Visiting Other Churches...No. 10  

CHRISTIAN UNITY IN A NEW ZEALAND VILLAGE
(Written in New Zealand)  

To get the feel of a country one needs to avoid the usual tourist circuits and traps, where one does little more than ascend and descend from buses in a herd of other tourists. The only natives he sees are either hotel clerks, tourist guides, or someone who is trying to sell him something tourists are supposed to buy. So, when I arrived in New Zealand one week in advance of the World Convention of Churches of Christ, which I am here to attend, I avoided the tourist hotels and took a "bed and breakfast" deal (at one-third the cost) with a family that migrated from Germany. One may have to rough it a bit, such as enduring noisy kids and preparing his own skimpy meals, but after three weeks in poverty-laden India I have no inclination to follow the ways of the typical American tourist.

So I walk where I can, which is much of the time, and ride buses where I can't, avoiding taxis. I try to live like and be with the typical working man, riding alongside him on the bus and eating with him at the lunch counter. I have learned to ask the right questions so as to learn the weals and woes of a nation. The woes always dominate, and they are not all that different from one nation to the next. New Zealanders, who call themselves Kiwis, after a native bird, are like Americans and most everybody else in that their chief concern is the economy. Unemployment is high, inflation has been accelerating but is now at a single digit level, and farmers are in a depression.

Christians are alarmed over the breakdown of home and family values, moral laxness ("Our young people are living together and think nothing of it"), and an incipient secularism ("Our people live as if there is no God"). If there is any religious revival in the country it is not readily evident.

My desire to see the innards of a country has brought me to the southern part of New Zealand's north island, where I am staying with new friends, introduced to me by missionaries in the Philippines. They live on 1500 acres of hills and vales with 5,000 head of cattle and sheep, mostly the latter. I came by bus from Auckland to Palmerston North through 250 miles of impressive scenery, and we stopped at little towns along the way. I visited with native-born Kiwis on the bus, on which I was the only tourist. I tell people I'm from Texas instead of the U.S.A., and they say, "Ah, yes, all Texans are tall, but where is your big hat?"

I sat next to a young lady (21) who was en route to see her live-in boy friend who is in prison for drunk driving. Since he is a Maorist (New Zealand's earliest settlers) and she is white they suffer the stigma of a mixed-race relationship, which includes the disapproval of her father. When I spoke of God's love and forgiveness, she boldly affirmed that she had no need of such. When I pointed to the grazing cattle on the hills around us and asked if we are no different from those brute beasts, she indicated that there is no particular difference. But they do not write poems, compose music, or author books, I responded, and is there not a longing for something greater than ourselves in all of us?, I asked. She had no such longing, she insisted. When I spoke of life's heartaches and tragedies and observed that there is no way to deal with these except through faith, hope, and love, she revealed that she had lost a baby, out of wedlock of course, and that she handled it just fine on her own.

When I told a Christian woman what the girl on the bus had said about losing her baby, she accused her of bluffing, which was something like my own reaction. Nonetheless, when I spoke tenderly to her of how God loved her and that Christ had died for her, it apparently meant nothing to her. As she left the bus and walked toward the prison, we waved goodbye, and I was left to marvel with a heart full of pity, over what irreligion does to some people. I remember her as looking like Elizabeth Taylor must have looked at 21, very beautiful and lots of makeup and an uncanny arrogance, almost inhuman. In my mind's eye I see her waving her farewell and walking toward the prison, at least showing a commitment to a lover of another race and that at some sacrifice - and yet without God and without hope. May God in His mercy grant that she may one day seek after God and find Him.

On this same trip I met a religious absolutist, one to whom it is inconceivable that by the bowels of Christ he might be wrong about anything at all. He is anti-church and refuses fellowship with any church, and gets his revelation directly from God, who speaks directly to him. I suggested a look at Heb. 1:1-2," In the past God spoke to our forefathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son," but he was not impressed. Religion, such as it was, had done a job on him comparable to what irreligion had done to the girl on the bus.

It is a cold spring day here in New Zealand, but it is beautiful to behold. I look out the large window beside me upon an array of hills, carpeted with rich green grass, bathed in sunlight, and dotted with hundreds of sheep, which appear to graze ceaselessly. The lambs are careful to stay near their mothers. But the flock is relatively secure, the main predators threatening them are the diseases they are prey to.

