Video for February 20th, 2025
And welcome, to this week's video. This is the first video that I'm actually recording from New Zealand because I didn't want to bore you all with my holiday snaps week by week. So I'm very happy to be sitting here in the Archbishop of New Zealand's house, Archbishop Justin.
Justin has got a very interesting ministry. He's been doing all sorts of, what by Anglican standards probably constitute wild things, but wild things that have been very, very fruitful. And one of the things that's been really helpful, as I've been travelling around New Zealand, is trying to talk to various people and seeing how they're doing mission and ministry in a culture that is in some ways quite similar to ours, particularly in terms of its relationship with the wider secular world.
Because New Zealand is a very secular place, just as the UK is now a very secular place. And Justin and his team have been doing some interesting things. So thanks for having me. It's been great to be here.
A-BJ: Lovely to have you.
Justin, just tell us a little bit about the sorts of things that have made a real difference in ministry for you here in this place.
A-BJ: Sure, I'll talk about this place as in where I live now. So although I'm um, the Bishop of Wellington, which is capital city of New Zealand, I live two and a half hours drive away and we call it a city, but it's only 40,000 people, so it's the smallest.
So I was studying and so we came here seven years ago. The ancient church was really struggling. They'd been through a significant restructure. We know restructures are good, if you know what I mean. They were bleeding out, etc. And we brought some younger clergy, some younger teams to be present towards revitalization.
So when we got here, one young couple of clergy sort of became the key players within the sort of main church. And then the rest of us went church planting and that's been fun. So we've gone church planting for the last seven years and we've planted - been part of - a couple of church planting teams now in Wanganui. And we've seen two churches planted in that time and Jenny and myself, we just sort of get in behind the young ones, et cetera. And so I think what we do primarily, and there's not many of us, we primarily go to about maybe six people - hree couples - we're all self supporting in that sense - I'm the bishop but I'm not being papa. Church planting, doing my, doing my...
That's your hobby?
A-BJ: It's my hobby, it's my side hustle. As you do side hustle, you've got to have something to do with your life. Yeah, and so we primarily shift into a neighbourhood we discerned. First of all, what we did is, before we shifted to Wanganui, we came months earlier and prayed through and tried to discern where to shift to what area, etc.
So we had a pre discernment etc, then we sort of landed in an area that we felt was the area that God was inviting us to. And then we spent probably six months in that area, primarily praying and just meeting people but without really starting anything, just turning up at things, praying, listening to God, trying to find out where the invitation was for us.
And then after six months in both cases we then you know, followed those invitations and ultimately ended up planting or we had empty church buildings in both cases where in the church there was no active services. And so in both cases we've ultimately ended up planting, replanting congregations in both those churches.
So the key to it of course is the prayerful discernment at the beginning. But the key to it is the relational stuff that you build up as the foundation to building anything?
A-BJ: Yeah. So the first one we did down the road, it was really interesting. So we were, you know, we were just trying to hear what God wanted us to do. So we weren't even at the point where we were going to plant a Church - there might be something else that God wanted us to do in this neighbourhood, of kingdom significance.
And we literally, after a time we met, we started hanging out. These people who said to us, literally said to us, imagine if you started a church, we would bring people.
Okay.
A-BJ: And so they sort of said we want a church that makes sense to us. If you started one, we'd bring the people.
Okay.
A-BJ: And so kind of like that was there was one invitation at that moment and the other invitation in the first case was Paul and Anna, who are the key, our key planters. Again, with us behind them, they had this miraculous, somebody had a miraculous word for them which was something about a red door being, being pushed open.
Right.
A-BJ: And interesting enough, there was no other church, ancient church in Wanginai. We've got seven churches here. No churches have a red door bar the one that we ended up living next to.
Right.
A-BJ: And so it was like there's another confirmation, you got open the door of the church. So you kind of, you know, there was a Holy Spirit leading by the people of the community and by revelation for us to sort of - it was the time to embark on that journey.
Right. And of course the people here, I mean these are people who by and large don't have a great deal of church background and connection, do they?
A-BJ: No, I mean it's -- hese are the actual suburbs we first went to. I think it works in English as well. But it's called Goneville.
