Anglican Church

ST MARTIN'S - BOROKO

St Martin's is our most "international" parish, with parishioners from many countries - Africa, India, Sri Lanka, England, Australia and more as well as from all parts of Papua New Guinea. Its liturgies reflect this mix and are lively and exciting. It also has many of our Anglican community leaders who provide sound leadership and are influential in the planning and development of the Church. Unlike the other parishes so far mentioned, very few of the parishioners actually live in Boroko, most travelling from all parts of the city. This has difficulties when they try and organise discussion groups or sessions in the evening. Very few people are willing to travel around the city at night because of the security problems and as there is no public transport after sunset it is difficult to move anyway. Yet they still manage to have a number of groups which meet to pray and to share and to help in the planning of the pastoral and spiritual life of the parish.

The parish priest, Fr Patrick Doulin has only just moved into the parish with his wife Adele. They come from Brisbane and Fr Patrick is responsible for the clergy inservice programme (afternoon session). He and his wife will be taking on responsibility for developing this programme and for looking at ways of making it available across the Province.

This is the only parish with a deacon (Wilford) and much of his ministry is concentrated on the six mile settlement (chapel of St Lucien Tapiedi) where we have a small Anglican presence. This is a community of Highlanders, who, while living close to the centre of the city, live in difficult conditions. Like the other settlement's there are problems with alcohol and drug abuse and domestic violence is a major cause of family disruption. Again, the Churches play an important and growing role in addressing these issues.

St Martins is in the process of building a new Church and have almost completed the outside sections. They have had an amazingly bad run of bad luck with the building companies though, with some walls having to be rebuilt, with enormous drainage problems and difficulties in keeping the weather out. But they remain optimistic that the work will be completed by the end of the year.