St John's Latimer Square: Growing the Kingdom

10 Jun 2010

It’s no secret that St John’s in Latimer Square is one of our diocese’s success stories. Under the leadership of Wally Behan, the parish’s faithful commitment to Bible teaching has seen the church grow well beyond bursting point. With the retirement of Wally looming this year, Anglican Life sent Megan Blakie to investigate what makes St John’s hum.

“Evangelism is in our DNA, who we are at St John’s – it comes out of the Bible as we read it together; it is our make-up. It is a conscious thing but it’s also a culture; it affects all the ministries we’re involved in,” says assistant minister Dave Morgan, referring to the Christchurch inner city parish.

The stone-built Church of St John the Baptist, located on the south-east side of grassed and tree-lined Latimer Square, has been a city landmark since 1865. It was designed by the Canterbury Association to be one of four churches within the city belt: neighbouring St Michael's and St Luke's were established in the 1850s, but the fourth church, intended for Cranmer Square, was never built.

The inner city has changed over the intervening decades, and the parish has changed with it. Under the leadership of Wally Behan, it has become a thriving parish that draws worshippers from a wide geographic area. In the eighteen years that Wally has been the vicar, he has seen the growth in Sunday attendance from fifty to more than 460, the commissioning of fifty parishioners to a neighbouring parish that was struggling, and the development of initiatives that have helped spread the gospel into Christchurch’s urban heart. “Because the street people were here, you wouldn’t get a lot of families coming,” comments Wally about the parish in his first years there. “Families are not going to come here when there’s glue-sniffers around and dope and stuff like that.”

In the mid-1990s, about four years into Wally’s tenure, the vestry took what he describes as the “massive” and “hard” decision to dissolve its drop-in centre and loosen its formal links with the City Mission. “There are ordinary people in this community – young families, singles, people living in the inner city – and they weren’t coming because we we’re putting all our energy into street people. We started putting some energy into reaching other people for the gospel, and God started to bring in families,” he says. “My task was to minister to the people of St John’s and that’s what I concentrated on.”

Today, the parish holds three Sunday services. To facilitate children’s ministry, the family-orientated ten o’clock service is held off-site at St Margaret’s College and utilises the chapel and nearby classrooms. A total of twenty-four different Bible study groups meet each week, catering to all ages and people’s availability during the week. They are an indication of how the change in focus has had a positive effect on the parish – whose mission statement is ‘to know Christ, to serve Christ, and to make Christ known.’ “A lot of what we do revolves around teaching the Bible, whether it’s me or the other people who preach from the pulpit on a Sunday – doing expository preaching week after week after week – or it’s our Bible study groups and our young adults groups and our Sunday School,” explains Wally. “Everything is based on teaching people the Bible,” he says.

To that end, St John’s places a lot of emphasis on training and leadership. It has a paid staff of six ordained and lay workers (the former vicarage, now church offices, was refurbished three months ago to better accommodate them), and spiritually and financially assists four full-time trainees. The trainees are young people undertaking a two-year full-time apprenticeship with Ministry Training Strategy, an Australian-based training programme for those interested in evangelical Christian ministry.

Christchurch Polytechnic is within the parish’s boundaries, and the apprentice workers hold weekly lunchtime gatherings to introduce students to Christianity and provide a forum to read the Bible and answer spiritual questions. The church also has links with Christian groups at Canterbury University, and partners with Christian organisations in providing lunchtime talks on campus and worship services in a hall in Ilam. “The mainstays of our ministry are preaching and reaching people for the gospel: bringing people into the Kingdom of God by proclaiming the gospel,” says Wally, who speaks earnestly but also has a self-effacing sense of humour. “The staff that we get are skilled in, and trained in, teaching people the Bible so they, in turn, can teach others. It’s training teachers to be teachers of the Bible; that’s what we’re about.”

Dave, who trained for the ministry in Australia and was ordained in 2006, came on board as assistant priest eighteen months ago. His main focus is families and evangelism, although he will step up to be priest-in-charge after Wally leaves St John’s at the end of June. In his thirties and wearing jeans (not a dog collar in sight), it’s easy to see why Dave relates well to the young adults and families of the parish – a parish, it should be noted, that has a slightly higher proportion of male parishioners than female. “Our services are intelligible. We try and remove as much Christian jargon as possible so an outsider can be part of the service and can follow it very easily. I guess we de-mystify church,” says Dave about his approach to making worship more accessible.

He explains that the Bible study groups often change their membership from year to year, so that new members are made welcome, parishioners have the opportunity to get to know other parishioners, and the groups retain their evangelistic outlook. “The groups also become centres of pastoral care,” chips in Wally, who believes it is unrealistic to expect a priest to be able to cater to the pastoral needs of everybody in a parish. “All in the congregation are pastors – not just me – and as a church family we have to look after each other and care for each other.”

Although Wally is unsure just what his next step will be when he leaves St John’s, he is confident that the church is still growing and that the next generation of leaders of the parish are equipped to take the reins. “I’m the same as everybody else: you want to hold on to what you’ve got. But I think the gospel calls us to go,” he says, not only referring to his own circumstances but his desire for St John’s to consider seeding another church. “I’d love to do that kind of thing again (commission parishioners to build up other congregations)… but I haven’t got the puff to do it again!” he says candidly, aware that his retirement is looming. “When retirement is in sight, you can somehow slow down and you can slow the church down. I want to go while God is moving to grow this people,” he says. “I don’t wanna hold them back. I don’t want to be a cork in the bottle in my last year.”

WORDS: Megan Blakie PHOTO: Dave Wethey