Okay.
A-BJ: So that tells you what it is, you know.
Yeah.
A-BJ: So I shifted from living 100 metres from Parliament, close to Parliament and the Prime Minister next to our cathedral. I felt called by God to move to a community called Gone - Ville. And it just really is a forgotten place. But every suburb is a forgotten place in many senses.
So there's nothing special about Gonville. It's not a place full of urban young adults and young families who are upwardly mobile. It's a forgotten, probably slightly struggling suburb and you know, in the back end of New Zealand. So there was nothing demographically that, you know, it's not the most fruitful place with low lying fruit to plant your church.
That's the place that God was calling us to which needed a faithful church being present.
Right. I mean I think the thing that strikes me about this is that you know, you're always looking for parallels between, you know, what you've done and sort of the underlying values that have generated the stuff you're doing and thinking about where we are in the diocese of Hereford, which is obviously a very different sort of place.
But it seems to me that for us we have very, very strong relational connections with the communities that we serve. Our churches aren't bounded sets. You're in, you're out. It's porous on all sorts of levels. And so also we're in the midst of communities that are spiritually hungry because people are spiritually hungry and modern secularism is not providing them with meaning or significance or purpose or love.
You can almost trace there's a correlation between the epidemic of mental health difficulties that people have and the nature of secularism in the communities that they are in. It's because people can't live without meaning. So I think there are those parallels which are interesting to explore. I mean you've gone in from scratch, whereas I think we've got those connections and we just need to learn to exploit them and move into them a little bit more.
A-BJ: And I do think this is a common problem that we find in our context, I think, in our diocese and what I observed coming into it as bishop 12 years ago, and I think we're still overcoming it, is basically, we'd lost confidence in the good news.
Yeah.
A-BJ: So our people were kind of ashamed. They, you know, again, Wellington City is probably the most secular city in the world. So they felt years of being. I don't.know - knowing they'd be having to marginalise. Marginalise. But actually, just as people are really hungry, our guys are just really embarrassed still.
So, like, no, no, people want this but we had to help our people refine their voice and confidence in their voice. And I do think, switching to proclamation for a moment, I do think what I say to people. And again, I'm not a natural evangelist, you know, I have to, you know, put on my big, big person pants and, you know, think about, you know, what am I going to say?
Anyway, what I talk to them about is this, I think, for in order to proclaim the gospel, you're trying to - I'm trying to - find the overlap of three circles.
Yeah.
A-BJ: So the first is it has to be true to the biblical narrative. So I can't proclaim what isn't found in scripture. Now, scripture talks about what God does in numerous ways. There's lots of material there. You know, there's lots of different ways. And I think sometimes the church gets obsessed on one way only.
So it's got to be biblically consistent. But the second is I've actually got to have authenticity. I've actually got to have experience in my life to proclaim it. So I can't proclaim a cliche. And I felt like often in my - when I first came to faith in the 80s - we were often proclaiming cliches that, you know, we said the word, but did we experience that?
I'm not quite sure. So I think we're at a point in history, particularly for all us who are ankling, that we have to have the authenticity ourselves. We have to. In order to proclaim it, we ourselves have to be living it and know their truth.
Yeah.
A-BJ: And the third thing is, the third circle's got to overlap with these - it's actually got to be good news to those who are listening at our point in history. And good news for those in the urban centres. the capital is different than the good news here, and there's culturally differences and so it's - so what are people nowadays? What's the good news? And, you know, mental health, loneliness, shame. I mean, there's a whole lot of hopelessness. You know, there's a whole lot of deep, deep angst that people have that our good news speaks into. But there's no point nailing it to something they're not even asking for anymore.
Yeah, yeah, sure.
A-BJ: So I'm trying to always find the overlap of those three circles and with confidence, encourage our people to proclaim.
Great. Thank you very much. I think that's probably a good point to end. So, friends, thank you. I hope you've been inspired by our conversation, particularly what Justin's doing here. I hope you're not too frozen back in the uk. It's rather bright and sunny out here and I look forward to speaking to you again next week.
+Richard