Fr. David Guthrie

The story of the Genesis Foundation is bound up with the story of my personal journey of faith and life.

My early life
I was born in New Zealand right at the time when the Imperial Japanese army was sweeping unopposed down through East Asia and everyone expected that defenceless New Zealand would shortly be occupied by the invaders. My mother was instructed what to do as a pregnant woman when the Japanese arrived. (That this scenario did not happen was due to the US forces - something we are too prone to forget today.) My home was an Anglican one, my father a churchwarden and I grew up in that environment, singing in the church choir (but refusing to attend Sunday School - which was considered a grave misdeed in those days.) It was a happy home, prosperous for those post-war days. I was the youngest of three siblings, my sister being 12 years older and brother 8 years older. In contrast to my gregarious siblings, I was a bit of a loner and dreamer.

Family crisis
The turning point in all our lives occurred when I was 10. My sister and I, with her husband of three months, were swimming at a beach when a rip caught us and took us out to sea. I survived because my sister kept me afloat. She did not. As I struggled though adolescence with what would be now called 'survivor guilt' (and there was no counselling in those days), the thought gradually coalesced that my life had to be worth the cost of my sister's.

Adolescent religion
Faith for me has never been easy, no more so that during my youth. I stuck with the church because we had a terrific youth group. Meeting each Sunday fortnight, we would go as a body to the evening service after our group meeting and then, since we lived close to the church, all would descend on my home for supper, singing (I'd play the piano) and general fun. I, however, was the religiously rebellious one, always questioning and doubting, coming eventually to a conclusion that there was no God (but I still kept up with church and the youth group).

School and university
My secondary education was at Auckland Grammar School, the leading boys secondary school of its generation as it still is today. I do not look back with any fondness on those years. To count for anything you had to be either A-level academic or a top sportsperson. No one else counted except to make up numbers. Grammar, however, gave me two things of inestimable value. One teacher inspired me we a love of history, and another with a love of drama and speech. I have never lost those two loves.

Following Grammar, I selected Law as my professional path and went on to university at Auckland where I studied and qualified for an LLB degree. Two years spent as a law clerk, however, convinced me -and everyone else - that I was not cut out for law!

Finding faith
Then I found my feet in faith and almost immediately knew that the priesthood was my vocational calling. Within months, and still short of my 21st birthday, I was in training, at St Johns Theological College in Auckland. Although the normal college training period was three years, I stayed for a fourth year because I was so young. If my adolescence was full of faith turmoil, that was nothing to what I went through during these four years. They were the mid-sixties - an incredibly heady time theologically as well as socially. Vatican II was opening up the moribund Roman Church as no one ever thought possible. We were discovering the incredible continental theologians in Tillich, Bonheoffer, Bultmann,Neibuhr and many others. All the old certainties were collapsing around us and the life of faith was full of bewilderment and excitement.

What held all this together, though, was the spiritual life of the community and I grieve when I see that so utterly lacking in today's theological training. Our day was structured around the morning office prayer at 7am, followed by Eucharist, midday prayer at 12, evening office prayer at 5pm and compline (the night office) at 9.30pm. From the end of the compline office until after the next morning's Eucharist we did not speak to one another but the community was wrapped in silence. It was this discipline of prayer and meditation that maintained the stability of the community through these years of turmoil.

Marriage and early years of ministry
So to ordination in 1966, to be followed a few months later by marriage to Barbara (with whom I am still married (41 years) and we have two married children and five grandchildren). 12 years of parish ministry was followed by a further decade of hospital chaplaincy. I became very involved with the early charismatic movement but equally disillusioned with that as it turned inward and fundamentalist during the 1980s.

