Anglican Taonga

Last year Taonga launched ‘The Canterbury Trail’ – a series of stories about folk who’ve left the denominations in which they started their Christian lives, to make their way into the Anglican Church.

Rob McKay is another pilgrim on that winding trail. Rob is a priest who has an MTh (Hons), he’s Tai Tokerau’s Community Theologian and Examining Chaplain, he’s taught at the Tai Tokerau taapapa for the past seven years, and he’s just become a Territorial Army chaplain.

His is a journey that’s had more twists and turns than most.

As acts of teen rebellion go, Rob McKay’s trips to the local Mormon chapel might seem fairly muted. Sunday after Sunday through the 1970s, he’d rise early, climb into his Sunday best, knot his tie, slick his hair and walk, by himself, from his Deas Place home to the Otahuhu shops in Great South Rd.

There, he’d hop on a bus that trundled south to Papatoetoe. He’d hop off there and walk to the local Latter Day Saints’ chapel.
That was it. He’d head straight back home at the end of the service.

Nonetheless, these were feats of defiance, protests against a chaos which daily threatened to engulf him.

Rob’s mum, who has Kahungunu, Ngati Porou and Ngati Mahuta ties, had become pregnant after she got together with a young visiting Scotsman. But he returned to Scotland before Rob was born, in November 1958.

Rob’s aunty Audrey (his mum’s sister) and her husband Bob – both devout Mormons – stepped into the breach, nurturing that baby boy.

Then, when Rob was 2, his mum married a Dutch immigrant. Now secure – as she thought – she plucked baby Rob from her sister, and began rearing him in this Maori Affairs home, where a further three children were raised.

Trouble was, that marriage was turbulent, and that home was no safe place for children.

Rob’s stepfather was a violent man. She’d sometimes needle him, too, and he’d respond with such violence that on a couple of occasions he wound up in Mt Eden Prison.

Sometimes, when Rob’s mum sensed things were about to blow, she’d pack young Rob on a bus to her parents. They were from Mahia, but had moved to Hamilton to be close to the Mormon temple.

The contrast between the two ways of living couldn’t have been more graphic: the one violent and dysfunctional; the other calm, clean-living, alcohol-free, pious and family-centred.

No surprises, then, that the Mormon chapel became Rob’s substitute for a loving family.

“I could never be lonely,” he says, “because I had the church. My relatives were involved – my cousins, my aunts and uncles and my grandparents – but in the Mormon Church, regardless of whether you’re blood-related or not, we call each other brother and sister anyway. You feel like you’re part of the family.”

Young Rob, so determined not to be like his immediate kin, progressed quickly through the Mormon ranks. Baptised at the age of 8, he became a deacon, teacher and then, at the age of 16, a Mormon priest.

He was sent to Church College – the Mormon secondary school next to Hamilton’s Mormon temple – and that’s where he heard the word that he greeted with relief: that his mother and stepfather had finally divorced.

His two younger half-brothers and half-sister didn’t handle that news so well, or the miserable life that had gone before it. Rob’s half-sister drifted to Australia and fell in with the wrong crowd. For 10 years she struggled with drug addiction, and she turned to prostitution to feed her habit. She died of a drug overdose in 1989, aged 27.

The Mormon Church saved Rob from that degree of damage. But nonetheless, it was while he was a boarder at Church College that Rob began to entertain doubts.

Rob suspects that if you checked out a Mormon chapel service, you mightn’t find it too different from a Protestant church.

But the Mormon temple? That’s another story. For a start, it’s closed on Sundays, only Mormons with “temple recommends” are permitted to enter – and they’re sworn to secrecy about what takes place there.

This is where couples come to marry not just for time but eternity; this is where mortal relationships are “sealed” and made into eternal bonds; this is where Mormons receive their “endowments” (more about that in a minute) – and this is where the living baptise the dead.

Mormons believe that it’s impossible to enter Heaven without baptism. The dead can still be saved, however: they can be baptised by proxy.

Rob first sampled this when he was 16. On the appointed day he rose before dawn, shuffled half-asleep to the temple and was ushered into the inner sanctum.

There he saw a vast baptismal font, standing on the backs of 12 life-size bronze oxen. And that’s where Rob, who’d already been baptised himself at the age of 8, was baptised again – not for himself this time, and not once, but many times.

Each time he was plunged beneath the waters the high priest would intone: ‘in and on behalf of…. (name)… I baptize you in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.’ Another man, clad in white from head to foot, would solemnly record those names.
It made Rob wonder – and there was more wondering to come.

When he was 19, Rob, by this time a Mormon elder, again went to the temple to take his “endowments”.

