We have a UCCF Summer Team out in New Zealand at the moment. Gareth Batten tells the story. He's been on Relay this year, along with a few others in the above picture. I had the priviledge of sleeping on Gareth's floor as a CU guest in his first year at Bath. The team will soon descend on Massey, where Scott Mackay is a student. Andy Shudall is also in New Zealand blogging.
As Andy reflects:
"It is great to have time to stop and think - and to think of the painful beauty that makes up New Zealand and the challenges that lie here: beauty because of what God is doing and pain because the hard work of the gospel is never easily accomplished or completed."
And then I discovered... Mo, Andy's replacement as Relay Coordinator... also now blogging.
Whats the religious make up of New Zealand currently?
ReplyDeleteMy Uncle lives out there and he's very much a 'be nice to everybody, keep yourself to yourself and raise yoru kids well' kind of guy, and doesnt take well to this 'wacky religious' stuff (although conveniently blanks out the fact that his sisters family is pretty wacky and religious :-p)
ANyway, he seems to like it a lot - Id love to go. How come UCCF have taken a team that far??!!
UCCF planted TSCF (CUs in New Zealand) - we send teams out to many other IFES movements every summer.
ReplyDeleteWe've always tried to keep a focus on the worldwide CU movement... kicked off when a bunch of pioneering big-faith CU leaders sold their sports kit to buy fellow CU leader Howard Guiness a warm coat and a one way ticket to Canada 76 years ago to start CUs there... (he subsequently planted the movement in NZ, Australia and South Africa). So IFES was born.
There's a particular renewal of our link with NZ since three of our current staff are about to start working for TSCF (Nigel Pollock, Andy Shudall & James Allaway).
NZ - very postmodern, all about tolerance, very pluralistic. Think UK but take it much further down the line. Scott Mackay is a CU leader there, so his insights are helpful.
I should just add here that, though I don't know much of the religious make up of New Zelanders, there's a fantabulous book by a guy there called A Churchless Faith (another good review here, and some little fragments to read here). It's well worth a read, especially for those with evangelical approaches or concerns. It makes you think about your faith, and the concerns of others, no matter what your persuasion. And since, as Dave's noted, the general trend of society in that country is similar to ours the stories have relevence and resonance.
ReplyDeleteIn fact, he's a writer on Prodigal Kiwi, which I found through Jonny Baker's website.
A worrying reflection. We fail as church when we fail to let people grow, think, learn, explore... and it has to be possible within a confessional church to teach truth and give people space to grow and live....
ReplyDeleteFrom the little I know of the Emergent reaction to US Fundamentalists I hope we (UK Evangelicals) do not fall into the same trap - let us not be over-narrow... let us not be unprepared to interact positively (as well as critically) with our culture... let us be able to self-examine...
As Mo says - let us not be staid rigid reformed... but constantly reforming... drawing closer to biblical patterns of church, to biblical patterns of life... and since our sin makes us drift that requires constant reformation...
I read somewhere that religion in New Zealand has always been pretty anemic, but I don't think it's ever been worse than at present. Same old story - mainline churches are in major decline, 'evangelical' churches import every American theological fad under the sun...
ReplyDeleteThis is pretty indicative... our most famous theologian (Lloyd Geering) doesn't believe in God.
It's an interesting church landscape. Extremely diverse. The two major bible colleges are not very sympathetic to conservative evangelicalism.
It sounds like just my kind of place, then :)
ReplyDelete