Young, Anglican – and proud of it
Brian Dawson | 11 Jun 2009
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It’s the 1980s and I’m standing in the middle of a paddock watching one of my best friends do a decidedly dodgy job of welding (yes, welding!) a wheel on to my old Bedford milk truck.
Said wheel had started to come adrift while I was towing around a dozen caravans on to the remote farm at Otaki Forks, down a brandnew road turned treacherous by recent rain, and trying to avoid running over electricians, sound and lighting riggers, and a bunch of guys putting up a huge marquee where tomorrow around 3000 people would gather for the inaugural Mainstage Christian Music Festival.
Fast forward three different venues and 20-plus years and I’m standing in another paddock, but with a bus not a truck, having just delivered 45 young people to Hamilton’s Mystery Creek for the three-and-a-half-day grandchild of Mainstage, Parachute.
I haven’t been part of the organising group for the festival since the 80s, but since the shift to Mystery Creek (from Matamata where it moved from the birth of Parachute at Waikanae after several years of Mainstage in Otaki) I have taken busloads of young Anglicans from Hawke’s Bay to join up to 25,000 others in what has become the biggest Christian music festival outside the U.S.
Why? (i) Because young Anglicans in my part of the world don’t get to see or hear a lot of Christian bands live. (ii) Because there’s nothing quite like getting together with thousands of other young people for a full-on festival event. (iii) Because there’s a great chance here to help young people discover that they’re part of something much bigger than just their own little youth group – how Anglican is that!
So this year we hooked up with then Waikato Youth Facilitator, Wade Aukitt, and a few others from Bay of Plenty and Auckland, and the beginnings of the Anglican Supergroup at Parachute took shape...
2009 and my busload is part of 100 from Waiapu Diocese and 300 more from as far afield as Nelson, all crammed on to one not-so-big roped-off site in the middle of a tent and campervan village big enough to be called a city in its own right. The one headline act at the original Mainstage has grown into six – including Kiwi legend Dave Dobbyn – and the mainstage itself has been joined by eight other stages featuring dozens of bands, speakers and some performers that simply defy description.
I have to admit that I have some doubts about the direction the Parachute Festival is travelling in. The all-consuming quest to be bigger and flashier has definitely led to the loss of some of the more intimate opportunities of the past, and a few very dubious commercial partnerships.
Case in point: The ads beamed on to giant screens in the mainstage this year featuring new sponsor C4’s upcoming seasons of such wholesome family fare as Dexter, the tale of a lovable serial killer, 24, where torture is applauded as a means justified by its ends, and a very strange show featuring a P-making schoolteacher.
Along with last year’s scantily clad ‘Vodafone Angels’, these inclusions stand in odd contrast to the Festival’s family-friendly image and squeaky clean, exclusively Pentecostal guest speakers (or should that be shriekers? Don’t get me started!).
Where I might question what’s happening with the Festival itself, my feelings about the Anglican presence are very different, and presence really is the right word. Along with having one of the few 300+ Supergroups, the Anglicans are one of only two groups to have their own officially recognised church service built into the Parachute programme. While the service still needs a bit of work, the presence this year of not one but three bishops (including Archbishop David Moxon) puts the official seal on what is now an annual fixture on the Anglican Church calendar.
And it’s that Anglican word that I find really exciting (and no, that’s not an oxymoron). This year, gathered under three marquees behind a sign proclaiming ‘Anglicans @ Parachute’, several hundred young people expressed their pride in being just that. Each morning up to a hundred of them gathered at the impossibly early hour (for teens) of 8am to celebrate Eucharist together.
At Parachute it’s easy to feel like you’re surrounded by Pentecostal super-churches: speakers all want to tell you (very loudly) that there’s only one way to be a Christian (I said, don’t get me started!), so if you want to say ‘I’m not one of them’ you have to do it boldly and equally loudly. What I saw and heard at Parachute ’09 were teenagers – lots of them – standing together and saying, ‘we’re young, we’re here – and we’re ANGLICAN!’
Praise the Lord! For a long time I believe we gave the message, consciously and unconsciously, that most of our church really didn’t have much to offer young people, and young people heard us. We set up youth groups and youth events that deliberately made few or no connections to Anglican worship – or even Anglican parishes – and then wondered why our churches looked so much older.
We told ourselves that we were good with older people and not with younger, and that the younger would come back when they were old. And then we discovered you can’t come back if you weren’t there to begin with. Bottom line, as far as young people were concerned we stopped believing in our product, and as a result they stopped buying it.
Thankfully, in many places, the store has reopened and much to many people’s surprise, there are customers. A number of parishes have started to take not only their young people but also themselves seriously, stressing the importance of remaining connected to the worshipping Body of Christ, and teaching the next generation that without the input of us all – old, young, and somewhere in-between – that Body really is incomplete. The results speak for themselves.
• • •
Parachute isn’t the first youth event I have been to in recent times where Anglicanism is worn with pride rather than shame or embarrassment. Increasingly I’m finding expanding pockets of youth becoming connected to their parishes, their dioceses and THEIR church.
It’s a great shift and it hasn’t happened by accident. Thanks to people like Jocelyn Czerwonka and Ngira Simmonds, who organised this year’s Anglican presence at Parachute, young people are being reintroduced to our church.
Thanks to people like John Hebenton, Tikanga Pakeha National Youth Facilitator, young people are experiencing and experimenting with Anglican liturgy, even though many of their leaders will try to tell you (and them) that it has nothing to offer.
Thanks to those who actually dare to have some pride in their own church, young people are discovering they don’t have to be embarrassed to call themselves Anglican.
The day after the first Mainstage Festival the wheel finally fell off my truck. Thankfully, despite everything, more than 20 years on the descendant of that Festival is still rolling. Even more thankfully, thanks to events like Parachute, it’s looking less and less likely that the wheels will fall off our church, and that’s something worth shouting about!
Brian Dawson is Vicar of Havelock North
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