“Is the world getting better, worse or staying the same?”
If you think it is getting worse, you’re in good company. The majority of audiences in 30 countries who were asked this question believed that things were indeed getting worse in our world. Among Christians too, many are predisposed to a negative perspective as wars, famines, persecutions and earthquakes have always been stuff of end-time scenarios.
But is this true? Or do most of us have a distorted worldview? Until his death two years ago, Swedish health professor Hans Rosling battled deeply-rooted misconceptions held by top academics, economists, UN officials, politicians, military brass and journalists concerning the state of the world, in boardrooms, lecture halls, and forums from Davos to TED talks.
A medical doctor with vast hands-on experience in many countries, Rosling challenged his listeners to seek out the facts and develop a lifestyle of what he called ‘Factfulness’, the title of the book he completed in the last months of his life.
Yesterday in the first Boekhoek (bookcorner) of this year in the Upper Room salon in Amsterdam, we examined some of the facts Rosling would present to his audiences about bad things decreasing, like the following: • extreme global poverty has fallen from 85% in 1800 to 9% in 2017, the biggest drop from 50% happening since 1966. • average life expectancy has risen from 31 years in 1800 to 72 years in 2017.
• today there are no countries with a life expectancy below 50 years. • in 1800, 44% of children died before the age of 5 years, but in 2016 only 4% died. • battle deaths per 100,000 people was 201 in 1942, but today is merely 1. • plane crash deaths per 10 billion passenger miles over 5-year averages was 2100 in 1929-1933, but 2012-16 was 1. • deaths from disasters annually over 10-year averages per million people was 453 in the 1930s, reduced to 10 over the period 2010-16. • child labour of those 5-14 years working full-time under bad conditions dropped from 28% in 1950 to 10% in 2012. • nuclear arms reached a peak of 64,000 warheads in 1986 but was reduced to 15,000 in 2017. • 148 countries had cases of smallpox in 1850, yet smallpox was eradicated by 1979. • world hunger has dropped from 28% of people undernourished in 1970 to 11% in 2015.
Facts about good things increasing that Rosling would tell his audiences included: • cereal harvests (tonnes per hectare) have increased from 1.4 in 1961 to 4 in 2014. • adult literacy has increased from 10% in 1800 to 86% in 2016. • the share of humanity living in a democracy has risen from 1% in 1816 to 56% in 2015. • the countries with equal voting rights from women and men was 1 in 1893, but today is 193. • child cancer survival has risen from 58% in 1975 to 80% in 2010. • the share of girls enrolled in primary schools was 65% in 1970 and in 2015 was 90%. • one-year-olds vaccinated at least once have risen from 22% in 1980 to 88% in 2016. • those with access to water from a protected source is 85% in 2015, up from 58% in 1980.
Our problem, Rosling pinpointed, was our tendency to notice the bad more than the good, our ‘negativity instinct’. We tended to romanticise the past into the ‘good old days’. Lack of memory in our ‘now’ culture robbed us of proper reference points. Our news media bombarded us with negative news from all across the world, he wrote: ‘wars, famines, natural disasters, political mistakes, corruption, budget cuts, diseases, mass layoffs, acts of terror’. Our surveillance of suffering had improved tremendously, yet stories about gradual improvements impacting millions of lives didn’t make the front pages. Activists and lobbyists made it their business to create alarm, and thus raise funding, for their causes.
Politicians, journalists and terrorists also exploit the ‘fear instinct’. While terrorism has increased worldwide, it has decreased in the richer nations (less than 1500 were killed from 2007-2016, a third of the number killed in the previous decade); most of the increase has been in Iraq (about half), Afghanistan, Nigeria, Pakistan and Syria. The ‘blame instinct’ is another factor giving us a distorted worldview, said Rosling, the instinct to find a simple reason why something bad has happened, when in fact the causes are usually more complicated.
Rosling was a man of deep humanitarian and humanist compassion. As far as I know, he did not write as a Christian. Yet, despite criticism of its ‘one-sidedness’, Factfulness challenges our world perceptions deeply. His passion for those still trapped in poverty and sickness is evident in his many Youtube videos. He unmasks many of the populist arguments which create fear of foreigners and scapegoat outsiders, and which too many Christians find attractive.
As we have written earlier, the progress he describes is indebted to values spread globally by the missionary movement. Surely there is some overlap between the advance of human wellbeing and flourishing he maps and the biblical concept of ‘shalom’, within the framework of God’s common grace, creating conditions for the gospel to be spread.
And that’s worth a prayer of thanks.
Fountain’s Weekly Word – originally published here
Changes are occurring in Northland – In the last six months, the Māori led Churches of Northland have been blessed by the Holy Spirit and have come into a wonderful oneness of fellowship and ministry.
