by Rebecka Colldunberg

St Peters Lutheran Church in Orange in central western New South Wales is a high church. That’s a term more commonly used in the Roman Catholic and Anglican traditions not typically associated with Lutheran churches.

But Pastor David Freckelton insists that the Orange Lutheran church is a high church. In fact, it’s the highest Lutheran church in Australia. In altitude, that is. It’s 860 metres above sea level.

The other part of the parish, Bathurst, has its own claim to fame. Two hundred kilometres west of Sydney, the provincial centre is home to the Mount Panorama Motor Racing Circuit. On the second Sunday in October, every self-respecting rev-head in Australia will switch on to Bathurst and will be locked there on the couch, unmoving, until the race is done.

David serves the Bathurst/Orange parish as a Specific Ministry Pastor (SMP). He has been the parish pastor for the last seven and a half years, after retiring from the New South Wales Department of Agriculture, where he worked for 40 years. With an average attendance of ten in Bathurst and 23 at Orange, the parish is too small in numbers to support a full-time pastor. Pastor David receives no salary but is paid travelling and office expenses.

At Bathurst in late 2009 four Chinese adults were baptised by Pastor David, following the guidance of Connie Hong Ning, a Christian lady from Sydney. Connie had worshipped at the Bathurst congregation before making her move to Sydney, but the congregation always retained a very special place in her heart.

When Connie’s new congregation, the Chinese Evangelical Free Church, felt called to do outreach mission among the Chinese students and workers in Bathurst, Connie immediately suggested that the leaders of the congregation get in touch with Pastor David.

‘When the Sydney Chinese congregations made contact with us, I was overjoyed that we had been chosen by God to help establish a mission to our Chinese brothers and sisters in our parish’, Pastor David recalls. ‘They are a wonderfully friendly group of people and very serious about spreading the word of God. A number of their group joined us for worship at Redeemer [Bathurst].’

The parish consists mainly of post-WWII migrants and their families, as well as a few native-born Australians. ‘So it was natural for us to welcome the Chinese people’, says Pastor David. ‘All races and people are part of God’s family, so why make any distinction?

You can read the rest of the story in the July 2011 edition, available from LCA Subscriptions. Full stories become available online three years after publication date.