PM: ‘It makes sense to borrow’
Families fleeing Gloriavale have been making their way to South Canterbury for the past seven years. Many stay. What is it about the rural community on the South Island’s east coast that has attracted the former religious community members to live there? Reporters Joanne Holden and Rachael Comer explore the mass exodus.
They leave with nothing in the middle of the night, in secret pickup missions many weeks in the planning. Most have very little money, and few possessions, and no idea of the life they are about to step into, but for the past seven years about 75 former Gloriavale members have settled in South Canterbury.
The influx has prompted many community appeals for clothing, accommodation and vehicles for the members, who usually leave with nothing but the clothes they are wearing, having been picked up from the reclusive West Coast religious community and driven
338 kilometres to Timaru.
Then, once they are in the unfamiliar town, there is a whole new way of life to learn – from using a phone to paying bills to bringing up children in a world with fewer restrictions.
As the number of families moving to South Canterbury has grown, so too has the support.
In November the Gloriavale Leavers’ Support Trust was launched by a group of Timaru trustees. Until then couple Liz and Graham Gregory, other volunteers, church members, former Gloriavale families and the public footed the bill for the ongoing financial support of former members who chose to resettle in the region.
Trust general manager and support worker Liz Gregory said 12 former members moved to South Canterbury in 2013, followed by four in 2014, 22 in 2015, two in 2016, eight in 2017 and 13 in 2018.
Last year 17 former members came to the region, including members of a large family who stayed in Timaru for six weeks before settling in Christchurch.
Fifteen babies have also been born in the region to members who have left Gloriavale.
A family of 17
It was hammered into James Harrison that his large family would starve outside Gloriavale, but five years after leaving he’s about to become a homeowner.
Harrison is in the process of buying a house on Divan Rd, Timaru, but when he escaped the secluded Christian community with his pregnant wife and 12 children on the night of March 7, 2015, they had only $40 to their name.
‘‘Five years ago, we never would have believed we’d be here now,’’ Harrison said.
The 45-year-old and his wife, Hope, who live on a dairy farm on the outskirts of Temuka, had three more children outside the community. Their children range in age from 25 years to 11 months.
While he admitted that raising so many children had been much harder after his escape, shedding the rigid schedules at Gloriavale that saw him spend just one or two hours with his family each day meant they were able to grow closer.
‘‘Within Gloriavale, you’re encouraged to focus on the community rather than your own family. But we were probably a lot more focused on our own family than, perhaps, what was normal,’’ he said.
‘‘You just have it hammered into you your entire life that you’re not entitled to your own opinions. Most people go along with that. They’re conditioned to.’’
Harrison said his grandfather, Gloriavale founder Hopeful Christian, often remarked: ‘‘Dads are sometimes the worst influence on their boys.’’
Harrison added: ‘‘I can remember getting in trouble a bit at Gloriavale for wanting my boys to work with me. I was told I needed to be more communityminded and let them go.
‘‘When the boys got taken away from working with me, it felt like they were tearing our family apart. My wife and I weren’t happy about it at all.’’
Realising ‘‘very little’’ taught at Gloriavale was true saw
Harrison and Hope decide to leave with their growing family, and in the middle of the night they were picked up in a van and car and driven straight from the West Coast to Timaru.
‘‘So much of what’s taught to us is nonsense and yet so many believe it because it’s all they know,’’ Harrison said.
‘‘I guess I inherited my grandfather’s rebellious streak. He rebelled against society and I rebelled against him.’’
The
Harrisons said they had adapted into a
‘‘fairly easygoing, casual sort of family’’ on the outside.
‘‘We’d have to be, or else we’d go crazy,’’ he joked.
‘‘You wouldn’t believe how much washing and cleaning there is to do. It’s never-ending.’’
Harrison could never regret leaving Gloriavale because his children now had ‘‘freedom’’ to make their own choices, as opposed to having their entire lives mapped out for them.
‘‘Out here, you’ve got to enable them to make responsible choices. It’s a huge difference.’’
Sisters do it for themselves
The night before she left Gloriavale, Naomi Pilgrim felt as though she was standing on the edge of a cliff with her nine children.
‘‘I felt like I didn’t know if we would be caught or smash on the rocks below.’’
More than a year on, and with a 9-week-old baby, Pilgrim has set up her own sewing business using the skills she picked up in the religious community. She said the transition to a new life has been challenging, and there are some aspects of her life she doesn’t want to talk about.
‘‘In some ways it feels like an eternity [since leaving]; in other ways it seems like such a short amount of time and we’ve accomplished so much.’’
Her sister, Lois Helpful, left in 2017, while 32 weeks’ pregnant, with her husband and son. Helpful and Pilgrim are the sisters of James Harrison and have both settled with their respective families in Timaru. Of their family of six brothers and seven sisters, five remain in Gloriavale.
Helpful is also using her skills on the outside.
A talented artist, she paints commission pieces, though now that she is pregnant with her third child, due in August, she has slowed down on her work.
The siblings say they are grateful for the skills they learnt in Gloriavale – skills they have discovered are in demand on the outside.
‘‘I’m very happy for my sewing skills,’’ Pilgrim said.
While every female in Gloriavale learns to sew, cook and paint, there were people who had obvious strengths in different areas, she said. Sewing was her forte.
‘‘When I was about 12 or 13 I used to sneak into the sewing room and once I made a nightgown for my mum,’’ Pilgrim said. ‘‘I remember working out how to sew the lace on without [it] puckering.’’