Together with this, there are hopeful signs, towards a merging of Māori led Church leaders with the non-Māori Church leaders, in the leadership of the Northland wide Leaders’ Gathering, held every three months since 1986, in Te Punawai-Moerewa Christian Fellowship centre, Moerewa.
The November Leaders Gathering was a demonstration of this flowing together and resulted in much joy and thanksgiving.
A second-way change is occurring in the North, is that God is granting an increasing number of miracles to confirm the preaching of the Gospel. God is granting increasing faith, to believe for, and expect the miraculous.
Village Church, Hikurangi, is a Church where many are being saved, and where miracles of healing are frequent. Last Sunday afternoon, at Kowhai Park, Kaikohe, Village Church held an evangelistic- healing gathering, with miraculous healings and people responding to Jesus. Recently, a long-time friend of mine, who had a serious condition of osteoporosis in his vertebrae, was prayed for in his Church, in Doubtless Bay, (Baptist), and the subsequent x-ray revealed that there was no osteoporosis. As he was being prayed for he felt a warm glow go down his spine.
In the last two years at Te Punawai-Moerewa Christian Fellowship Centre, Moerewa, there has been a fourfold increase in the people of the town using the Church facility, as a place of social interaction for many events and fellowship. The community and the Church are meeting together daily. Moerewa Christian Fellowship was established by Howard Edwards in 1979-80, and “Howie” and Vicki pastored the Church until recently when they transferred the pastoral responsibility to Laurie and Glenda Anderson. Howie and Vicki have picked up our itinerant role in the North visiting many Churches.
It was a privilege to celebrate all Ken and Dorothy Bassett have done in Northland at our last gathering of the year. [2017]
Over 120 pastors and leaders gathered from around Northland to honour Ken and Dorothy for their 40 years of ministry.
Shaun Foster
Frontline Church Keri Keri
King’s Daughters, Northland
“King’s Daughters, Northland” meets alternate months (on a Friday evening) at Kerikeri Baptist Church and its vision is to unite and to encourage local Christian women in faith and life. It aims to allow them space to come together to hear God’s Word, to worship, pray, be creative, and to develop and strengthen friendships.
For the other months (also on a Friday), it hosts a “DVD & Prayer Ministry” evening. There, women can be inspired, challenged, and encouraged by Christian international speakers via DVD
King’s Daughters began In November 2016, celebrating our unity as women of God
Since then, the gatherings have seen on average a hundred women from different churches and towns across Northland, New Zealand, come together for a time of worship, encouraging testimonies, fellowship, creativity and prayer ministry.
The Churches of Greymouth enjoy the benefit of a number of long-term clergy and pastors who have formed good friendships and relationships with one another combined with newer clergy and pastors who are keen to connect ecumenically. The result is a strong sense of ecumenical unity that plays out in joint activities, responses to issues and good fellowship and prayer at our Minister’s Association meetings.
One example of how that sense of unity has worked out long-term has been the annual Combined Churches carol service in the local Regent Theatre which has been running for close to thirty years and is a feature for many in the community’s Christmas celebrations, Christian or otherwise. It’s always a good night of singing, dance, drama, humour and a poignant message towards the end with three to four hundred in attendance.
A more recent example of our unity was our coming together this year (2017) for the new Alpha Film Series where many of the churches were involved from hosting the starting dinner to providing venues for courses. We share leadership across the churches and joined forces for the Holy Spirit Day. We were blessed to see quite a number of people growing in their faith, experiencing healings and more.
The town has struggled economically over the last few years but the consistency and unity of the town’s churches have I believe been a point of stability for our community.
Rev Tim & Nicky Mora
In 1999 the Anglican Church of Greymouth and Kumara appointed a new youth worker by the name of Nicky Mora. Her husband Tim had just arrived in the Parish as a trainee priest and both had had experience in youth work.
Very quickly under their joint leadership, the youth group grew and expanded into a community-based youth project for the young people of the Grey District with administration and oversight support provided by the church.
The church’s support also includes the provision of “The Shed,” a multi-purpose youth activities centre with an amazing range of facilities. The project has been very successful with around 20% of the High School aged young people in the Grey District currently on the total roll.
The project was put in place because it was recognized that on the Coast young people can miss out on opportunities and don’t always have the support they need to get through the teenage years and the struggles that brings easily. It was in recognition of this that the Greymouth Churches Community Youth Project was established and gathered together an amazingly dedicated team of volunteers.
The aims of the project are to provide weekly and other programmes and activities that meet the needs of the young people in the Grey District in a safe and controlled environment.
