The Christian Church in Australia and New Zealand (4)

New Zealand: Background Information

New Zealand is an incredibly beautiful country with a wide variety of breathtaking scenery. Its natural features make unparalleled opportunities for photography — from the glaciers and mountain peaks of the Southern Alps to the bubbling pools and geysers of the North Island’s volcanic region. A remarkably variegated coastline is more than one-half as long as that of the United States. Two thirds of New Zealand is mountainous region, conjoined with swift-flowing rivers, deep alpine lakes and dense subtropical forest — known locally as “bush.” The majesty of the Creator God is breathtaking throughout much of New Zealand.

Certainly for scenic diversity in a small country, New Zealand would be hard pressed to find a rival anywhere in the world. For example, in one sixty-mile stretch of the South Island’s West Coast, a tourist passes through dense rainforest, barren plateaus, lush dairying plains, forbidding bluffs, and rolling sheep country. Our NRC congregation, located near the southern tip on the North Island, lies in close proximity to a large section of indescribably peaceful, rolling sheep country.

Situated some twelve hundred miles southeast from Australia (and more than nine thousand miles from Michigan!), New Zealand consists largely of two slender islands —the North Island and the South Island, roughly equal in size, and comprising 100,000 square miles in all — an area equivalent to the state of Colorado. In shape, it resembles California. From north to south, the country is one thousand miles long, but no point on either island is more than seventy miles from the sea.

Whereas Australians call themselves “Aussies,” New Zealanders usually refer to themselves as “Kiwis.” Literally, a kiwi — pronounced kee-wee — is a local bird which is about the size of a young turkey, with strong legs and a long bill. Being nocturnal, it is seldom seen in the wild, but has become New Zealand’s unofficial national emblem.

New Zealand was undisturbed by humanity until Polynesians landed there one thousand years ago. From these Polynesians the modern Maori — eight percent of the current population — are descended. The Maori were of south Asian origin and spread among the south and east Pacific, settling in New Zealand in the fourteenth century. In 1642, New Zealand was briefly sighted by a Dutch navigator, Abel Tasman; nevertheless, the country remained unknown to most Europeans until 1769 when the renowed English navigator, Captain James Cook, first mapped the coastline.

New Zealand’s National Day dates back to only 1840, when Britain finally responded to pressure to make New Zealand a colony by dispatching Captain William Hobson to act as governor. Only since then has the landscape of the country begun to be transformed as Kiwis — largely immigrants from the British Isles — moved inland to displace forest and birds with pasture and sheep. Its three million inhabitants, however, still possess an incredible amount of unspoiled land, surrounded by clear unpolluted air and water. Like Australia, New Zealand has an extraordinary climate. There are no extremes of heat or cold; snow is usually confined to the mountains and high country.

Nevertheless, the Kiwis are rapidly urbanizing as well. Although the economy is still largely based on the land, in the last century the proportion of the population living in towns and cities has doubled to reach eighty percent. Today, more work in factories than on farms.

New Zealand thrives off its agricultural exports — three-quarters of it from three commodities: sheep meat, dairy products, and wool. In fact, New Zealand has become the biggest exporter of sheep meat and dairy products in the world and the second largest exporter of wool. Its climate and terrain is ideally suited for sheep farming. How else could a small country the size of Colorado

house sixty-five million sheep — more than twenty for every Kiwi! Wherever a traveler goes in New Zealand, he is greeted by sheep; almost literally, there are sheep everywhere.

Though the standard of living in New Zealand ranks among the highest in the world (but still below that of United States, Canada, and the Netherlands), the Kiwis have always lived modestly; wealth, class, social status, leave them unimpressed.

The modesty of the Kiwis, combined with the beauty, solitude, and serenity New Zealand offers, however, does not seem to have influenced the population toward God and religion. Like Australia, secularism has the upperhand in New Zealand. Only twelve percent of the Kiwis attend church regularly. One million Kiwis belong to the relatively liberal Church of England. Six hundred thousand claim to be Presbyterians; four hundred fifty thousand, Roman Catholics; two hundred thousand, Methodists. As in Australia, the Reformed faith, which remains very small, was not established until after World War II.

New Zealand: God’s Saving Grace at Work

Australia’s second renowned, godly chaplain, Samuel Marsden (1764–1838; cf. February 1989 editorial), was used by God to bring Christianity to New Zealand. Marsden’s original vision of bringing the gospel to Australia in order to use his base there for missions in the Pacific proved most successful, by God’s grace, in New Zealand. In fact, the light of history reveals that Marsden’s labors were more blessed in New Zealand than were his untiring labors at his home base in Australia. Eric Ramsden goes so far as to state that the New Zealand mission was “the great work” of Marsden’s life (cf. Marsden and the Missions, Prelude to Waitangi, 1936). How free and sovereign is God’s grace!

On a visit to England in 1809, Marsden received encouragement and assistance from the Church Missionary Society to pursue plans to bring the gospel to New Zealand, lain Murray sums well Marsden’s initial and subsequent work here:

These plans came to fruition in 1814 when, at his own expense, Marsden purchased a schooner and took three English missionaries and their families across the Tasman Sea. Eight Maoris came with them in support and on arrival one of them interpreted after Marsden had preached from, “Behold, I bring you glad tidings of great joy.” The date was December 25, 1814—”The first Sunday on which the one true God was worshipped in New Zealand since the creation.” Surveying the need of his vast audience, says Marsden, “I felt my very soul melt within me.”

