Will probe rise to the occasion?
If you’re seeking solace, company, answers, or just a fun place to be on a Sunday, the idea of a community devoted to your spiritual health must be attractive. The idea, I imagine, would be to grow and blossom, supported by that community of like-minded citizens – not spat out years later, broken and abused.
That juxtaposition of promise and harm was highlighted by LA-based Kiwi journalist David Farrier in his series exposing allegations of exploitation and abuse at New Zealand’s biggest church, Arise.
The allegations are serious – they include harassment, physical bullying and exploitation of vulnerable workers. Most organisations with a culture problem have found abuse of power at the heart of their issues. The steeper the power imbalance within relationships, the greater the opportunity for harm. Many of the people who’ve spoken out about at Arise were on the lowest rungs – young, often brought into the church in targeted recruitment campaigns. They showed remarkable commitment and stickability as their work burden grew and grew. In the end, in Arise head pastor John Cameron’s own words, they were left feeling ‘‘overworked, overwhelmed, underappreciated and taken advantage of as interns’’.
In recent days Cameron resigned from the church’s governing board and ‘‘stepped aside’’ (although, as Farrier points out in his latest piece, this does not necessarily mean he’s no longer in charge.) Cameron has said all the ‘‘right’’ things. He apologised for the pain caused to ministry school students, and promised change.
‘‘I want to make it clear that there is no place for people’s health to be anything other than our top priority,’’ a statement said. The devil, pardon the pun, is always in the details and there was another part of his latest statement I found particularly telling.
‘‘The truth is for a period of time as a church we allowed a culture of performance to be part of our Arise world, and this negatively affected Arise Ministry School students,’’ Cameron said. The ‘‘culture of performance’’ could be another phrase for the corporatisation of organised religion – a common aspect of megachurches worldwide.
It’s not a new concept. In 2006, Samuel Kobia, then head of the World Council of Churches, warned the megachurch movement was ‘‘shallow’’ and driven by ideals more commonly found in private sector businesses.
‘‘It’s a church being organised on corporate logic. That can be quite dangerous if we are not very careful, because this may become a Christianity which I describe as ‘two miles long and one inch deep’,’’ Kobia said. There are plenty of corporates which, when they choose to take a proper look, have discovered broken systems that have allowed harassment, bullying and exploitation to flourish unchecked. Few corporate environments, however, would mimic the kind of structures that have allowed the mess at Arise to fester. The closest I can come to a comparison would be major law firms, where, it was claimed in 2019, once weekly hours were averaged, some new lawyers were working for less than the minimum wage. At Arise, there were no wages at all for the young workers, who instead had to actually pay the church for the privilege of collecting drycleaning, cleaning John Cameron’s car and babysitting his children, which they were apparently told would lead to a ‘‘qualification’’ at the end of the internship. The concept of the work as a ‘‘privilege’’, drummed into these young people, was a convenient tool – unlike law firms, who could only point to the career ladder and the firm’s bottom line as justification, the church leaders had a neat way to sidestep accountability. The work was not for their benefit, but for God. And if it’s for God, how can you argue?
When allegations of abusive behaviour are made, the right thing to do is take a deep, preferably independent, look at the organisation’s culture and come up with a sound plan to do better. How does the organisation achieve that? By hiring the bestqualified experts to get the complex job of an external investigation done with natural justice and the dignity of all preserved.
Arise has promised to do that. This past week, it appointed a Christchurch firm trading as Pathfinding NZ to carry out what it called a ‘‘full and complete response’’ to the allegations. The Arise review will be run by its owner, Charlotte Cummings, who is a counsellor with many years of experience and training behind her. But Cummings is not a lawyer, nor is she, or any of the others on the review panel, a private investigator. Why does that matter? Because external fact-finding investigations must be run under the Private Security Personnel and Private Investigators Act 2010. The provisions of this rather obscure act were tested in 2020 – which established any fact-finding investigation must be carried out by a licensed private investigator, or a person exempted under the act – a lawyer, for example. Most major external reviews are led by Queen’s Counsel, or retired judges (also exempt from the provisions of the act.) Pathfinding NZ did not respond to my questions about the personnel carrying out this review, which leaves the question hanging: How sound – or even how legal – will this much-vaunted investigation be?
The devil, pardon the pun, is always in the details.