These programmes include social, recreational and skills learning activities. Camps and outdoor wilderness activities (often subsidized). We involve ourselves in community initiatives and run social justice projects. We are members of the West Coast Youth Workers Collective, network with DCYFS, the High Schools, the police and District Council and have twice been awarded the supreme Trustpower Award for overall best community project in the Grey District.
This month has marked the 29th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall (November 9) and of the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia (November 17), two events which catalysed the collapse of the communist system.
In 1989, headlines everywhere announced the unbelievable news that the Wall had fallen. Euphoric crowds celebrated in the streets. The pluralistic free society of the West had won! Marxist regimes in other central and eastern European satellite states toppled like dominoes, and eventually the Soviet Union itself fell apart.
Yet today, less than three decades later, headlines now tell us that it is truth that has fallen.
“In today’s world, truth is losing”, announced The Washington Post. The Oxford Dictionary chose ‘post-truth’ as the word for the year in 2016. Since that year, we have watched political leaders rise to power in both North and South America, and across Europe to Russia and Turkey, who brush aside truth as a petty inconvenience.
The words of the prophet Isaiah ring ominously true today:
Justice is turned back, and righteousness stands afar off; for truth is fallen in the street, and honesty cannot enter. So truth fails, and he who departs from evil (stands for truth) makes himself a prey.
– Isaiah 59:14-15 NKJV
What happened?
What has happened to turn this apparent triumph of secular liberalism into a climate of fear, uncertainty, polarisation, fake news and mistrust?
In 1991, Lesslie Newbigin warned of the multiple problems of pluralism. While others contrasted free society pluralism with totalitarianism as light with darkness, he wrote: “Total pluralism, in which there are no criteria by which different lifestyles could be evaluated, in which any kind of discrimination between cultural norms as better or worse is forbidden, in which there is no truth but only ‘what seems meaningful for me’, leads inevitably to anomie, to lostness, to a meaningless life in a meaningless world” (Newbigin, L. (1991) Truth to tell,Geneva: WCC Publications, p55).
Marxism, claiming to be objectively scientifically true, therefore claimed the right to impose itself as public doctrine controlling all areas of life, he argued. We have seen the disastrous consequences of a false objectivity and applauded its collapse. Yet, even as the crowds were still celebrating victory in the Cold War, he cautioned of the ‘danger of collapsing into a false subjectivism in which there are no criteria but everything goes’.
Today, truth has fallen to subjectivism. Honesty is shut out. Those who stand for truth are mocked and dismissed. So how do we respond?
On the recent anniversary of the Velvet Revolution, I was in Prague with 170 participants of the Together for Europe movement from many nations of Europe east and west, and shared a meditation on lessons from Czech heroes about living in a ‘post-truth’ world.
Jan Hus, burnt at the stake as a heretic in 1415 during the Council of Constance, is honoured in Prague’s Old Town Square by an impressive monument paid for by publical donation during the First World War, to mark the 500th anniversary of his death. A century before Luther, Hus stood up for truth against abuses and doctrinal distortions in the Church of the day. Even as he faced his own death in Constance, he exhorted his disciples back in Prague to ‘seek the truth, hear the truth, learn the truth, love the truth, speak the truth, adhere to the truth, defend it to the death, for truth will free you’.
Truth prevails
On the base of the Hus memorial in Prague is the famous phrase attributed to the reformer, ‘Truth Prevails’. This motto was adopted by the first President of Czechoslovakia in 1918, Tomas Masaryk, and again by the first President of a democratic Czechoslovakia after the Velvet Revolution, Vaclav Havel.
Havel is another Czech hero from whom we can learn about living in a post-truth world. In what used to be a famous essay, The Power of the Powerless, the dissident playwright exhorted his fellow countrymen living under the false scientific objectivity of marxism: ‘don’t live the lie!’In language becoming freshly relevant this time in the West, Havel hammered again and again that truth and love had to prevail over lies and hatred.
Havel was a founding member of the Charter 77 movement whose motto was: Truth prevails for those who live in truth. Imprisoned multiple times for his stand on truth, Havel found himself in 1989 thrust into leadership of the Velvet Revolution and almost carried up the hill into the presidential palace to be the nation’s new leader.
In their words and life, Hus and Havel challenge us in our post-truth world and through our daily lives to stand for truth, to seek the truth, to speak the truth, to love the truth – for the truth will set us free.
Jeff Fountain’s Weekly Word – originally published here
This Christmas Bible Society New Zealand, through the generosity of its supporters, is giving away 85,000 copies of The Well Good News of Christmas, a fun and colourful booklet for parents and grandparents to help them pass on the Bible story of Christmas.
Last year, this little book was a run-away success with 3,000 copies flying out the door equipping families to pass on the Bible story of Christmas. Following on its heels was The Super Cool Story of Jesus, with 84,000 copies given away to children around the country with the help of churches and families.