Faith crisis
By the end of the 1980s, however, the theistic model of God finally broke for me and I could see no viable alternative. I was back to my adolescent conviction that there was no God - although I remained convinced that Christianity had something to offer - it just had to recast itself as a 'religion without God'. So when an opportunity came to take up a secular position with the local health authority I seized it and abandoned my ministry - as I thought of it. Looking back though, I see this period of faith-loss as a period of immense spiritual creativity and a 'dark night' that the Spirit was leading me into and through. First, the ground had to be cleared of the rubble of the theism model - something I see the Spirit as doing across the whole church in our time. The soil had to be made fertile again for the vast spiritual growth that lay in the future.

The 'Mason Clinic'
The role with the health authority that I was now playing was to work with a fledgling forensic psychiatric service to create a new facility to keep secure those mental health patients who were considered a risk to themselves and society. My brief, as the manager of the project, was to create a facility that was both secure and therapeutic - and all the professionals from both health and justice told me that it was not possible to achieve both objectives. But we did. I had been working with these patients for a year and was very close to them as their chaplain. So one morning I gathered them all together, told them I had been commissioned to create a new "home" for them and they were to tell me what it was they wanted. They were amazingly insightful and realistic. When we finished what became known as the Mason clinic, most of what they requested was incorporated. When it opened in 1991 it was a world leader in its field. I am told that the world still beats a path to it as the examplar of what is possible. It is therapeutic, staff love to work in it, and it has proved secure - and why? because the philosophy we developed was that if you created a good environment people would not want to break out.

The commercial years
When my part in the project finished I was left with a dilemma - what did I do now? I still had no faith, so going back into stipendary ministry was no option. Meanwhile my son had graduated from university but it was a time of economic recession and jobs were scarce. He had major computer skills and we decided to go into business. My commercial life lasted over ten years - we achieved all kinds of groundbreaking things in our field - and lost money hand-over-fist. By the mid-nineties I had nothing materially left - not even a house of our own. No faith - no money - no home. Yet God continued to provide and provide in an abundance beyond any expectations and the material recovery began.

Ministry - a return
An invitation came to provide Sunday ministry for a parish that existed at the bottom of the economic scale. I would be part of a team of clergy providing their services without charge. I agreed on the proviso that the parish understood where I stood with my faith. That parish embraced me, accepted me, loved me and allowed me to be real. Somehow they drew power from my ministry though it came without visible "faith".

Cancer and facing death
Then, for someone who had never suffered an illness of any significance throughout life, never been to hospital, came the diagnosis of a cancer that was aggressive and most probably terminal. This was in 2003. I resigned my role in the parish, saying at my farewell that the only thing I could say was, 'The Lord is my shepherd: I shall not want'. Even  as I uttered thse words to them my mind cried out that this was bullshit. Except it wasn't. The treatment for the cancer physically and mentally devastated me, in the process triggering a major depression that was to last the next three years. I was brought so low that I could do nothing at all for myself. We tailspun into financial crisis on top of everything else.

Faith reborn
What I began to realise was that "I shall not want" was coming literally true. Uncomprehending at first as to what was happening, I kept on discovering that each need - physical, emotional, medical, financial, you name it - was being met on a daily basis. And it was reliable: so reliable that I could affirm before any solution presented itself that the need would be met about any specific issue. I came to be in awe of what was happening and inevitably had to ask the question, what kind of universe do we live in that grace like this can occur?

It was out of that question, arising from the devastating circumstances, that faith was reborn, but a faith dramatically different to the one which had died in me nearly 20 years before. It was then that I reached back to the spirituality of the daily prayer offices and rediscovered in them the secret of what had held the theological training community together through the disintegrating years of the 1960s.

The three keys of the Genesis Foundation
So came together the three keys to spiritual renewal that now lie at the heart of the Genesis Foundation -
• a community of prayer,
• engagement with scriptures,
• and a deep theology.

