Tag: Church and Community

Busselton Uniting Church held its inaugural Christmas Carols BBQ in December 19 and, given the response, it seems set to become an annual event.

A major focus for our church this year has been to better integrate the various parts of our church family, and the carols gathering showed we are on the right track. The 100-plus crowd consisted of Sunday morning regulars, Messy Church and Boppin Totts families, plus volunteers and friends from our various outreach activities (community café and op shop.)

As the sausages sizzled, Rev Brenton Prigge, First Third specialist for the South West Region, told the Christmas story, even using some of the children as live ‘props.’ Each part of the story was interspersed with carols, led by a band of young people from church.

The Billabong Community Centre has been a long term project for Billabong Uniting Church. Hard work has finally paid off, as the centre officially opened its doors on Sunday 4 October.

The congregation celebrated with an opening worship service and a Grand Opening Community Festival, a family  friendly community event complete with a petting zoo, bouncy castle, face painting and plenty of games for young and old alike.

The Billabong Community Centre has been built with the local community in mind. The centre has purpose built function rooms which can be booked out by various community groups, including a main kitchen, upstairs and downstairs rooms, a meeting  room, a resource library and a large outdoor grassed area. There is also a playgroup room which has its own kitchen and outside playground area which is perfect for children’s birthday parties. Kids clubs, exercise classes and conferences have already started taking place at the centre.

St Andrew’s on St Georges Terrace, is the church where my parents were married in 1943 and where I went to annual church services as a PLC student. Probably the last service I attended, the church was packed for the funeral of Heather Barr, principal of PLC and lifelong St Andrew’s member who died suddenly and unexpectedly in 1989. Those are my memories of St Andrew’s.

I’ve begun this article with personal memories because in my research I have found plenty of information on the building but very little on the people who worshipped faithfully each week, whose life milestones of baptism, marriage and death were celebrated there. And yet it is people who are the church, not the building.

The birth of St Andrew’s began with the arrival of Rev David Shearer. Through the joint action of the colonial committees of the Established and Free Churches of Scotland, he was commissioned to plant the ‘blue banner’ of Presbyterianism in the colony of Perth, Western Australia. He arrived at Fremantle with his wife, Margaret, and seven children, plus governess, on 1 October 1879. Not one to waste time, he held his first service ten days later in St George’s Hall, Hay Street. His sermon was preached from the deck of HMS Pinafore, the set of the Gilbert and Sullivan musical comedy performed there the previous night.