Reverend Frank Ritchie has thousands of followers - mostly non-believers - on Twitter, he loves to crack a joke, and he is the soothing voice of reason in a cacophony of headline-grabbing mega-preachers. By Russell Brown.
"Where All Who Love the Lord Jesus Christ Worship Together" reads a sign outside St Francis community church in the Hamilton suburb of Hillcrest. The church's two main worship spaces host services for three denominations; Anglican, Methodist and Presbyterian: a "blended family" of believers, according to the church website.
On the Mansel Avenue side of the complex, one part of the family is arriving for a 10am Sunday service. The members of Commoners Church, a Wesleyan Methodist faith community, are a diverse but relatively small group on this day, somewhere between two and three dozen, and they greet each other warmly at the door.
They're also very likely the only congregation in the country to hear from a minister who has struggled out of bed after attending the Voyager Media Awards, a more bacchanalian community gathering in Auckland the night before.
Many New Zealanders hear in some way from the 45-year-old Reverend Frank Ritchie. Sunday at Six, the Newstalk ZB show he co-hosts, won its slot in the last round of commercial radio ratings and he turns up regularly on the Christian stations Rhema and Life FM. Then there's social media. Six and a half thousand people follow him on Twitter alone and most of them – he took a poll – are not Christians.
"If I was running the numbers, I'd say I'll probably talk to in any given week about 50,000 people," he will say later. "And my church is tiny."
Ritchie has also been part of a shocking national news story this year. After David Farrier's Webworm blog sounded the alarm about the actions of the leadership of "New Zealand's biggest megachurch", Arise, Ritchie was part of a committee of three asked to conduct a review by the church board. What the review found, according to a leaked copy of the report, strongly vindicated Farrier's alarm. It spoke of sexual misconduct, racism, bullying and cult-like practices that left members feeling exhausted, abused and burned out – and recommended that the Arise board resign.
In an email, Ritchie had asked not to talk about the Arise review, "a high-stress situation over the last four months that has taken its toll on me personally". His last word on the matter was a 15,000-word "theological and cultural reflection" published on his own website at the beginning of August.
"If we understand the church to be those gathered by virtue of their commitment to Christ," he wrote, "then the defence of those who have followed Christ and have been damaged by a relentless desire to grow our institutions, is a defence of the church, not an attack."
Not everyone in the churches has seen it that way and Ritchie was accused, among other things, of doing it for the money (he in fact asked not to be paid). It's not the first time he's incurred the ire of pentecostal churchgoers.
There are none of the trappings of a megachurch this morning, just a slim Bose PA stack, a lecturn and a projector. Ritchie welcomes the crowd, noting that he will be explaining the various stages of the service for any newcomers (of whom, it turns out, I am not the only one). He's a warm and authentic communicator – he was a broadcaster long before he was a minister.
A video from Healing Forest, an organisation that encourages the pursuit of mindfulness in nature, sets the tone for a service that unfolds quietly, periodically making space for contemplation. It also, as a liturgical service, contains many words.
After the recitation of the Lord's Prayer, Ritchie reads Luke 13:10-17 and asks us to turn to our neighbours and discuss what the text means. In this passage, Jesus upbraids synagogue leaders who criticise him for healing a crippled woman – and thus working – on the sabbath. ("You hypocrites! Does not each of you on the sabbath untie his ox or his donkey from the manger, and lead it away to give it water?") I hear an underlying note about power and control of the rules, but others in the room offer different insights and the 200 words of text seem to deepen in the process.
After the benediction ("Go now in the joy of knowing that you are a recipient of God's manaakitanga"), church members rise to practice a self-service communion devised for the Covid era.
"I like this kind of informal formality, this casual structure, this contrasting thing we do here," says Robert Gray as we put away the chairs. He's Ritchie's former tutor at Bible College – and one of seven former pastors in the small Commoners flock. They come here, everyone says, because they've been burnt out by their former churches.
"A lot of the people here are from different traditions and a lot of them are refugees like me," adds Bruce, who was born into a Brethren family, came out, worshipped with a Mennonite community and hadn't been to church for years before he joined Commoners. "People who've been hurt by the church in various locations or just been burned out by getting over-involved in stuff."
"I really like having that space that's just for me to think about my faith," agrees another member, social policy researcher Dr Rebekah Graham, who grew up in an evangelical family. "It's not public, I don't really talk about it publicly. It's quite nice to be able to have a faith practice that doesn't involve a performative component in public. And it's very calm and gentle and contemplative. I feel like I can come and attend and then go home and there's not the expectation to then engage in a bunch of other things during the week.
"I've never attended a liturgical church before, but it's been quite nice, because you just get a chance to sit with, actually, this is what's in the Scriptures. You have to reckon with it and you have to wrestle with it and you can't just brush it away. For some of us who've come out of that pentecostal evangelical tradition, it has actually shifted the meaning quite a lot. When it's been preached previously and then you read it as a group and discuss it, it's like, this says something quite different."
Some of the Commoners' worshippers had qualms about a journalist coming to their service. They didn't want to be depicted as freaks, which perhaps speaks to the relationship between church attendees and the media in New Zealand. So let it be said that Ritchie's house, on a back section 10 minutes from the church, is modest and completely, thoroughly normal. He shares it with his wife Melva, a speech and language therapist, and their teenage daughter Sehla (a Biblical Hebrew word that can be translated as "pause and reflect"), whose boyfriend is here today.