Prayer and the daily offices
I began to put the daily offices online and found that many others were resonating with them. it took me a long time to develop both the technological command and the right 'formula' for them but that came in time. Today, hundreds of people daily throughout the world now engage with these online offices and, judging on the growth in website traffic, this is meeting a deeply felt need. For the first time in the entire history of the Christian Church it is becoming possible to envisage the entire community, across all denominations and traditions, coming together daily in communal prayer. For the community that is even now gathering online every day comprises of people from almost the entire spectrum of the Christian community both ecclesiastically and theologically. It may well be that it is in these offices that the community truly finds its focus of unity.

The recording of scripture
At the heart of the offices lies the reading of scripture and the re-engagement with the offices brought about a revitalised engagement with scripture, and an excitement about them more that I have ever known. So commenced the project that currently involves me: the recording of both the New and the Old Testaments and the Apocrypha. As the resources of the Foundation are very slim materially, this project necessitates that I be not only the recording voice but also the sound engineer, sound editor and in fact just about every other role needed to bring these CDs to the market. I commenced the project in February 2008, thinking that I would have the whole of the New Testament ready by the end of August. Here it is November and only four of nine sets are in production. Why the delay? Partly it was the process of learning the technical expertise necessary as I went along, so I was constantly rejecting previous recordings as I made new technical advances. But another process was at work that played an even bigger role. Each book of the New Testament had to be recorded in a single session because it is impossible to take a break and return with the timbre of voice the same as before the break. So I had the experience of each book as grasped in an entirety (whereas we are more used to reading scripture in "chunks"). I found this brought dramatically different insights to play, something appreciated only after the recording was finished. This brought a desire to re-record to capture this new understanding: and this would happen several times for each book. Overall, I have recorded most of the Testament anything up to a dozen times. I have found the hardest thing has been to say "stop!"

It has not just been with each individual book that such growth in grasp of the whole has been occurring. Even more powerfully has been the growth in understanding of the scriptures, both Old and New, as an organic whole. (Because of the needs of the offices, recordings of the Old Testament have also been made through this period). I had the recent experience of speaking to a bishop about my perception of the scriptures and his reaction (and he is a Doctor of Divinity) was to say, "Until this moment I have never seen the scriptures as a whole. What you have just expounded is a revelation to me!"

So I am making these recordings of the New and Old Testaments. For me, these are not just the creation of yet another "audio bible". I am deeply convinced that they will lead, in time, to a revolution in the way we see and understand the scriptures.

The rebirth of theology
The third key is theology. The rebirth of faith arose from a fresh and incredibly exciting revelation of a new model for understanding God and the world, and this new model sparked intensive re-exploration of theology. But theology in the church has died over the last generation. There is not a single creative figure around to express faith for this 21st century. If theology is to be done, we, the grass-roots people of God, have to start doing it for ourselves. That is the birth concept for the third key in what the Genesis Foundation offers.

I have placed theological writings on the website – but only as a starting point for a theological engagement by the wider Christian community. Above all, I want to share my model for it may be something of greater significance than what simply helps me. At a recent secular health conference I was invited to take a session on spirituality and I shared my model – receiving overwhelming affirmation from an audience few of whom were active Christians but who saw in the model something of a foundation upon which they could relate once again to the spiritual world.

Parish revival at St Albans
In 2006, as i came out of the years of depression and began to look for ways in which to express my ministry (I had gone to the bishop to say that I had now done my 40 years of apprenticeship and was ready to begin my ministry!), I became aware of a congregation with whom I had a past deep connection, one which was steeped in the Anglo-Catholic tradition, that had been marginalised by a take-over of their church by an extreme evangelical outfit that had come in fromoverseas with pots of money. Nave was now 'auditorium', sanctuary 'stage' and altar the band's music stand. After an attempt to negotiate a compromise failed, I was able to facilitate the joining of these alienated parishioners with those of a neighbouring parish and the two congregations came together at the church of St Alban the Martyr in Balmoral, Auckland. Three other priests joined me in a non-stipendary team and since then the parish has gone from strength to strength, a model of a modern expression of catholic tradition in worship. I have been able to stand aside from the team to focus on the work of the Genesis Foundation but remain awed at, once again, how the Spirit answers prayer.