This is an elaborate, highly theatrical ceremony in which candidates are asked to make covenants; don various temple robes; are given a ‘new name’ and instructed in secret hand clasps, signs and tokens.

Mormons believe these secret signs come in handy when they die. Sentinel angels block their path to highest heaven – but if the good Mormon can produce these signs, those angels will flag them through to paradise.

That experience left Rob feeling queasy, too.

“I thought; far out. What was that about? But then I thought: This is the Lord’s church. Who am I to question God?”
Rob got over it. Or so he thought.

Then one Friday night back in Otahuhu he popped down to the hardware shop. As he was leaving, he ran into a group of Pentecostal Christians, who began to talk to him about the need to be born again.

“I remember saying: ‘But I am a Christian. Yes, I go to church. And yes, I pretty much lead a good life...” But as they were talking I felt this presence... They seemed to be full of joy.”

There, on the corner of Mason Ave and Great South Rd, they led him in the sinner’s prayer.

For the next couple of years, Rob led a fairly schizophrenic existence. On Sunday evenings he’d go to Shiloh Community Church, where he’d see exuberant Pentecostal worship – but in the mornings, as he’d always done, he’d trot off to the conservative LDS Chapel.

Then in 1980 came the rite of passage that all young Mormon males make – the two-year mission. In Rob’s case that was spent proselytising in the Wellington Mormon mission district: such places as Waitara, New Plymouth, Gisborne, Waipawa, Waipukurau and Porangahau.

“We weren’t theologians, we were just simple people. We hadn’t been to seminary. We were given a booklet, and we memorised conversations with would-be converts.”

But his cage was regularly being rattled. A challenge from a Catholic priest here, the witness of a Baptist landlady there, an underlining of contradictions somewhere else…

The more he delved into the back story of Mormonism, the more Rob became sceptical: “Goliath’s head came off with his own sword,” he says. “Mormons have huge archives – and when historians go in there, they come out with the truth. The great challenge, of course, is the Book of Mormon itself. Where is the historical evidence for it? Well, there is none.”

That erosion of his childhood faith continued when he returned from his mission, and was contacted by a group called Ex Mormons for Jesus (EMFJ). More than 50 quit Mormonism because of EMFJ – and Rob was one of them.

He stopped going to the LDS chapel, and threw himself into life at Shiloh. And in 1981, while he was at a Sunday evening service there, he had another profound experience:

“You know how they say from the podium: ‘There’s a person in the third row…’ and this evening I just knew that was for me.
“Two elders prayed over me, and I felt this overwhelming flood of energy, like electricity, flowing in, going up and down from my head to my toes. I was lying on the floor, even while they were serving their monthly communion.”

“They were saying things like: ‘Come out, you demon of Mormonism, you demon of Moroni!’ I just ignored that: I always thought my Mormon family were good, decent people, and I could never think of them in a demonic sense.

“That experience of the Holy Spirit was wonderful. So affirming. And very healing. Life changing, too, because I now knew that God was real, and that Jesus Christ is the Messiah.”
He remained in the Pentecostal stream for seven years. He might have stayed longer, too, except Shiloh split four ways. Rob and his wife Dianne tried life in one of the fragments, but they’d become disillusioned.

In those days, Rob was working as the assistant manager of the Manukau crematorium and cemetery. That’s where he ran into Martin Bridge who, back then, was Vicar of St George’s Papatoetoe.

“I knew their church was kinda Pentecostal. And I thought: yeah, we’ll go that way. This church is good. Big. Solid. It’s been around for a long time.”

There were other appealing aspects, too. He’d begun to tire of the relentless ‘joy-joy-joy’ approach in Pentecostalism, and he yearned for a more sacramental approach to communion.

By 1995, Rob was on the St George’s vestry, and he wanted to go further. Maybe to become a pastor himself. Martin Bridge encouraged him, and suggested he check out St John’s College.

In 1995 he applied – but the Diocese of Auckland wasn’t taking any new students that year. But when the Ministry Officer learned about Rob’s whakapapa, she had a suggestion: Why not talk to Bishop Ben Te Haara?

That was good advice. Because Ben decided he’d back him to have a tilt at St John’s as a Pihopatanga student.

Rob came into St John’s in 1996 as an evangelical, born-again, spirit-filled Christian, certain that the Bible was the inerrant, infallible Word of God.

Within a week of joining Keith Carley’s Old Testament class, his belief structure began to come under siege.

