Thought for the Week 28 June 2026

I was in Christchurch on Thursday for our regular Presbytery Council meeting which included an afternoon session with Alan Hirsch. Alan is a globally recognised thought leader in mission, especially to post Christian societies like ours. He is in Christchurch to be the keynote speaker at the Little Revolutions conference. He also heads up Forge International which our Presbytery partners with, to encourage new forms of ministry, outreach and church planting.

In his conversation with us he pointed out that surveys regularly show that people have positive attitudes towards God (a high percentage believe in some kind of ‘higher power’; atheists are a very small %), Jesus (often listed among the most significant humans to ever live), and spirituality (many say they are spiritual but not religious). But they have very low attitudes towards the Church, seeing it as either irrelevant or in some ways dodgy (after your money, controlling, not safe…).

Which is quite a problem given that the Church is meant to be the delivery system to connect people with God, Jesus and spirituality! One answer to this is to reorient the church away from being an institution, who’s primary aim is to sustain itself, towards a being Spirit led movement. He gave the example of the underground house church movement in China which saw 2 million Christians in 1950 grow into 120m by 2016 all through a simple approach of replicating small group house churches no bigger than 25 people. It’s a remarkable story of the faithfulness of God and the human folly- in the form of the Communist party- to try and stop it.

It’s this kind of imaginative thinking that we want our Wayfinder to engage in as we seek to support a new way of doing church for those who will come after us. The appointment process for this role has gone well and we will have an announcement to make by the end of July.

Nga mihi nui,  Brent