Category: New Zealand
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Free Speech And The NZ Church [2]
So there’s plenty to follow up after the anti-trans rally controversy over the weekend. Though it’s doubtful even the conservative Christian anti-trans lobbies knew she was coming or were associated with her, they have subsequently sought to champion her cause without looking really seriously at the extreme nature of the way this issue has played…
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Free Speech And The NZ Church [1]
Free speech is a topic that receives a lot of attention in society. The issue is perhaps best known worldwide because of the prominence it attracts in the United States of America. This has, throughout the history of New Zealand, led to a great deal of US influence upon our society and culture, including in…
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Political Faultlines Continue To Divide US Churches
Apologies for the slowdown in delivery of posts from this blog in 2022. The authorship has experienced many distractions, much of which have been personal family circumstances. These have been overcome enough by now to resume blogging. A faultline that has emerged this year in the US over evangelical engagement with political culture in the…
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Is the State clamping down on Christians in NZ?
At the end of June, a well known Christian activist group in New Zealand failed in a legal challenge to the removal of their charitable status (registered with various government agencies). The revocation of this status is said to be due to their involvement in political advocacy, which is generally held to be non-charitable in…
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Recap: Governance and Accountability [2]
Just a short update on this, the issues of church governance and accountability are super relevant at present in the wake of current scandals involving a prominent South Pacific megachurch. Most churches of this type have relatively limited accountability because of their leadership structures, which often place one person at the top as an apostolic…
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NZ Churches Seek Judicial Review of Government Covid Protection Framework (Traffic Lights) [2]
In the first part of this series we briefly examined the circumstances of the establishment of lodging court cases against the Government’s vaccine mandate policies by two separate groups of Christians. These groups are FreeToBeChurch, and the much more widely known Family First. The purpose of this part is to dig into some of the…
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NZ Churches Seek Judicial Review of Government Covid Protection Framework (Traffic Lights) [1]
The New Zealand Government in October 2021 announced the Covid-19 Protection Framework, otherwise known as “traffic lights”, for managing the impacts of Covid-19 in the community. The system was brought into effect on 2 December 2021 with most of NZ at the Orange level at that time. Nationwide pro-family lobby group Family First organised a…
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Theological Controversies Influencing US and NZ Churches [2]
An article in “The Atlantic” in October 2021 highlights huge division in US evangelical churches, which is a high price to pay for years of craven obeisance to conservative politics. The author lays the blame squarely at the feet of Donald Trump in the present term whilst also acknowledging that the issue has been steadily…
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Theological Controversies Influencing US and NZ Churches [1]
It’s very plain and has been for many years that churches in New Zealand are theologically influenced by viewpoints that originate from the USA. Whilst these ideas may be mainstream with the overall culture of society in America, they begin to look rather odd when imported into another country where cultural values are very different.…