INTRODUCTION

About the Author

Towards the end of 2002 I reached a crisis point in my life which caused me to reassess how I was living. My knowledge of God and Christianity came from my early experience of growing up as a Roman Catholic as well as what I was later taught while I was a member of the Worldwide Church of God. In 1974 I graduated from the English campus of Ambassador College run by this church, where I also married a fellow student before returning to New Zealand.

The Worldwide Church of God was then a small fundamentalist church based in America. I finally left this church because my personal experience of Christian life didn’t fit very well with what I was taught and, in 1977, I decided to step away from all religion and live my life according to my own standards and expectations.

Life wasn’t so bad going down this path. I had a reasonable idea of my strengths and weaknesses, developed a successful career and had the opportunity to travel widely. I experienced the usual ups and downs of married life.

This all changed at the end of 1990 when I met Shu Ping. I realised then that my marriage was as empty of real fulfilment as was my ‘Christian’ life while in the Worldwide Church of God. I made the decision to end that marriage and to begin a new and more fulfilling life with my new partner.

This decision had a massive impact on my life. As anyone who has gone through a divorce will know, it can be a painful and difficult experience. My relatively uneventful life was transformed into an emotional roller-coaster. 

Shu Ping and I were better suited, and we were blessed with two beautiful daughters. However, both the emotional and financial stress was difficult. This greatly increased when I lost my position at Fisher and Paykel where I was working, and I ultimately resigned from that company to set up a home-based business building internet applications and websites.

With only a few exceptions, nothing I set out to do successfully generated enough income to support my new family. We would build excellent products and establish good contacts, but that was as far as it would go. It all came to a head when, in partnership with my two sisters, we set up a government-funded joint-venture program, employing staff and committing to ongoing office expenses, only to have it gradually die, leaving me to carry our on-going financial commitments. This effectively soaked up much of the small income that I was earning.

This was especially tough on Shu Ping as she couldn’t understand why my income was so low. She had to live under the stress of earning enough from her Real Estate sales to keep us going. Her health suffered badly. Our relationship had some really low periods.

By the end of 2002 I felt like I was living under a curse. I was starting to wonder whether this may have been a penalty for breaking my earlier marriage. I felt confused and depressed, and was not coping very well. I finally came to realize that I had to make some changes.

I began reading the Bible and talking to God again. I knew that my personal life was in a mess. But I also had a strong feeling that the God I had turned away from 25 years earlier was now using this situation to get me to rethink where I was going.

I had observed the massive doctrinal changes in the Worldwide Church of God that were introduced after its founder, Herbert Armstrong, died in 1986. Many of the core doctrines that I had been so convinced of while studying at Ambassador College were now discarded as error. Seeing this helped me to realise that I couldn’t rely on learning what I needed to know from other people or churches.

I decided to set aside everything that I had previously learned, and I asked God to help me understand what he has revealed in Scripture. While I didn’t know what that might be, I determined to make any changes in my life based on what I might learn. I began with a modern translation and set about reading it through.

It quickly became clear to me that what Yeshua and his apostles actually taught was very different to what was being taught in any of the churches that I knew about, including much of what I had been taught at Ambassador College.

I also discovered that there is surprising harmony between the writings of the Old and New Testaments. The same God is described in both. The Old Testament writings laid the foundation on which the New Testament writings were built.

But my most astonishing discovery was to see written down, and repeated many times over, both the purpose for which God created us and his plan for achieving that purpose. It is a plan that is awesome in its intent and scope and yet simple enough for a child to understand. While it is detailed in the Old and New Testament books of the Bible for everyone to read, it is also possible to study these books in great detail, as I had done in the past, and to never understand them.

I also read that the early church taught with great power and authority. The sick were healed, some church members had the gift of prophesy, while others were able to talk in foreign languages they had never learned. Dead people were brought back to life. God listened to and answered prayers. These miracles were often provided to validate the message being taught by the church leaders. This wasn’t done in highly publicised and emotionally charged mass healing meetings, but almost as a matter of course as the occasion would arise.

So where is this church today? It is clear that there are many very sincere people in the Christian churches around the world. In spite of this, religion has become a pale shadow of the original church described in the New Testament. Some people go to church for the experience. Others go to be part of an organisation, or to find some purpose and meaning in their lives. These are deep-seated human needs, witness the success of all religions, not necessarily just Christian ones.

The churches that cater to these needs differ widely in what they teach. Who is God and why are we here? The answers are in the Bible and were taught by the early Christian church. To my amazement and dismay, I have yet to find any modern church that is teaching them.