Change from traditional

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32775, 27 November 1971, Page 15

Change from traditional

The church in New Zealand was the most strait-jacketed, straightlaced outfit anyone could be involved in, the acting superintendent of the Christchurch Methodist Central Mission (the Rev. B. Mackie) said in an interview.

“Talk about the courts being rigid! You ought to come into some of our churches. You’re told when to stand up and when to sit down, when to open your mouth, and when not to. “We need to throw out the pulpit, throw out the pews, put down wall-to-wall carpet and scatter a few chairs around, he said. “This is where the Pentecostals and the Jesus people have something on us.” Mr Mackie has introduced a new type of worship service into the programme of the Mission Church. Those who attend, at present by invitation, are charged $l. The first service held on October 15 included current hit songs, film excerpts, clay modelling, miming and the presentation of the Christian message by projector and tape recorder.

The first two sections of the evening, which lasted

three hours, were taken up with loneliness, first talking about it, and then experiencing it. The programme culminated in a party, and the celebration of the Eucharist, to symbolise sharing and belonging. The service is to be held monthly and the next one will be an experience of the tensions between war and peace. The church had used words far too much and forgotten other methods of communication. It had forgotten the. feelings people had, said Mr Mackie. In the new service there would be no great long dissertations, he said. The material used and methods of communication would be different from those of the traditional church. “Much of what we have in the church is irrelevant to young people. The language is foreign, the formality is lost on them, and the whole set up of the traditional church is divorced from the experiences people have. Worship is unreal to many people.

It was no good saying to young people any more, “You must come to church,” said Mr Mackie.

Speaking about the entrance fee of $l, Mr Mackie said that the imposition of a

fee was something people understood and something to which they responded. “If we say, ‘lt costs us $1 a head to run this evening,’ they understand that,” he said.

Handing around the plate at church had become largely a symbolic gesture. “Most people have a heritage of traditional church thinking. They cannot think in terms of the service we are envisaging,” he said. Mr Mackie said that there needed to be a continued respect for the style of worship preferred by older people. These people were the kernel of the church. But the church needed to look at other possibilities. If it continued to cater only for a traditional core it would be turning away those who were seeking relevance in the church. There was not enough development of new styles of worship to appeal to this bracket, said Mr Mackie.

The venture was not a gimmick. A gimmick was a method of increasing church attendance. “I couldn’t care less about church attendance. But I am concerned about developing a relevant and authentic pattern of worship,” said Mr Mackie.