Ritchie himself has an intriguing relationship with journalists. In 2015, he founded Media Chaplaincy NZ, a service for working journalists who need someone to talk to about the job. He came up with the idea in 2014, at a time when, he recalls, "Mark Weldon was the head of TV3 at the time, so the newsroom was being gutted." The 2019 Christchurch mosque massacre was a significant step up. Ritchie flew to Christchurch, "supported as many journalists as I as I could" and interviewed six of the reporters who were first on the scene for his media podcast 're_covering'. The show, he is careful to note, contained no proselytising.
"It's been a long process of just building trust, because of course, as you know, every media person's looking for 'the story'. We've had to slowly work and just keep showing that there is no agenda except helping. The only agenda was just sitting down, helping those people process."
Broadcaster Petra Bagust and Wesleyan minister Atu Langi are now on board as chaplains and at the previous night's media awards "we had people seeking us out to thank us for what we do, who I'd never met before. It's a real privilege to have a Christian group sitting in that room with no agenda other than to help, to have that recognised."
He acknowledges that for some other people, "I'm essentially supping with the devil every time I sit down with someone from the media."
The Ritchies moved to Hamilton from Auckland to found Commoners in 2016. The career of a minister requires a degree of entrepreneurial spirit and the prospects of gathering a new church community seemed better in Hamilton. Ritchie had been ordained while working as an education and justice advocate for the Christian aid organisation TEAR Fund since 2009 and before that as a Life FM announcer and talkback host.
More than a third of Commoners' life, he observes, has been lived with Covid. It's not a trivial fact: the church's in-person attendance could be as many as 50 on any Sunday pre-Covid and some who come now were with other small churches that couldn't survive the pandemic. Ritchie reworked the formatting of his slides so the text would be easier to read for members participating via the internet.
"It's been interesting journeying with a community through that. We seem to be a space where a lot of people who've been burnt in other church environments have landed, still wanting to explore faith and go on that journey, but a bit weary of normal church life or church life as they've experienced it. We seem to be a bit of a safe place where people land."
What attracts his bigger flock, the largely non-believing Twitter followers, is, he acknowledges, "a really good question. You probably need to ask them. I think we all have an inclination towards something deeper. If I look at the statistics, there's a lot of people disassociating with organised religion, we see that continue to decline all the time. But in almost every conversation I hear, people have some sense of spirituality. And they want those conversations, they want people that they can safely explore it with. I think organised religion has been seen for a long time to be an unsafe place to do that. I hopefully bring something a bit deeper and calmer to the table. And I don't mind cracking a joke."
Ritchie does have a good sense of humour and his online voice is as soothing as his speaking voice. Sometimes he'll simply remind anyone reading to stay hydrated, or to get enough sleep. But it's also likely that people outside the faith community were drawn to him because many other religious figures in the media come with unseemly baggage. (Brian Tamaki, for example, has fewer Twitter followers than Ritchie, but many more news headlines to his name.)
"When you look around the Christian community, it's extremely diverse. We all have different views on many things. But when I look at how Covid was handled, for instance, there are thousands of churches in New Zealand and most of them followed the rules. Most of them were glad to follow the rules, most of them treated it as a health issue. But that noisy group gets so much attention.
"There are ministers around the country who give day in and day out and will never have a headline, because they're just giving to their small congregations. But there are bigger entities that know how to play the media. So they get attention and, for a country that is growing less and less aware of organised religion and understands it less and less, that then becomes the lens for how they see the whole thing. I realise that I have a platform and I realise I have the ability to talk publicly so I keep at it. Even though sometimes I'd like to shrink back."
Although Ritchie seems at pains not to pick a fight, tension with elements of the church is built into his own story.
"I had some horrific experiences as a kid in church settings. I had a mentally ill mother who suffered from various mental illnesses. So my early life was hard. And then, because of those early experiences in the faith community, I just felt angry about the whole thing. So I decided to take my faith seriously, and own it for myself. I didn't step in because I really loved church, I stepped in because I loved Jesus and the story of Jesus, and everything you experienced today."
When he took a job as a nationwide talkback host on Life FM in his early 20s, he soon discovered that not everyone in his audience thought the way he did.
"I thought I was just being given the chance to have fascinating conversations with really interesting people, only to find out that there were people who, if you hold a different opinion, they hate you. And I very quickly as a young guy had to grapple with that."
Ritchie, the pastor with the tiny church, says he really has no problem with big churches.
"Church size is neither here nor there, but it worries me, the influence of the United States on New Zealand discourse and the online environment. I've got friends who are ministers, good people. Some had people in their churches who got really angry during Covid -because they were consuming all this other stuff. And there's no way we can counter that. Once upon a time, your church would have been the place where you probably got a lot of your information, whereas now, that's not the case."
Ultimately, he says, he understands the growth of evangelical churches in an era where mainline churches have "almost lost the heart of the story. I mean, there are ministers in New Zealand and around the world now who are, at best, agnostic. There are things that I agree with them on, but that's a removal of the heart of that story. When you remove that story, you get left with the beauty of ritual and with social justice. Both of those are great things. But if you remove that backbone, that's all you've got."