. Each one with gifts to bring that you were able to trust, cultivate and encourage. You have avoided being too inward-looking and have led us outwards to St Stephen s Mae Sot where we support a partner parish among Karen refugees in Thailand. That has opened our prayer and giving horizons. At another time, you welcomed the Little Bourke Street Chinese Christian community to worship in our Hall during their church reconstruction and we shared some bi-lingual services.
5 Closer to home, you have instituted hospital communions at the Epworth Hospital which has brought great comfort to many patients and which helps us to keep the staff and patients in our prayers. You see worship occurring in many places beyond this beautiful historic church and you value brief, fleeting encounters as much as longer term encounters. Local residents turn to you, refugees turn to you, vagrants turn to you and you give them advice, translate and explain documents, refer them to relevant sources of specialist help. You keep street packs in the vestry so that no one need go home empty-handed. You even once provided emergency sleeping quarters when someone had nowhere else to safely shelter and lay down his head. You attend endless hours of court cases and appeals to help individuals gain residency status or meet charges against them. You aim to improve life whenever and wherever possibleorganising school fees to enable a bright student to study, organizing links with a dialysis patient, taking lonely people out for a meal to name just a few. And you have provided all the coffee we have consumed over your time with us. Thank you for all you have done. This brings me to the crux of our thanks, Dennis. You give so generously. It has all been done without fanfare and probably no one but you knows the full extent of your giving. You give to the point of exhaustion. You seek to improve strangers lots even when they are abrasive, threatening, disappointing, at inconvenient hours, whatever is needed. And so Dennis, linking in with my theme, I would like to call you this evening our Namaste priest- the one who sees God in all. But how did you sustain such dedication and compassion? I believe you live the Gospel of love and forgiveness because you value it above all other things. I believe when you see someone in need, hungry, homeless, grieving, tormented, it is a Namaste moment, you see God in them. The spirit of the Lord has rested on you bringing wisdom and understanding and you judge the poor righteously.
6 But it is more than that. I know that the encounter of the rich man with Christ recorded by Mark in Chapter 10 is an inspirational passage underpinning your ministry. The rich man had tried to live a dutiful life but was probably never going to give all his riches to the poor as Christ was to advise him. The description of Jesus listening to his burning question of What must I do to enter the kingdom of God? deeply moves and guides you. Knowing that the rich man may never be able to sever his life from wealth, may never fully embrace God s way, Jesus looked at him in the acutely insightful way we know was his hallmark. He did not berate the man, or belittle him, or banish his hopes. He looked at him and loved him. Basing your ministry on this model of Christ s love places you as a dedicated gospel priest. Dennis, if we had time, we could go around the church and ask each person to identify one of your gifts to them. I know we could think of many. But we don t have such time so I will dwell on two wonderful parting gifts you will be leaving with us. You have led us to many encounters with God s word and love and you are leaving us with the vibrant challenge of following in your footsteps and being Namaste parishioners in Richmond and beyond and continuing your theo-local presence in the community. You have constantly reminded us that all things are possible with God. We will remember your feeding of the hungry, your inviting in of the stranger and your giving of clothes and life necessities and we will know that you did it in the name of Christ, and so should we. The second parting gift is your music. Having a composer in our midst has been such a privilege. We have sung with pride your psalms, hymns and settings of the mass. I can recall times when an urge to compose has inspired you. You have dashed over to the vicarage and returned a little later with a print out of your new composition. In fact
7 the beautiful setting of psalm 100 was composed by you especially for this Evensong. Once you are elsewhere, the link with your music will be a treasure for us. We give thanks to God, Dennis, that with all our flaws and frailties, you looked at each one of us and loved us. May God bless you and keep you in your going out from St Stephen s Richmond and your coming into St Paul s, the Church of the Resurrection and St John s in Gisborne, Macedon and Riddell s Creek. May you experience deep joy in your new ministry there. Namaste. At this point, I call upon Hedley Potts to carry forward our link both ways with your faith as expressed through music. Hedley. Elaine Warne