Onward Christian minister
Tony Smith talks to New Zealanders from different sporting eras and backgrounds who have two things in common: sport and faith. Today, Kiwis great Roy Christian discusses his links to the Mutiny on the Bounty, his standout league career and switching from the freezing works to the pulpit.
Kiwis great Roy Christian faced a big decision – should he manage the New Zealand rugby league team on a tour of Britain or leave a secure job in Auckland to become a Presbyterian minister?
Christian had captained the Kiwis to historic series wins in England and France in 1971 and was a natural choice to manage the 1980 team, coached by good friend Cec Mountford.
‘‘But I had to say no to that,’’ Christian says. Instead, he answered ‘‘God’s call’’.
Today, Christian, 78, has been minister at the Presbyterian Church in Mā ngere, south Auckland, for 38 years.
As he tells it, however, he never wanted to be a minister at all.
‘‘It wasn’t until 1979 or 80 that it came to me that’s what God wanted me to do.’’
Christian earned 33 test caps from 1965 to 1972 and a reputation as one of the Kiwis’ greatest captains.
His father’s family came from Norfolk Island where his sixth great-grandfather, Fletcher Christian, settled after leading a mutiny aboard the HMS Bounty in the Pacific Ocean in 1789.
‘‘That’s my first name, Fletcher Roy.’’
Christian’s father was from Norfolk Island, and his mother was born in Vanuatu before returning to Norfolk, but the family relocated to Auckland to build new lives after the banana crop – the island’s main industry – failed.
He was born in Auckland and grew up in Otahuhu.
Despite his surname, religion did not feature prominently in Christian’s early life.
‘‘Dad used to say he’s Christian by name, he didn’t need to be one [by religious practice]. Mum tried to get us to go to church by going up the road to the Salvation Army, but it didn’t last.’’
Sport took over by the time Christian reached school age. ‘‘But I always had a belief in God and the church, and I thought that would do.’’
He did go to Boy’s Brigade for a while, where he heard a Christian message. One of his colleagues there was David Lange. Many years later, Lange’s government appointed Christian a Justice of the Peace.
As he got older, Christian began attending church in Otahuhu, ‘‘but that was it as far as I was concerned’’.
Christian earned respect from his team-mates for his play, but also for his humility and steady manner.
‘‘The first thing I always packed when I went away on tour was a Bible and a study guide.’’
He says he never tried to preach to his football friends, ‘‘but they all knew’’. Nor was it terribly challenging being a Christian in one of the toughest of sporting codes.
‘‘The only part I didn’t like was the amount of drink some of them had, I don’t mean on the tour, mainly around the local scene,’’ said Christian, who ‘‘used to drink shandies – mainly lemonade and beer’’.
Christian captained the Kiwis from 1970 to 1972, leading them to a famous win over Australia at Carlaw Park in 1971 before the twin series triumphs on the European tour.
He retired after a three-test World Cup campaign in France in 1972, having just turned 30.
By then, he’d been away on tours or test assignments for up to six weeks at a time three years in a row, and he felt it was too long away from work and family.
So, Christian hung up his boots and focused on his clerical job at a freezing works and spending time with wife Robyn and their two children.
Robyn shares Christian’s faith. ‘‘My wife used to get annoyed because my father would say: ‘Well, you married a Christian, and you had to get married to become one,’’ Roy said. ‘‘She didn’t like that because she was a Christian far before I was.
‘‘Robyn and I used to work during the day. I’d go for a run at lunchtime and go training at night with my football team, then we’d both go out and do cleaning jobs around factories and whatever to get the money to get a deposit for a house.’’
By the end of the 1970s, Christian was happily immersed in family life, but fate then stepped in.
He was attending a combined Anglican, Methodist and Presbyterian church in Otahuhu when a minister asked him to help out with a youth group.
‘‘Over a few days, those three ministers said to me, ‘we think you should become a minister’. I thought, ‘No way’, I didn’t even have school certificate … I was too busy playing sport.’’
But he felt ‘‘God spoke to me through other people’’. He and Robyn ‘‘prayed about it a lot, and then we both decided that’s what God wanted me to do’’.
Christian says he didn’t apply for the ministry. ‘‘My own minister told me, ‘I’ve put your name forward, you have to go to this meeting’.’’
So, he went to a meeting of the Auckland Presbytery and felt ‘‘there’s no way I’ll get in’’. But he was sent to a camp in Hamilton, ‘‘where people came from all over the North Island wanting to become ministers’’.
Christian felt relaxed there, saying he had a ball. ‘‘The others were all worried about whether they’d make it in or not, but I went down to see if that’s what God wanted me to do.’’
When Christian was asked if he had been to university, he replied: ‘‘No, I didn’t even get school certificate.’’
‘‘I came home to my wife and said, ‘that’s it, it’s finished’. Next thing I knew I had a letter saying I had been accepted and that I had to do a year at university in Auckland and then go down to Dunedin to Knox College.’’
That meant turning down the Kiwis manager’s role, and leaving his job.
Christian believes he and his family were looked after once he made his decision to train for the ministry.
‘‘The freezing works had given me a big pay rise because everyone got a rise at that time. I had already handed my notice in, so I said to the manager, ‘you know I’m leaving?’. And he said, ‘Yes, but you could probably do with the money before you go’.
