The Ephesus Group in Wellington
This article provides a picture of the Ephesus group initiated by Ian Harris in Wellington in 1990. It is the talk Ian gave at the 25th Anniversary of Ephesus in 2015 (slightly updated) and gives interesting insights into how and why the group was set up. Quoting the hymn by Charles Wesley and alluding to the painful history of the beginnings of the Methodist Church reflected in it, he titles his talk “And Are We Yet Alive?”
While the origins of Ephesus were initially within the New Zealand Presbyterian Church, members today come from many different denominations and some have no religious affiliation at all. Active members currently number 15-30 and a small programme planning group meets about twice a year.
And Are We Yet Alive?
On the 25th Anniversary of Ephesus May 3, 2015, by Ian Harris
If “we” is Ephesus, yes, we are – and that’s somewhat surprising to me. When first we met in March 1990, people were asked to commit to four exploratory sessions – yet here we are, still meeting, 25 years on.
Our title for the evening, And are we yet alive?, has an honourable back-story in church history, especially for the people called Methodist. Methodism was a movement among the poor, especially in the new mining towns of England and Wales, and it was loathed and despised by the squirearchy and the Anglican establishment. In some places mobs were set on the Methodist preachers and those who had gathered to hear them. They were attacked with mud, stones, rotten eggs and staves.
Well, our experience as an Ephesus Group has been less dramatic than that, thank goodness. The churches from which we’ve come have ignored us. And we’ve got on with our life without them. Nonetheless, Ephesus does share one key feature of the early days of Methodism: it was conceived in the womb of an existing church, which then disowned it.
Our Origins
So how did we come about? Tonight I shall go right back to the beginning, because not everyone knows that Ephesus had a pre-existence.
In 1986 I took up an appointment as Director of Communication for the Presbyterian Church. As time went on, I became aware of a malaise among many people, a sense of dissonance between what was being affirmed in preaching, the creeds and a lot of the hymns, and what they were thinking deep down. As John Spong said, “The heart cannot worship what the mind rejects.” So good folk were turning off, dropping out, or just hanging on by their fingernails and increasingly wondering why. This, of course, was the result of the secularisation of society over the past 200 years, and of the churches’ unsatisfactory response to it. We had moved into a new world, but the church was anchored firmly in the old one.
I was Director of Communication, and I saw this as a communication problem. How was it to be addressed? My answer was first, to encourage the church to acknowledge the new reality; and second, to set up a research group in the Communication Department to check out the extent of what was going on.
For this, I proposed the umbrella name Ephesus. It was a New Testament metaphor growing out of the tradition that it was at Ephesus, in western Turkey, that John took a Jewish understanding of the life and teaching, death and resurrection of Jesus, and transposed it so it would resonate with people of a Greek cultural heritage. The name “Ephesus” suggests that a transposition of similar proportions is necessary in Christianity today: from a pre-modern interpretation of our Christian heritage to one that fits with the secular understandings of the 21st century.
We produced a number of booklets addressing these issues, eight in all, beginning with one based on Massey University research on New Zealanders’ values:
What New Zealanders Believe
Attitudes and Life-Styles
Earthing our Faith in the 21st Century / The Church in the New Era
Bridging the Generations
Salvation and Hope in the New Zealand of the 1990s
The Greening of Christianity
A Deep Flowing Stream (on New Zealand women and their churches)
Exploring the Meaning of Life.
All these were published as titles in the “Ephesus Series”. The first five added the line “Presbyterian Church of New Zealand”, the last three “Christian Research Association of New Zealand”. There’d been a switch, as I’ll explain.
Broadening Out
Then I developed a proposal to broaden what we’d been doing to a more comprehensive “Project Ephesus” – a request to the Council of Assembly in its budget-setting role to allow me to spend one day a week working on this approach.
It was approved, and in February 1989 we got under way with an exploratory group comprising Yvonne Curtis, Lester Reid, Shirley Murray, Maurice Brown, Nola Ker (Borrell), Sharon Ross-Ensor, Jim Veitch, for a time Silvia Crane, and myself.
At that point Ephesus was defined as “a project to explore new ways of understanding God and expressing faith in terms of New Zealand culture and experience, and to form networks of people throughout New Zealand who wish to share in the task”.
Turning-Point
Then in July 1989, out of the blue and without any consultation at all, the Council of Assembly dropped the Ephesus initiative. I was totally cheesed off, to put it mildly – that’s when I started looking for another job. Later the council ditched the research group, too.