New Zealand was to be the scene of Marsden’s greatest spiritual encouragement in the southern hemisphere. The response among the Maoris, both now and later, was to him a matter of supreme joy, contrasting as it did to the indifference in New South Wales and the many failures experienced in attempts to help the Australian Aborigines. (cf. Australian Christian Life, p. 36.)

Marsden was to make seven voyages in all to New Zealand. Upon returning from his first visit, he wrote in June, 1815:

It is wonderful how Divine Providence opens a way for me to accomplish my desire for the promotion of the Gospel. For many years I had ardently wished to visit New Zealand, but I had neither pecuniary means, nor could I obtain permission from the Government here.

The mission in New Zealand, however, did not proceed without grave difficulties. Where the Lord will build His church, Satan will erect his temple beside it. How clear this is from one of Marsden’s letters to John Terry in the early years of missionary endeavor there:

I am very anxious for the instruction of the New Zealanders; they are a noble race, vastly superior in understanding to anything you can imagine a savage nation could attain. Mr. Hall, who was in Hull, and came out with us with an intention to proceed to New Zealand as a missionary, has not yet proceeded, in consequence of a melancholy difference between the natives of that island and the crew of a ship called the Boyd. The ship was burnt, and all the crew murdered; our people, it appears, were the first aggressors, and dearly paid for their conduct towards the natives by the loss of their lives and ship. I do not think that this awful event will prevent the establishment of a mission at New Zealand. Time must be allowed for the difference to be made up, and for confidence to be restored.

Marsden did much to organize mission fields in New Zealand. The Lord also blessed his efforts in England to obtain missionaries and mission workers for New Zealand. By 1833 he could write: “I have visited New Zealand six times. The mission prospers very much; the Lord has blessed the missionaries in their labours, and made their work to prosper.”

In 1837 Marsden would make a seventh and final trip to New Zealand. Murray notes: “By that time there were 11 mission stations, 35 missionaries, 178 communicants, and 2176 worshippers” (p. 45). New Zealand remained close to the heart of Rev. Marsden until the end of his life.

As in Australia, other God-fearing men labored faithfully in New Zealand throughout the 1800s. Samuel Leigh, so influential in Australia, worked as a pioneer missionary in New Zealand from 1821 to 1823 when illness forced his return to Australia. Nathaniel Turner, whose labors were more signally blessed in Tasmania where “ordinary preaching services [were] attended by the power of the Holy Spirit in answer to earnest prayer” (p. 129), also expended much labor in New Zealand from 1835–1839.

In the latter half of the 1800s, Calvinistic Scottish Presbyterianism also bore a substantial influence in New Zealand. Barkley sums this well:

The main impact of Calvinism in New Zealand stemmed from Scottish Presbyterianism. The first Presbyterian minister, John Macfarlane, sailed from Glasgow in 1839 with a company of immigrants. They settled in Wellington. In 1843 a minister of the Church of Scotland, the Rev. W. Comrie, began services in Auckland. An important and influential pioneer minister was David Bruce, brother of A.B. Bruce, a professor at the Free Church College, Glasgow. He promoted the cause of church extension, and as churches came into existence with the growth of population, the Presbyterian Church of New Zealand was organized. The ministers of the church included men from the Free Church of Scotland, the Irish Presbyterian Church, the Church of Scotland, the United Presbyterian Church of Scotland, the English Presbyterian Church, and those trained in the colony. The first Assembly met in 1862 (p. 336).

But by 1900 the winds of liberalism were blowing full gale. Minority opposition was attempted; it was largely too little too late. In 1950 this opposition received a boost from the establishment of the Westminster Fellowship, which launched the publication of a journal entitled The Evangelical Presbyterian. Three years later a new denomination — brought about largely by new immigrants from the Netherlands who were disappointed with the preaching and teaching of the Presbyterian churches — added impetus to the fight to retain Calvinistic doctrines. This denomination, however, remains small — presently, there are fourteen congregations and three presbyteries.

For the most part, even these small groups in New Zealand which oppose liberal doctrines and retain a stand for the inerrancy of Scripture and the five points of Calvinism, have little emphasis at best on the necessity of experiencing these precious doctrines of grace. Our little church group, denominated “Reformed Congregations of New Zealand,” forms a faint glow on the horizon of the backsliding churches of New Zealand. The sunlight of experiential, historic Calvinism has well-nigh set in New Zealand. (There are also three, small Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland groups in New Zealand.)

Oh, may God yet arise and enlarge the coasts of Zion also in New Zealand to glorify Himself in the salvation of sinners! May He abundantly bless our evangelist who is laboring there, as well as the congregation of some eighty persons, with the outpouring of His Holy Spirit, and enable them to be salt in the earth and light on the hill. May He take reasons out of Himself to graciously fulfil the expectations of Samuel Marsden, who firmly believed that the Lord would grant spiritual revival there. To a visitor, shortly before he died, Marsden — the first to bring Christianity to the shores of New Zealand — confessed:

I shan’t live to see it, sir, but I may hear of it in heaven, that New Zealand with all its cannibalism and idolatry will yet set an example of Christianity to some of the nations now before her in civilization.

May God transform by Spirit-worked, free grace Marsden’s pioneer-missionary vision into spiritual, experiential reality in our sin-darkened day in the midst of backsliding New Zealand.

[Next time, the Lord willing: A concluding article of diary notes on our trip to New Zealand.]

Dr. J.R. Beeke is pastor of the First Netherlands Reformed Congregation of Grand Rapids, Michigan.

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