‘‘God was very good to us. When we went down to Knox we didn’t know what we were going to do with the house, and somehow in that last year, and we’re still not sure how it happened, God allowed us to pay off the mortgage. So we were debt-free and we were able to let family members stay there, rent-free and look after the house.’’
University life seemed daunting at first but, again, Christian received some unexpected help. Two headmasters returning to complete degrees helped him select university courses and adjust to academic life.
‘‘One was high up in the Anglican Church, the other an elder in the Presbyterian Church. They just took me under their wing so I got through the year all right.
‘‘They had a look at my assignments and said, ‘you can’t write simple words, you have to write university words’. When I did that, I finished up getting As.’’
Christian had another turning point at Knox College when he told the professors he didn’t want to do a theological degree.
‘‘They said, ‘that’s all right, you’ll be doing the same courses as everyone else, just wait until you have to pay the university fees and decide then’. I thought, ‘That’s incredible, I’m getting through, and it’s nothing I’m doing.
‘‘On the morning of the day I had to decide I went and sat in the chapel to think what I was going to do. Then I said [out loud], I wouldn’t [do a degree].
‘‘This is the incredible part people find hard to believe. I heard a voice behind me say: ‘Now you’ll listen to me and not to the wisdom of men’.’’
Christian turned to see who was talking and ‘‘there was nobody there’’.
Nearing the end of his three years at Knox College, Christian heard the Mā ngere Presbyterian Church was looking for a minister. ‘‘My own minister from Otahuhu was on the board to decide the next minister at Mā ngere. They hadn’t had any joy [in getting someone] so he suggested me and they called me up.’’
Other students told him ‘‘you can’t go to Mā ngere, that’s not a very good place to go’’. ‘‘But I said, ‘It’s good enough for me, I just lived up the road before I came to Knox. I said, ‘it doesn’t matter where the people are, people are people. I’ve found they are good people here in Mā ngere.’’
Roy and Robyn Christian were embraced by the Mā ngere congregation from their arrival in 1984.
They returned to south Auckland with ‘‘$100 to our name’’, but within a fortnight they opened their letterbox to find ‘‘someone had given us a bank cheque for $2000 with a note saying it was to be used for a trip to Norfolk Island’’, where none of them had been.
‘‘All those things, I can only give to God. He’s the one that’s done it.’’
The Presbyterian Church in Mā ngere dates back to 1874. The original wooden church is still used for Bible classes for young people. The Christians initially lived in a manse three houses up from the church in Kilbride Rd, but more latterly have moved to Mā ngere East.
‘‘Having grown up in Otahuhu, I knew what it’s like around here,’’ Christian says. ‘‘It’s cleaned up a lot now. A lot of glue sniffers used to hide in the cemetery where the grass had grown up over everything.’’
There was also a big gang in the suburb in his early days, but ‘‘we haven’t got the gangs so much now’’.
Christian says there are more than 100 churches in Mā ngere, with various denominations having congregations for specific heritage groups, including Samoan and Tongan.
His own parish has ‘‘a bit of everybody’’, but the Covid-19 pandemic has resulted in congregation numbers dropping from between 70 and 80 to 32 on a recent Sunday.
‘‘We’ve got a lot of older people here. That’s why we’re down on numbers at the moment. The older people don’t want to come and catch Covid because we’ve had the odd younger one who won’t wear masks, although we’re gratefully losing that, thank goodness.’’
The pandemic has also meant
Christian hasn’t been able to do as much pastoral work in the community as he’s been accustomed. ‘‘Some of the rest homes have stopped allowing ministers in,’’ he says.
Christian has served the community in other roles, as a Justice of the Peace since the 1980s and as a Mā ngere Law Office trustee, which required him to work with other churches experiencing challenges.
He was also moderator of the Auckland Presbytery for two years in 2003-04. Again, he never sought the role, he had ‘‘two people pushing for it and they put my name down. Eventually I said yes.’’
During his tenure he had the difficult job of ‘‘talking to ministers and telling them they’d been sacked’’.
Delivering tough news was not something he enjoyed. ‘‘But never mind, it had to be done. God was good. He got me through it all.’’
He enjoyed visiting parishes ‘‘up north’’, but said it was challenging ‘‘because I had to keep this church running, too’’.
He cares deeply for the Mā ngere community, even down to having concerns that a trend towards higher density housing might leave children in the district without backyard space to play in.
Christian is conscious he is long past national superannuation age, but he has ‘‘just kept going’’ since the ‘‘Government brought in the rule that you can’t discriminate on age any more.
‘‘I want to stop, but we are short of ministers. Once I go, I think it’s going to be a problem for them to find somebody else. The different ministers I talk to don’t want to come to Mā ngere.’’
So Christian doesn’t want to leave his parishioners in the lurch.
He says ministering to a congregation and a community isn’t a lot different to captaining a successful rugby league team, because ‘‘it’s all about the people’’.
After almost four decades as a minister, the Kiwis’ 1971 captain has no regrets at turning down the team manager’s job for a full and rewarding Christian life.
‘‘The first thing I always packed when I went away on tour was a Bible and a study guide.’’
Roy Christian