Imagine you’ve arrived late for church and as you gaze through the glass doors on your way in, you see a line of people, some wearing black beanies and balaclavas. Do you continue to enter? Yes, at Cityside you do. The congregation were not being held at gun point, they were just learning about load shifting electricity use.

Read about the Cityside Travelling Nativity Set - a Cityside Baptist tradition that began in 2013. The Nativity set starts its journey by being handed over to the initial hosts during the service on the first Sunday of Advent. There is a liturgy for the giver and the receiver to say during the process of handing over. The nativity set will stay with the hosts for one or two nights before they pass it on to the next recipients, continuing until it arrives back at Cityside on Christmas Eve.

Cityside Baptist community had long wanted to enhance the gardens around their building. They also wanted to extend them, with a couple of gravelled spaces at the back of the church calling out to be planted. In 2021, they began a programme to explore what being a regenerative church could look like. At the same time, they joined the Eco Church movement and the garden project sat easily at the intersection of these initiatives. After years of dreaming and months of planning, in August last year, the community got stuck in to make the new garden happen. Even one or two self-proclaimed “non-gardeners” got their hands dirty.

Look at that bunch of children and parents with spades and buckets. They’re above Te Auaunga (Oakley Creek), on the Auckland isthmus and it’s a Saturday afternoon, children from Cityside Baptist Church. They’re celebrating Matariki, the Māori New Year, with this midwinter tree-planting.