Presbyterian Church of Aotearoa New Zealand

Kevin Ward, a Bible College lecturer in Christchurch, believes the kind of church New Zealanders are invited to belong to is out of touch with most people's real lives.

"When we invite people who don't have church backgrounds to be part of our church community", says Ward, "we're inviting them to belong to something they see as an anachronism. We shouldn't be surprised when they're not very interested".

For all the talk of making the church contemporary, Ward suspects most efforts are simply attempts to breathe new life into tired structures. They might appeal to people who already belong. But increasingly they are foreign to New Zealanders who have never been part of church culture.

And it's not surprising they are foreign. The church's lifestyle has been shaped by Christendom, an alliance lasting 18 centuries between church and culture. But since the cultural revolution of the 1960s, a new society has grown up whose values and language are no longer shaped by a Christian understanding.

At least two generations of New Zealanders have little understanding of Christmas and Easter beyond summer holidays and chocolate eggs. But the church resolutely carries on as though everyone shares its values, language and rituals.

"Take what happens in services" Ward suggests. "Shaped by our Christian heritage the main fare is corporate singing and listening to a 30-40 minute monologue, with no opportunity to interact. Where else in society do we attempt to create a sense of belonging and community in this way?"

Ward has found that research has consistently indicated that most people who have left the church have not done so because they didn't have Christian beliefs. They've left because the lifestyle of the church had become increasingly disconnected from their lifestyle as a whole.

This stark result is also reflected in his analysis of where church growth is coming from. Only 3.9% of newcomers to church are genuinely from a non-church background. The rest already spoke "church" before they came. Either they have moved from one church to another (and will likely move again) or they have a Sunday School or Youth Group background.

But Ward sees reason to be hopeful. He believes if we stop treating the church as an end in itself it can have an exciting future. "The church has to re-discover that it is not the point of the Gospel."

That was the trouble with Christendom. The church came to see itself as the Kingdom of God on earth. Today, more than ever, it needs to re-discover its missionary calling, its role as God's agent, a means to God's end. "If we took that role more seriously" Ward says, "we might take our status as church a lot less seriously too. And that might give us the freedom to change"

"What is important now is creating a new plausibility for the Gospel. We need people living out Christian values and working at points of real need in the community, providing testimony to God, to Jesus active in the world. We have to ask ourselves how we live the core of Christ, the heart of Jesus, the Gospel in our culture."

That life might even be attractive. It might invite people to see the church in a new and positive light. It might suggest a new role for the church. "People will always believe in something. But when believing is split from belonging it often becomes little more than a vague spirituality. Perhaps if the church can pay more attention to people's spiritual development, give more respect to the variety of their experience and be a place where open discussion about spirituality is possible, the church can again become somewhere people might choose to belong".

Kevin Ward is completing a PhD on 'The Impact of Post 60s Social and Cultural Changes on the Church in New Zealand' with Otago University.

Papers he has written on the subject include:

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Religion in a Post Aquarian Age

Christendom, clericism, church and context

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