The Reverend Canon Zoe Everingham has resigned as Rector of the Anglican Parish of the Bellinger and will conduct her final service on Christmas Day.
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She came here four years ago from Goondiwindi and was pleased to find a similarly strong sense of rural community-mindedness, but her last couple of years have been difficult.
“Part of the reason I’m leaving is for my own well-being,” she says. “It has been a wonderful time being here – a very busy time – but I’ve had my own personal life challenges in that time.”
In the middle of 2016, Zoe donated a kidney to save her brother Christopher’s life and in the middle of 2017, her husband Richard died.
She has found some aspects of her work more taxing since then, particularly funerals, and for the sake of her own health, she has decided it is now time to pull back and minister to herself.
Although she doesn’t look it, Zoe will soon be turning 65, but this resignation is not retirement.
“Ministers never fully retire,” she says. “You can’t turn off the tap!”
She will stay on the board of Bishop Druitt College, and continue as a Canon of Christ the King Cathedral in Grafton, and will be available for occasional work as a relief minister.
She will keep living at Repton and plans to engage in more exercise and leisure pursuits, including walking, gardening, kayaking and fishing.
She is also looking forward to having more time to visit family in New Zealand and Sydney.
While at St Margarets, Zoe oversaw a project to have its beautiful stained glass windows restored, but she doesn’t regard this as her legacy.
“I think it was more that they needed doing, so you get to it,” she says. “I think increasing community participation has been the big thing for me.”
By this she doesn’t mean getting more folk through the doors on Sunday, but rather how the outreach of the church has grown, with pastoral care, the Urunga Op Shop, the Food Pantry and its free ‘Chomp and Chat’ meals on Fridays, as well the hosting of two community playgroups and partnerships with the Neighbourhood Centre and the Affordable Housing group.
“For a small parish, I think we serve the community very well,” she says.
As Zoe feels Christmas Day is not the right time for a farewell, it will be held on Sunday December 23 instead, and everyone is warmly invited to come along to a pot-luck farewell lunch that will start about 11.30am, following the 10am service at St Margaret of Scotland Anglican Church in Bellingen.