Church in New Zealand I

Part of the joy of being part of the body of Christ is going to worship with other congregations. It’s sort of like going to visit long lost cousins whom you’ve heard rumours about their living in far away places, but haven’t had occasion to visit. Now that we’re here, we got the chance to visit some of those cousins, to worship with them, and to see how they do what we do every Sunday.

Our first Sunday in New Zealand we had poorly executed intentions. Having walked by First Church of Dunedin (the Presbyterian congregation founded by settler-pastor Thomas Burns—nephew of the poet Sir Robert Burns) several times in our first day in the city, we saw that the congregation had three services every Sunday: one at 9:00am, one at 11:00am, and one at 5:00pm. Since I was feeling ill and we were enjoying sleeping in, we decided on the 5:00pm service.

No one was there. The church was open but the sanctuary was empty. We checked the signboards inside the front doors and noticed a bulletin of service times for January through April. They were at variance with the board at the gates of the church property. Sadly, no worship for us that Sunday.

About mid-week the next week we had made the acquaintance of one of the hostel staff members, a young woman from Zimbabwe named Idah. Another worker told us, upon my inquiry about Maori Christian churches, that Idah might know. Well, Idah did not know directly about Maori Christian services, but she invited us to her congregation. It is a church plant by a Zimbabwean Pentecostal denomination. So the next Sunday we worshipped with them; their usual space at the university was not available, so they worshipped at the home of their deacon.

We were the only two white folks there, of perhaps nine people plus a group of rambunctious children. They made us feel welcome, though it being my first experience having regular Sunday worship in someone’s home I felt a little out of place. But this is how the first Christians met and worshipped, after all. I could get into it. Eighty percent of attraction is proximity, right?

What seems to take more adjustment for me is Pentecostal worship. (For those of you who aren’t familiar with the jargon, “Pentecostal”—with a capital P—refers to a style of worship that takes its central inspiration from the story of Pentecost in chapter 2 of the book of Acts. At the first Pentecost the Holy Spirit came down visibly upon the fledgling church and, among other things, allowed Jews from all over the world to understand each other even though they did not speak each other’s native languages. “Pentecostal” denominations are generally known for their fervency in prayer and exercise of spiritual gifts, especially “speaking in tongues.”)

I am accustomed to a regularly structured liturgy, in which predictably timed or marked prayers are offered by the leader of worship, by congregants in unison according to a printed prayer, or by individual congregants silently or in an ordered manner. (One of the semi-official mottos of the Presbyterian church is “everything decently and in order.”) So when our brothers and sisters in this Zimbabwean congregation began praying each at his or her own pace, in other languages, and with voluminous energy, it took a moment for me to get used to it. It’s freeing, in a sense, to know that I am free to pray however and whatever I am called to pray at that moment. Nonetheless, I felt an undercurrent of chaos, as if some potential unity had been lost.

But we did some worship-dancing. The impropriety of free, rhythmic movement is, I think, a tragedy of the Anglo-Saxon Western church. As we sang with these Zimbabweans, we clapped with the semi-present rhythm of the pastor’s synthesizer, and in time the Africans started to dance. It was a sort of line-dance that one would start and the others join in, a joyous unity of movement with the song. I sensed little emphasis on perfect unity—of pitch in voice, of rhythm in dance, or of the words of the song (I had never heard these songs before)—but emphasis that we were worshipping God with body and voice. Good stuff.

~ emrys