Speaker & Worship Leader:- Rachel Mackintosh

Read below or download the PDF

Follow this shortcut to the bottom of the page for the various readings, videos, etc. shared in the service.

Rachel Mackintosh © 12th March 2023

A father and son are in a horrible car crash that kills the father. The eight-year-old son is rushed to hospital in critical condition. ED staff prep him rapidly and take him to an operating theatre where the surgical team is waiting. Just as he’s about to go under the knife, the surgeon says, “I can’t operate — that’s my son.”

How can this be?

I opened the service with this riddle. 

You may have heard it before.

You may have been confounded or you may have found the answer obvious.

Speaker and Worship Leader:- Rachel Mackintosh

Read below or download the PDF

Follow this shortcut to the bottom of the page for the various readings, videos, etc. shared in the service.

Rachel Mackintosh © 15th January 2023

If you think about the vastness of space, and how enormous our galaxy is, and how big our planet is, and how small we are, I’m not really eating all that much cheese.

Thanks to Kay for finding and sharing that.

with Rachel Mackintosh

Read below, or download the PDF

Follow this shortcut to the bottom of the page for the various readings, videos, etc. shared in the service.

Rachel Mackintosh © 23 October 2022

Ki te kahore he whakakitenga ka ngaro te iwi

“Without foresight or vision the people will be lost.”

This past week a colleague of mine who lives in Taranaki mentioned the town of Patea, which he described as being “nothing since the freezing works closed”.

For 100 years from 1883, the local freezing works had been the heart of the Patea economy. In 1982, the works closed. That’s 40 years ago – 40 years of “nothing”.

The freezing works closed without a vision or a plan for what else could be at the heart of the local economy.

Forty years on, the damage from that lack of foresight can still be felt.

with Rachel Mackintosh

Read below, or download the PDF

Follow this shortcut to the bottom of the page for the various readings, videos, etc. shared in the service.

Rachel Mackintosh © 21 August 2022

Burning Down the House was part of the soundtrack of my adolescence.

The song came out two years after the 1981 Springbok tour of New Zealand that had united a nationwide protest movement from across the political and socio-economic spectrum, where tens of thousands of us had marched together periodically in the year leading up to the tour, and twice a week from 19 July — my mother’s birthday and the day our family went to the airport at dawn to protest the Springboks’ arrival — to 12 September — the fourth anniversary of Steve Biko’s death from severe beating in custody and the date of the final test match of the tour. The second match — against the Waikato provincial team on 25 July — was called off after protesters invaded the pitch. Apart from that one match, the tour went ahead. The movement didn’t achieve its aim of stopping the tour.

The introduction to the subject of the tour on the NZ History website has the subheading, “A country divided”.

with Rachel Mackintosh

Read below, or download the PDF

Follow this shortcut to the bottom of the page for the various readings, videos, etc. shared in the service.

Rachel Mackintosh © 13 March 2022

What do you see when I show you this image?

Who do you see?

Do you project yourself on to this person?

Yes?

I don’t. I see a neutral person, not me.

Could it be a woman? Hard to imagine.

I see a man.

Could he be Māori? Doesn’t even occur to me.

Could he be disabled? Clearly doesn’t need a wheelchair, and invisible disabilities don’t enter my view.

Could it be a non-binary person?

What?

Is this person old?

No.

This is just a normal, average person.

A young white able-bodied man, that is. Did I not mention cisgender and heterosexual? Goes without saying.

Normal.

with Rachel Mackintosh

Read below, or download the PDF

Follow this shortcut to the bottom of the page for the various readings, videos, etc. shared in the service.

Rachel Mackintosh © 16 May 2021

The pandemic is a great rupture. Those who seek hastily to sew up the rupture and return to pre-pandemic normal are seeking to preserve a world where wealth is funnelled to the already wealthy at alarming rates, while millions upon millions pay.

The alternatives to a return to normal are political. It is a cliché that politics is the art of the possible. We are at a moment in the arc of history where what once was politically impossible is possible. We can now perform the art of the impossible. It will take all of us.

with Rachel Mackintosh

Read below or download the PDF

Rachel Mackintosh © 8 March 2020

The seeds of International Women’s day were sown the year my grandmother was born. In 1908, 15,000 women marched through New York City demanding shorter working hours, better pay and the right to vote. It was the Socialist Party of America who declared the first (US) national women’s day a year later.

The idea to make the day international came in 1910, at an international socialist conference of working women in Copenhagen. An attendee called Clara Zetkin suggested it and the100 women present from 17 countries unanimously agreed. The first international celebration was in 1911, in Austria, Germany, Denmark and Switzerland.