When I visited the wool shed one day for several hours, I saw some of the precautions taken to ward off various infections. While it is yet too early for general shearing, they were cleaning the sheep, one by one, by shearing away the dirty wool, especially from their bottoms. This keeps the worm flies from laying their eggs in the sensitive areas. There is also periodic spraying. A lamb's tail is also removed for sanitation purposes. The tail eventually drops off after a tight band is applied to cut off circulation, all presumably without pain.

I was impressed with the skill of the shearers, who work with power equipment. Two men cleaned more than 600 sheep the day I visited the shed. Working side by side, each man has a supply of sheep in a holding pen near him. He opens the door, grabs a sheep, rests it on its bottom and across his leg, shears away the dirty wool, and then pushes the sheep down a chute to the floor below, all in little more than a minute. I noticed that the sheep were docile and cooperative in all this, and was told it is due to the skill with which they are handled. But one could remember the line from the prophet Isaiah, "As the sheep before its shearers is silent, so He opened not His mouth." My job was to sweep up the wool on the floor, separating the dirty wool from the not so dirty. They bring different prices on the market.

They completely sheared a couple of sheep for my benefit. I did not realize that the clippers go right to the skin, leaving the sheep almost completely denuded. And a skilled shearer takes off large hunks of the wool at a time. When I held one piece close, I could feel the warmth from the sheep's body, a bit sticky, and it was like holding a thick wool coat. The denuded sheep looked like a different animal without their wool. I worried that they would have a hard time of it without their coats during the cold night, but was told that they would do just fine. It takes only a few months for them to grow another coat of wool ready for the market.

On the Lord's day that I was here I went with my hosts to the Holy Trinity Episcopal church in nearby Woodville, which happened to be the one Sunday in the year that all five churches in town were meeting together. It was their unity Sunday, and it was the first time ever that I was in an assembly made up of all the churches in a town, five of them in a town of 1500. They were the Episcopal, who was the host church, the Roman Catholic, the Church of the Brethren, the Union Church (Presbyterian-Methodist), and the Salvation Army. Many took part in the service, some from each of the churches, including women and children. The Lord's prayer for the unity of his people was emphasized and it was taken seriously. It was all done reverently and with grace. A visitor would get the impression that it was no problem for them to be together and worship together. Those from the Salvation Army were in their uniforms. The Roman Catholics were represented in the pulpit by a reader. No priest was present and none lived in the small town.

Even though it was but a village I could not believe that every church in town was meeting together. Isn't there some fundamentalist group that will not meet with you?, I asked incredulously. There are only the five churches in Woodville, I was assured, and they all dismissed their services and met as one church at the Episcopal facility. I well knew that if my own Church of Christ folk had a congregation here, as well as some Christian Churches, they would not cooperate. I found myself supposing that there was a Church of Christ in this village and howl might persuade them to join the unity effort. I would urge that they have an early service in which they would break bread according to their conviction (and mine), and then go as a group to the unity service.

The other churches in town would be impressed if a Church of Christ, with a commitment to weekly Communion, would meet at an earlier hour in order to break bread, and yet be present for the unity effort. It might well cause the other churches to consider the place of weekly observance, or to at least have Communion on unity Sunday, which they do not.

But it would be the rare Church of Christ that would attend such a unity gathering on any condition. Isn't it as strange as it is tragic that a people who began as a unity movement should become so isolated from other believers as to have no association with them at all? One would suppose, our heritage being what it is, that the Church of Christ would be at the forefront of any unity effort. But it is predictable that if all the churches except one in any given town met in a unity service the Church of Christ would be that exception. We owe it to ourselves to face up to the question of how we can be serious about being a unity people when we won't have anything to do with anyone else.

My overall impression of the unity service in a New Zealand village is that they quietly practice, at least occasionally, what some of the rest of us only talk about. They make it work, at least once a year, and one is left to ask why there can't be more of what they do one Sunday a year. The service was general and the teaching general—a unity based on "general Christianity," to use a term our pioneers used as a basis for the unity of all believers, or what C. S. Lewis called "mere Christianity." After all, we all worship the same Christ, we sing the same hymns and pray the same prayers. We have far more in common than we have differences.

I soon leave this remote part of New Zealand to return to Auckland to attend the World Convention of Churches of Christ. I am looking forward to leading some of the discussion groups that will be celebrating the birthday bicentennial of Alexander Campbell. I am eager to point out to them that Campbell pled for a unity based on what all Christians agree to in common, not unlike the service I was a part of in a village in the backwoods of New Zealand, where every church in town met together and worshipped God on the basis of what they all hold in common, particularly their faith in Christ as the Lord of glory. — the Editor.