In publishing another 85,000 copies of The Well Good News of Christmas, Bible Society is hoping to reach the 36%* of Kiwi kids who have never seen, read or heard the story of Jesus’ birth. The book is part of Bible Society’s Pass It On campaign designed to encourage and equip parents, grandparents and caregivers to pass on their passion for the Bible to the next generation.
With The Well Good News of Christmas, people have a fantastic opportunity to share the good news of Christmas with the children in their communities using a brilliantly fun book. It’s a story that is still impacting and changing lives today.
Stephen Opie, BSNZ Programme Director.
Written by Welsh author Dai Woolridge, the story is aimed at four to eight-year-olds using child-friendly rhyming language.
And while The Well Good News of Christmas focuses on the events around Jesus’ birth, it also includes a little about creation, and Jesus’ life and ministry.
The Well Good News of Christmas
is being offered free to churches, BSNZ partner organisations and anyone who wants to share the Bible story of Christmas
Click here to order your copies or call us on 0800 424 253
Individuals can order up to five copies, while churches and organisations can order up to 250 copies
Learn more about how Bible society New Zealand makes the Bible accessible to everyone and encourage interaction with it
“Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace”
– sohow are New Zealand churches going on that?
It is no secret that Jesus told his followers to “love another”, that he prayed that believers “all may be one”, and that he indicated such unity would be a great witness to a watching world. Also, Ephesians 4 reminds us that we all share the same Lord and are all part of the same worldwide spiritual body of Christ: “There is one body and one Spirit, …one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all”.
The principles of unity are clear enough. In reality, though, seeing and practising that unity is a lot more difficult. So the scriptures also say to us that we have to work hard at getting on well together. They also constantly teach us about humility and gentleness, forgiveness and reconciliation, respect and encouragement – attitudes and behaviours which reflect the mind of Christ and the fruit of the Holy Spirit. As it also says in Ephesians 4: “Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love”, and “Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace”, and “Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ, God forgave you”.
The main obstacle to Christian unity is not that we lack a biblical theology of unity, but our failure to live it out. Human nature is intrinsically self-centered. Even as Christian believers we do our own thing and don’t necessarily care too much about others.
So what are some of the obstacles to Christian unity in Aotearoa New Zealand today?
OUR OWN BUSYNESS
We are generally too busy coping with our own concerns and all the demands of our own ministries to be investing time and energy into relating to Christians beyond our immediate circles and context.
DENOMINATIONALISM
Our denominations tend to confine us as Christians into narrower boundaries. Too easily we idolise denominational distinctives, and make them more important than relating across the body of Christ. The church in New Zealand appears increasingly fragmented.
THEOLOGICAL DIFFERENCES
While most Christians would affirm the same basic tenets of faith, such as there is one triune God and Christ is Lord and Saviour and risen from the dead, and most would assent to the Apostles Creed, there are nevertheless some profound differences of belief and practice among Christians. Some may hold loosely to biblical orthodoxy, and many others may emphasise points of the faith that are secondary. The Church in New Zealand has various overlapping streams: liberal, traditional, liturgical, mainline, evangelical, charismatic and Pentecostal, and many people in each of those streams are not particularly eager to have much to do with those Christians who are in other streams, and regard them as suspect or defective in some way. There is some distrust between these different Christian streams of faith and practice.
TRIBALISM
Human beings are incurably tribal. We like to mix with people like us and do things our own way. That is why the dreams of Church union (which climaxed in the 1960’s plan for mergers to create a mega denomination) all came to nothing.
EXCLUSIVITY
Various attempts at creating national inter-church bodies in New Zealand have all struggled because, theologically and ecclesiastically, they failed to be sufficiently inclusive. The National Council of Churches and the Conference of Churches of Aotearoa New Zealand, for instance, did not include Pentecostals or smaller evangelical denominations, and the new National Council for Christian Unity includes just four denominations.
FUNDING
Denominations all agree unity is good, but are unwilling to give funding to support organisations working for Christian unity.
GEOGRAPHY
New Zealand is a long thin country and it is not easy to maintain relationality across the length of the whole nation.
CULTURAL DIFFERENCES
New Zealand is a mix of many different cultures and traditions and these add to the fragmentation of our Church. There are many churches in New Zealand which reflect migrant groups that, very understandably, prefer to worship together in their own way.
Unity is not just a matter of institutions and structures and mergers. It’s primarily an attitude of the heart and a work of the Holy Spirit. In Christ, all believers are called to unity, unity of spirit, which is something we are not always doing well. “Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” gives us what we need to do. How can we rise to that challenge?
Dr Stuart Lange, interim National Director, NZCN Adapted from reflections shared with the National Church Leader’s meeting, September 2018.
