August 2009 – Established Centre

As I pen this text preparations are underway in Old St Paul’s Wellington to receive and process a select group of Kiwi men and women, cham­pions of our realm, into Knights and Ladies. The choice of Old St Paul’s as the venue for this is particularly fitting. Apart from it being extremely handy to the parliamentary precinct, it is gor­geous to be in a space that was created several cultural time-zones away from the world in which we now live. The difference of the interior from familiar workaday environments helps visitors put their preoccupations on hold and simply enjoy the feast of trusses hewn from our native forests and the sparkle of coloured light that tumbles through the glass into the space. Under the influence of such beauty, one must resist the temptation to over romanticise the past. This is probably how some also view the reinstatement of Knighthoods. 

Old St Paul’s has many qualities that generate strong feelings of familiarity and reverence – a powerful combination. This “Ministry of Architecture” has made the asset a national taonga for all New Zealanders. What makes Old St Paul’s perfect for the occasion is that she is a de-consecrated church. She has the outer form and val­ues of Ecclesiastical Gothic, done well, but without the machinations of vestry meetings or salvoes of torment from the pulpit to sully the acoustics of the timber panelling. Perfectly groomed, placid, and demure – she is a Stepford Wife of the state, cinched into a Victo­rian dress. She is a place where those who practise religion, of whatever type, and those who practise resisting religion can come together in a hall of unity. As the recipients kneel, are tapped on the shoulders with a sword  of dominion, and arise, somewhere in the rafters the spirit of the forests and the light of the stars will be looking down on the proceedings and will see that everything is going perfectly to plan.

Meanwhile, back at the keyboard, an altogether different group of Kiwi men and women have been putting finishing touches on the architecture generated by the conflict between the world in which they live and the world that has been progressively revealed through prophets, psalms and histo­ries. As we grind tectonicly through a period of changing fortunes, exemplified by the global systemic crisis, the differences between those worlds are becoming sharper, the pressures greater. The value of perspectives that have been steeped in the bath of biblical wisdom would seem to be self-evident. The alternative is merely to receive sto­ries generated by a media with a short history and a shorter attention span. Stories about “green shoots of recovery”, may soon be followed by “khaki shirts of war”.

Appropriate to our transitional times, this issue of Stimulus kicks off with David Cashmore’s essay on apocalyptic and millenarianism in the Thessalonian church, tensions in the fledgling church under the apparatus of the Roman State, and the problem of the delayed parousia. Len Hjalmarson explores the concept of liminality – the space between the familiar and the unknown, uncomfortable spaces that churches seem increasingly to inhabit. Kevin Ward applies various stress tests to “Evangelicalism” and watches it wriggle under his microscope. Is it still worth identifying with Evangelicalism or is the price too high? Nicola Hoggard Creegan takes up a telescope and gazes toward the Sasha-Malia horizon of 2110. Spurred into print by recent events in financial realms, Chris Pinfield follows the money (that avoided the gigantic bubble machine), into the little ecologies of micro-credit.

Consideration of the entangle­ment of the religious and the economic continues in two further articles. Bruce Hamill considers worship as mission and the problem of its commodification within the dominant consumer culture. The issue concludes with Part One of Gavin Drew’s gritty analysis of Jesus as the delaminator of political and religious hegemony, not just of his time but of all time. The centrality of money to the Temple and to Rome has obvious echoes for NZ Christians in 2009. As we wriggle and squirm on the Petri dish of the dilemmas of the world that we face, the spirit of the forests and the light of the stars will see that everything is going perfectly to plan. Read on…

Paul Marcroft
for the editorial committee

Douglas Maclachlan
Publisher