Today
So where am I at today? I am now 66 years old and have never felt so strong in the Spirit or so filled with life. Over this last two years, with the support of my wife (who has been the sole breadwinner) I have had to carry every role in the Foundation's work apart from the basic creation of the website engine (my son's work) and the artwork for the CDs. I have been recording artist, sound engineer, sound editor, copy writer, executive manager, accounts manager, marketing and sales manager and fund raiser - and speaker to live gatherings. All this has been done on the slimest of shoe-string budgets and I have often cried out for 'better' resources, for a new microphone, faster computer, just some money to get some promotional material done. Yet the reality is that, to do what needed to be done, we have never lacked and the proof of that is in what is now being produced.

The 'sound'
Finally, I want to make a note about how the sound comes about that you hear on the recordings. I started recording the New Testament at the beginning of 2008 and set myself a target, that I thought I would comfortably achieve, of launching the entire series on August 31. I have noted above two of the reasons for the delay. But for me by far the most significant cause of delay was the work towards a concept of the 'sound' I wanted, and at the beginning I had no idea what that sound might be.
In early October of this year I had finished the recording of Mark and had spent countless hours prepping it to be ready for production. It was finally complete and I put the master on the main stereo for one last check - and decided to scrub it and start all over again! It was nothing to do with the technical quality but it had to do with 'sound', the concept that lies behind the sound.

For what I had developed for the Pauline letters I now knew had to be applied to Mark. In a recent radio interview, the interviewer played a section from the start of I Corinthians. When it concluded he said, 'I feel as if Paul was speaking to me.' That is exactly what I had set out to achieve. When I recorded the letters of Paul, the sound I created came out of a concept that this was Paul talking directly to a modern audience - talking in person, not writing nor reading from a prepared script. This, I knew, was what I wanted to achieve with Mark and so the new recording, the one released, is the 'sound' of Mark who is with you in your home or your car or wherever you are listening, simply telling you his account in person of the life of Jesus.

I am currently (early November) working on Matthew' s gospel, which has a quite different "sound" to Mark for Matthew is a very different writer.

The Old Testament recording
With the New Testament recordings complete by the end of this year, the challenge for 2009 is going to be the Old Testament (and Apocrypha). The scale of this is huge – four times that of the New Testament. Although I have made extensive recordings already of the Old Testament, I am not sure whether I will accept any of them as up to the standard I wish to achieve.

But quantity is not the only or even the main challenge the Old testament presents me. In The Spoken Word New Testament I have reordered the writings of the NT into a chronological order and this produces an entirely new experience of the Christian scriptures, one that tells a story in itself and one that, through that story, has a major fresh message to the church today.

The Old Testament, on the other hand, has become almost wholly neglected in the contemporary church. The excerpts included in the Sunday lectionary make little sense and the prevailing attitude is that the OT is of no relevance, an attitude compounded by its abuse by biblical literalists both in insistence upon its literal truth and in employing selective passages from its laws to bolster moral judgements.

In contrast, I am overwhelmed with excitement about the OT and its high degree of relevance to the modern world – if it can be heard in a fresh manner. the key to that manner, I am convinced, lies in the same treatment applied to the NT, that of reorganising the order of the books so as to tell the inner story of the faith journey of the Hebrew people. so for me, the 2009 challenge lies not so much in the quantitative issue of the size of the OT but in the qualitative issue of how to present the OT in such a way that its message gets across to our world.

'Bible alive!'
One of my hopes for 2009 also is the development of live readings to groups, retreates, conferences and other gatherings under a programme called 'Bible Alive!'. I wish to see schools, in particular, take up this possiblity, especially with readings of Mark's gospel in the form of a condensed version known as 'Tight Mark'. So if any school or group, retreat or conference would like to contact me, email me at david@genesis.net.nz.

If you would like to comment on this story or ask me any question, do email me - Email me

David Guthrie
October 13, 2008

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