Disunity among Churches
There’s a study that recently came out that has genuinely challenged the part of me that wants to be gracious and kind. It was at first presented to a room of youth pastors in a zoom call. It is the National Youth Outreach Survey conducted by the Shining Lights Trust.
It somehow sits at the intersection of the thing I am most passionate about and the thing that frustrates me most. The thing I care deeply about the most is Church unity. The thing I struggle with the most is hypocrisy.
Firstly, I want to give grace to the organisers. I genuinely believe they likely did the best they could with the information they had. By their own admission, this study is aggregated data that appears to skew heavily toward a North Island perspective, yet it is being presented as “National Findings” encompassing youth across all of Aotearoa.
Personally, I think it would have been fairer, and more accurate, had North and South Island findings been represented separately or at least clearly distinguished.
My biggest concern, however, is this: camps were purposely omitted while smaller and less broadly reaching events were promoted.
At best — through my most gracious lens — this feels like an unfortunate exclusion that renders the study’s conclusions moot. How can you purposely omit the outreach event that is the majority of many youth group’s budget?
Through a more frustrated and passionate lens, it feels symbolic of a deeper issue surrounding church disunity.
In the zoom call with a upwards to about 50 youth leaders, the omission was introduced at the beginning and explained at the end of the presentation. When I asked why camps were excluded, no clear explanation was given beyond being told that some pastors considered them irrelevant data.
That is difficult for me to understand.
Eastercamp South alone represents about 60 churches from across denominations throughout all of the South Island. Across Aotearoa, The other 3 Eastercamp gatherings collectively involved around 9,000 young people and over 200 churches. If we are trying to measure youth unity, it is hard for me to imagine a clearer expression of it than this. Yet it was considered irrelevant data. It was also presented that there was not that many examples of Youth unifying events and that the majority of events were not gospel based. It presented findings that it’s rare for a church to attend more than one of these events.
In Christchurch in 2025, young people could attend events such as The Send, Eastercamp, Open Heaven, and monthly worship events attended by multiple churches across different communities. Yet none of these were meaningfully represented in the examples or shared in their website. Instead in their website, the links highlighted largely reflected events or initiatives started by particular non-denominational churches.
By no means do I think one event is more important than the other based on size. But it’s the pattern that slowly emerges that I find myself bewildered with.
In the presentation they reflected the diminishing pattern in school ministries. However absent from their examples on their website are organisations like 24/7 and CYS while the same pattern repeated with non-denominational organisations again being platformed.
I do not say this to disrespect any church or organisation. Nor do I want to jump to conspiratorial thinking. My honest assumption is that this reflects the perspective of those closest to the study. They are just people reporting from their own context and side of the fence. Perhaps Christian unity is largely non-existent in North Island.
But if that is the case, then I struggle with the framing of this as the national picture.
The grand irony is that there would have been near-complete attendance from all churches had those very churches chosen not only to be thought leaders for unity, but to participate as well.
Instead, what we have are large events that nearly unite all churches being purposely dismissed from studies, while churches that do not attend those same events speak on behalf of all churches, saying that church unity is non-existent — all while having their own unity events.
That to me is hypocrisy.
I want to be kind. I want to be graceful. I do. for my shortcomings in that arena I apologise. But it’s still
So that just honestly makes me frustrated and sad.