So I put to the exploratory group three options:
- Lie down and die.
- Get up and kick.
- Push on with the Ephesus emphasis outside the institution that had rejected it.
The issue for me was a choice between an open, inclusive approach in matters of faith, and giving priority to the survival of parishes where “the unity of the church” demanded that nobody must rock the boat. My interest was clearly with the first of those. Well, our little ad-hoc group continued to meet, and finally decided to test the ideas we’d been discussing by inviting people to come to four sessions early in 1990. We produced a programme and sent a letter to people who might be interested. Here are a couple of quotes from that letter:
“The starting point is that the way people experience and understand reality in this secular age is so different from the past that a wholesale rethinking of theology is needed, to be reflected in the way the Church understands God, and in the way we worship . . .
“Ephesus doesn’t assume it has all the right answers. But we think that at least we are starting with the right questions. If you think so too and would like to take an active part in an unpredictable journey, you are welcome to join with others at . . . [time and place].”
After the four sessions, we asked people if they wished to continue or not. They did. At the end of the first year, we asked again, Do you want to carry on in the new year or not? They did, and the answer has been “yes” for 25 years.
I’ve spent some time on the origins of Ephesus because people know less about them – and the nearer we get to today, the more you’ll be aware of anyway.
Milestones
Now I’ll touch on a few milestones in our development, and then reflect briefly on the unpredictable journey we’ve been on.
- Ephesus has a leaflet setting out our aims and emphases. In 25 years we’ve made only two changes. One is where we referred to “exploring new ways of understanding Christian faith in [our] increasingly secular world”. That was changed to “understanding and expressing Christian faith”, etc.
- And we originally had “Its God is the I AM God, not a God defined, a God ‘out there” Then someone said: “I don’t know what that means”, and I said “Neither do I.” So we changed it to “Each person is free to think of God and express that understanding in his or her own way”. Behind both of those, of course, was an attempt to emphasise an open, non-dogmatic approach, and not pin talk of God down in a doctrinal straitjacket.
- We moved about town. We’ve met in the national offices of the Presbyterian Church, at St Andrew’s on The Terrace, St Peter’s Undercroft, Crossways, Trinity Union (Wellington South), and in recent years at Johnsonville Uniting Church.
- In 1993 we began to spend a weekend away, first in the Marist Brothers’ beach house at Otaki, then at the Magnificat Community at Cross Creek. The purpose in 1993 was to watch and discuss Don Cupitt’s Sea of Faith TV series, and in following years The Power of Myth, Healing and the Mind, and so on. We obviously valued these weekends, and they continued till Covid, and subsequently an ageing membership, led to our dropping them.
- Ephesus was heavily involved in forming the Sea of Faith Network in New Zealand – eight members of the foundation committee were from Ephesus, and we planned the first national conference at Hamilton. Ephesus and Sea of Faith overlapped closely at first, but since then they’ve diverged and taken their own paths. Which is fair enough.
- We allowed ourselves the freedom to fail. If something was worth trying, it seemed better to try it – and if it didn’t work, we learnt something for next time.
- Ephesus recognised gradually that there’s more to faith than endlessly chewing the fat on worthy topics. That led to our actively exploring new ways to express what we were discovering, and so to a new approach to liturgy. Lots of people have been involved at various times in the preparation and performance of liturgies, with Jill Harris making a major contribution. In the longer term, reclaiming liturgy is probably the most important thing we do.
- Out of our exploring and honest sharing there has developed a sense of community, a valuing of, and commitment to, one another.
- Another milestone was, after 10 years, my relinquishing the roles of devising our programme and acting as co-ordinator for the group. It isn’t my group, it’s our group. And we’ve been well served over the years by Maxine Cunningham, Norm Ely, Jeanette Brunton, Archie Kerr, Rob Wilkinson, Margaret Rushbrook, and today (2024) Maria Cash.
So has it all been worthwhile? I can only answer personally, and for me yes, in spades. They’ve been years of delving, widening horizons, exploring themes that are off limits or frowned on in a lot of church circles. Years of fluctuation in degrees of participation, but there have always been opportunities to participate, and encouragement to participate. Years of making new friends and, sadly, losing old ones; yet we will remember them, for they remain part of the fabric of our communal experience.
So here we are, 25 years on, still ready to learn what we can, still ready to share in the life of a unique faith community, still aspiring in our consumer society to be more rather than to have more. At least I hope so.
So are we yet alive? Too right we are, and let’s go on together, in the hope that the best is yet to be.
Ian Harris