Pilgrim worked in the sewing room for 15 years, moving from sewing buttons on garments to running the operation with two other women. Every mother in Gloriavale has a small sewing machine in their home.
‘‘There is always stuff that needed mending as you couldn’t just throw things away,’’ Helpful said.
Pilgrim and Helpful learnt to barter their skills, often exchanging paintings or mending jobs for baking or for additional shares of sugar, chocolate or biscuits.
The community holds a biennial four-hour concert, usually attracting up to 6000 people.
About six months out from the concerts Pilgrim would begin to feel dread about the task ahead.
‘‘There was a real dread and the thought: ‘Can we actually do this again?’ ’’
Making costumes for the concerts required a lot of preparation.
‘‘The men involved with organising the costumes would find pictures of what they wanted and we would draft up patterns for them and make the clothes from scratch.’’
The work involved ‘‘hours and hours’’ of sewing and many sleepless nights.
The last concert Pilgrim worked on involved 780 costumes that later had to be sent out to be dry-cleaned as they started to go mouldy in storage.
There was also a British military costume for a brass band of 30. ‘‘They looked the real deal. There was very, very long hours – sometimes staying up all night.’’
She said that while it was exhausting, the work meant a ‘‘pulling together’’ of members.
‘‘It was a real time of seeking God and finding the strength to keep going.
‘‘We had some fun together and lots of chocolate. We would be giggly, we were so tired.’’
When Gloriavale held its most recent concert, Pilgrim said on the outside she wondered what was being done to organise it.
‘‘It was a real empty feeling, thinking about it. I had heaps of really good memories from my time preparing for them.’’
While many of the costumes followed a theme, such as Egyptian outfits, Glorivale’s strict rules still had to be adhered to.
‘‘It was difficult making a woman’s costume from Egyptian times as they wore quite skimpy clothes. It still had to be modest.’’
Sewing also gave Pilgrim a sense of purpose, such as when she was asked to help other members if they were finding a particular stitch or fabric tough to work on. Her sewing business has helped her find some of that sense again, she said.
Helpful began helping to paint backdrops for the concert stages at age 12.
She remembers seeing her sister working long hours behind the sewing machine in preparation for the concerts.
The pair said South Canterbury residents had been ‘‘extremely supportive’’, both emotionally and with practical things.
‘‘It’s really nice to have other friends and being able to talk to them,’’ Helpful said.
‘Awful stories of separation’
It is Gloriavale’s limited focus on family that drives most leavers out, a religious historian says.
‘‘The price of being in the community is that families can do very, very little as families,’’ Peter Lineham, professor emeritus of history at Massey University, said.
And that same factor ‘‘causes the public distress’’ when the isolated Christian community blocks leavers from their family members who are still inside.
‘‘There are just awful stories of the separation of husbands and wives and access to children. They’re not beyond defending the indefensible: cutting parents from children.’’
The result is that leavers are ‘‘often full of regrets’’ because they ‘‘lose a huge amount in terms of family and identity’’, Lineham said.
‘‘Some people desperately want to go back but effectively they’re not allowed to, because it would cause too much disruption.’’
The reclusive cult had become ‘‘even less open’’ after leadership passed from Gloriavale founder Hopeful Christian, who died in May 2018, to a group of elders.
But what led people to join religious sects that promoted simple living, such as Gloriavale and the Amish, was dissatisfaction with society’s ‘‘individualistic’’ culture and a desire to be where ‘‘everyone is looking in the same direction’’, Lineham said.
‘‘The key issue is that there is an incredible gap in our modern experience for some sort of belonging.’’
Lineham said nearly every family in Gloriavale had friends or relations outside the community, providing them with a ‘‘support network’’ if they did decide to leave.
‘‘It’s also interesting how that link with Timaru has been established over a long period. It’s created escape routes that allow people to be funnelled out.’’
The Timaru-based Gloriavale Leavers’ Support Trust, launched in November last year, had approached Lineham about helping with a research project to better identify issues that former Gloriavale members face, but he had not yet decided whether or not to get on board.
Lineham said the way Gloriavale members dressed was what kept the public ‘‘endlessly fascinated’’ with them.
‘‘They seem to be totally exotic because they look so different.’’
Most religious sects never made it past the first generation, so Gloriavale was ‘‘surviving against the odds’’.
‘‘Their significant financial structure has probably solved that problem.’’
What is Gloriavale?
Gloriavale founder Hopeful Christian died after a battle with cancer, aged 92, in 2018.
A former travelling preacher, Christian came to New Zealand from Australia in 1967 under the name Neville Cooper, and was the religious sect’s leader for more than 40 years before retiring in 2010. As a Christian preacher he spoke around the country, but he quickly fell out of favour with mainstream religious groups because of his fundamentalist preachings.
He changed his name to Hopeful Christian some time after setting up the Gloriavale Christian Community – named after his first wife, Gloria – in 1969 in North Canterbury.
The religious group is well known to most New Zealanders. Former members break ranks to tell stories of forced marriages, sexual and physical abuse, the shunning of anyone who leaves, and the complete financial domination of all members. The community, which has about 600 members, moved to the West Coast in the early 1990s and now sits on the shores of Lake Haupiri, a remote part of the West Coast.
Gloriavale women and girls dress the same in conservative long, blue dresses.
Followers grow up in large families (an average of eight children), marry young, and must all contribute to the selfsufficient, communal-living lifestyle.
Christian was thought to have at least 19 children with three different wives.