I am in the curious position, having altogether departed from the Presbyterian Church of Aotearoa New Zealand, of watching from a distance as it dies. It is something like, having been rescued from a torpedoed boat, sitting in safety at a distance and seeing it ever so slowly upend, teeter, struggle for buoyancy, and slide from sight.
The PCANZ was torpedoed when the forces of biblical literalism, fundamentalism and moralism, and people who simply want safety among their own kind and all the familiar ancestral noises, and think that is what the church is for, eventually achieved the majority vote in the General Assembly and presbyteries of the church. In 2006 they were finally able to force through legislation which severely proscribed gay and lesbian ministers and officebearers. Very serious injustice was done to a lot of people. The new alpha males began to fashion a church in their own image. A lot of intelligent and sensitive members had been sidling out of the PCANZ for some years past. Others remain, some because it is still their livelihood. Many feel alienated and persecuted.
The PC(A)NZ in which I trained and was ordained was very different. It doesn’t exist any more. Ministers were seriously trained – you were expected to have a tertiary degree before you began theological studies – and Elders knew themselves to be part of a long tradition of thoughtful if conservative lay leadership. Zealots and charismatics were discouraged. The church was far from perfect, but it had some wise and good leaders. It was moreover a church in which necessary change tended to happen from within, by processes of prayer and theological reflection, rather than by revolution. That is the way the PC(A)NZ came to accept women in both the Eldership and the Ministry, ahead of many other denominations.
I don’t know what they have now. The ruling class in the PCANZ doesn’t share its thoughts with me. I occasionally get echoes of programs and projects supposed to put fire in your nostrils, and all more or less pathetic to this elderly bloke. Then there is the sector that doesn’t seem to believe in anything much, always plagued by doubts and provisos, generally devoted to the current trendy causes. These are the post-modern brigade, if anyone knows what that means. And we have the angry and alienated sector, the gays and lesbians – and the people always trying to agonise about what is Christlike in this or that situation... The whole show is sad, neurotic and dying. I guess it doesn’t matter. The PC(A)NZ served its purpose in its time and space, and often did very well indeed. I remember numbers of its great leaders with affection and awe.
Of course it will hang on for a while yet, propped up and temporarily resuscitated, in the recovery position.
But the trick these days is to make some simple but firm decisions about personal allegiance to Christ and his people. For me that means contemplative prayer and life in the Benedictine mode – which antedates most things in the Christian spectrum and history. It actually does mean general adherence to the faith of the great creeds, more as songs of praise and wonder than of norms of belief which include some and exclude others. I am very happy with all that. There is no longer any patience with denominationalism – I can’t be bothered with it. Inwardness is all – at any rate, in the sense that without it there is nothing else.
It is a life and a discipline in which one is formed, mostly in silence and stillness, according to the pattern of Christ, just as St Paul taught. And one joins the company of those contemplatively formed by Christ.
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