Oprah Winfrey is the New Pope

I have been reminded and excited again this week about what a seismic change is taking place in Christianity in New Zealand. Where the organic church has been very much under the radar and under ground as it begins to build, over the last week I have begun to wonder if it is beginning to break the surface as it's flow continues to ripple out.

During the last seven days I have been struck by two pieces of news.

The first piece of news is that a contact I have who started and leads a New Zealand based Overseas Missions agency has decided to personally start a house church in New Zealand with the aim of seeing a network established. I was quite surprised by this as when I last met him he was very much operating with a institutional church / mission mind set. He says in his newsletter that he was challanged to change by observing the powerful surge of house churches in the third world where he was operating. He realised that people on average stayed in a pentecostal / charismatic church for less than 6 years. he knew this to be true in N.Z but was staggered to find it exactly the same in the nations where he was working in. When he moved back to N.Z he was struck that the Institutional church though speaking one thing basically works out of the old Testement in its practices, yet people are needing to live out and here the powerful New Testement gospel of GRACE. It is exciting to see key people who are have sacrificed every thing for the gospel of Christ to be changing there directions to head down more organic paths.

The second thing that excited me was the 3 page pull out in Saturdays NZ Herald (NZ's largest Newspaper). It was called 'Soul Searching'. The articles were mainly about how we have become more Spiritual as a society but are rapidly rejecting its institutionalisim. The paper quotes Dr Kevin Ward of Knox Collage in his comparisons of the Church with local rugby clubs around the country.
"People are becoming aware that the fact church attendence is declining does not mean people are not interested in faith... He has tagged the phenomenon Believing without Belonging, drawing a metaphor for the decline of structured belief from the dwindling membership of amateur rugby union competitions.
Players are withdrawing from the organised competitions, with their strict hierachies and complex grading systems, and flocking to the more casual, come-when-you-can atmosphere of touch football instead...
Previously everything in life was part of a structure or a club, like sport or volontary service, but now, increasingly, people do all kinds of things without belonging. Take tramping; in the 60's and 70's, most people who tramped belonged to tramping clubs, but now very few people do. The're still tramping, but they're making their own way.
Other quotes from article

Instead of rejecting God altogether, today many are finding spirituality in everyday life as well as in the church.

Spirituality is not about having a few nice experiances, it's about how you live in the world, how you can help to transform society