Rob was shocked to be told that Moses hadn’t, in fact, written the first five books of the Bible; shocked to be told that Moses wasn’t (in today’s terms) a strict monotheist; shocked to discover that what he’d taken for granted as factual (eg, the first 11 chapters in Genesis) was, in fact, myth – and shocked to learn that the very notion of God Himself was evolving…

“God somehow began as a mountain god, formed a covenant with a motley lot, who became the Hebrews. Then He becomes a tribal God, who can only be worshipped within a geographical location: Israel.

“When a certain gentile wants to be cleansed from leprosy, for instance, he has to dip himself seven times in the Jordan. He then asks: ‘Can I take back some earth, so I can pray to your God back in Syria?’

“It’s not until you reach the second part of Isaiah, from chapter 40 onwards, that you find this discovery – that He’s the God of the whole universe.”

“I was being deprogrammed. I’m not sure how I survived that first year.

In Derek Tovey’s classes, that shaking of his foundations continued. He saw a development of thought taking place in the New Testament, too.

Take, for instance, the doctrine of Jesus as the Son of God. Paul, who wrote the earliest NT documents, declares Jesus Son of God at his resurrection.

Next came the Gospel of Mark, which makes that claim for Jesus as the Son of God at his adult baptism.

Matthew and Luke, which came later still, move that messiahship forward: they state that Jesus was Son of God at his birth – while in John, the last gospel to be written, Jesus is the Son of God pre-mortal, from eternity past.

The synoptic gospels have presented a human Jesus – but John’s Gospel presents a divine one: He is the Logos. From being a Galilean peasant, a worker of miracles and a healer, Jesus has become God.

Rob also learned that in the Jewish world the term ‘son of God’ was a common metaphor, used of men who were faithful students of the Torah.

By the fourth century though, when the Nicene Creed was being constructed, Jesus has become, literally, God ‘stuff’. But the word substantia – substance – is a Greek concept, and those scholars were seeing through Greek eyes.

“There was no taking into account of the Jewish world view,” says Rob. “No understanding of ‘The son of God’ as Hebrew metaphor. I thought: Wow. What’s going on?

“I have now come to the point where I think: Can I not just accept Jesus as the son of God in the Jewish sense: a son of the Torah, or the Law? Do I have to say that this is God in the literal sense?

“For a fundamentalist, SJC makes or breaks you. And I know several fundamentalists; it’s broken them.”
Rob’s very notion of salvation got challenged. When he was converted, he’d accepted Jesus as his righteousness, who represented him upon the cross.

“But now, having imbibed liberation theology, where the dominant theme is the OT gospel of justice, I think: is this just? Why should the innocent suffer for the guilty? More to the point, what kind of God requires a human sacrifice before He can forgive sin?

“I was caught up in soteriology… it was all me, me, me – how do I get saved. How do I get in?”

Instead of ‘me’, Rob was prodded to think about ‘we’ – for example, how do we, collectively, look after this earth God has made? He was confronted with the idea that God is not merely interested in saving individual souls; He wants to save all creation.

“When I went into SJC, I went in with Hal Lindsay’s book: The Late, Great Planet Earth. I’m embarrassed to say it now, but I read that book so many times – I was so excited by it!

“But what did that tell me? I’d be quoting the Psalm: The earth waxeth old like a garment, and I’d be thinking: Who cares about the planet? It’s on the way out! We’re moving on! I’m going up!”

“Yet I now see that there’s evidence in Scripture that God wants to save and redeem all creation: the planet, and all the people who live on it.”

And yet, and yet… for all the study, for all his academic success… there’s a part of Rob that that still defaults to his past.
He doesn’t drink alcohol, coffee or tea. He talks about gay rights in the church in an easy, liberal way, but recoils from the thought of gay sex. It conflicts with deep-rooted beliefs about purity and the holy life, and it conflicts with his Mormon upbringing.
That Mormon past surfaces in unexpected ways.

“When I was in Torere last year for Archbishop Hui’s tangi, Bishop Kito leant over to me as Bruce Davidson was speaking. ‘When he’s finished’, he whispered, ‘tautoko him with a Pakeha waiata.’

“‘What hymn are you going to sing?’ he asked. I said: Amazing Grace. Well, that didn’t happen: Because when I got to my feet, I sang – God be with you till we meet again.”

That’s an old Mormon favourite that had pinged into his mind.

“I was familiar with it: I sang it with confidence. That’s the attachment I still have with Mormonism. The God we image is pretty much what we’ve learned in our formative years. If I go into a Mormon chapel, it’s still like coming home.”

So where does he now stand?

“One thing I have learned from my experience in evangelical churches – particularly Shiloh – is that God is real.

“God is real – and we don’t have all the answers. I see that God is for us, too, and not against us. But He’s a bit of a mystery for me now. Like Paul, I see through a glass darkly.”