New Uniting Church Pastor has much faith post-COVID

EUROA’S St Andrews Church will welcome a new pastor in a service of commission in the upcoming weeks. Pastor Scott Leslie was to be commissioned on February 13, but the snap lockdown placed in by the state government has delayed the ceremony to March 13. “My wife's name is Sarah and we have a son Charlie aged 11. My wife grew up in Wangaratta and we have moved there with COVID and things like that. She's been working from home up there and we took the opportunity to work in the region during this time,” Pr Leslie said. Pr Leslie’s career has seen him take on unique roles outside the church halls – he previously worked as a pastor with the Manningham Uniting Church with the primary task of working with congregations that were being merged into one. He has previously worked in Melbourne within the Uniting Church’s neurological services in a pastoral care role. Pr Leslie, who will be living in Wangaratta but regularly travelling into the region is particularly eager to meet and work with the St David’s congregation in the Tableland communities of Terip Terip and Ruffy. He said he was particularly looking forward to working with smaller communities and that it will active time for him. “I've been involved in churches that are a similar size to Euroa, and Ruffy and Terip Terip are a bit smaller, but there's always a good number of people in the wider church community and a good bunch that come along on a Sunday,” Pr Leslie said. “There's plenty of plenty of things for me to do, plenty of people to get to know and also opportunities for engaging with the community in different ways. “They've had different programs like Messy Church before where they have children coming along on a Friday afternoon and a lot of those things have been suspended during COVID.” The re-establishment of these programs will be his primary focus for the St Andrew’s and St David’s congregations in the coming days and in-person visits. “There's some enthusiastic leaders in the church who have been running those programs, y, they're very friendly and welcoming which struck me as soon as I met people in Euroa, Terip Terip and Ruffy,” Pr Leslie said. “I'll certainly be visiting a lot of people and will have a good network of visitors and pastoral care people who’ll make sure that everybody's going along okay in this time, whether that's via phone calls or visits,” Except for the recent five-day lockdown, the Uniting Church services have slowly been brought back to near normality, with Mr Leslie keen to also continue the work of studying and reading parts of the Bible at meetings every Sunday. He said while the sound of voices may be muffled during the songs in services because of facemasks, he has faith the passion of the congregation will still be there through the upcoming months. “(A few weeks ago) we were inside and we wore masks for the whole service because of the state government requirements so we need to keep monitoring those,” Pr Leslie said. “But we shouldn't let those things discourage us or get in the way too much.”