James & Charly Boardman and their kids have been in the Parish of Kelso since January this year. It’s been a huge year for them as the church is celebrating its bicentenary. James tells us more:

I like to say we hit the ground sprinting in Kelso. For the first four months, there was a bicentenary celebration almost every second weekend. This provided a wonderful opportunity to engage with people who are in our church’s orbit, don’t have a Christian background, but like the church on top of the hill.

First, we had two cemetery tours, which were really well attended. And I was very excited by the Holy Spirit moment when I got to stand up and say, “If you enjoyed tonight and the 200 years of history of people who stayed in the grave, why don’t you come on a Sunday morning and hear the 2000-year history about people who come out the grave?”.

Our baptism and wedding display had 200 people attend over two days. The church also runs two fetes a year which raise a significant amount of money for the parish. The first one had about 800 people coming through. This is a great opportunity for outreach, so I asked one of our BCA partner churches, St Paul’s Castle Hill, to bring a team across. The team did face painting and balloon animals. We had many opportunities to invite people to church, and some came!

The Bicentenary celebration itself was a wonderful occasion. We invited various local dignitaries and leaders of other denominations to come. The main draw card was Archbishop of Sydney Kanishka Raffel, and I believe this was Kanishka’s first official act as Metropolitan of New South Wales. He preached on 1 Peter 2:4–10, about the church being built on Christ. The service was led by Bishop Mark, and we had around 120 people attend. After the service we installed a 2025 stone on our gate, made by one of our parishioners (see right). The gate was built for our centenary, so it was nice to have matching plaques for 1925 and 2025.

In August we had a high tea, we will run another cemetery tour in September, and then host an organ recital in November with a prominent Sydney organist. Preceding the organ recital, we are running a five-week evangelistic course called Hymns We Love. This will look at five familiar hymns like ‘How great that art’, and explain the theological significance behind the words. Those five hymns are going to be part of the repertoire played at the recital. There seems to be a modern trend of Gen Z seeking more traditional service styles, particularly because the timelessness in those services transcends changes in society, so my prayer is that we attract a lot of people.

This time last year our church was averaging 25 people on a Sunday. For most of this year we’ve averaged about 45 people. Some have come through bicentenary events, and others have been invited by their friends. I’m really encouraged by how many of our congregation are inviting people to church.

In our church there is one young boy who was the only child for the last 10 years, so with the addition of our three, we started the year with four children each week. We’ve had others join, including a young girl who was baptised here in 2014 who has returned with her Mum, then someone who did Hope Explored at the Cathedral has been coming on and off with his son. One lady from church brought her granddaughter, and we’ve had a new family join, so recently we had nine kids! That young boy who was on his own at church for so long is over the moon.

There is certainly a lot to give thanks to God for.