Howard Nicholson Pilgrim – We Didn’t Set Out to Build a Sect

Some reflections on Gloriavale’s Origins

Several recent Gloriavale leavers, born and raised there, have expressed an interest in hearing about the origins of that community from its beginnings in Rangiora and Springbank in the 1970’s.  While age brings insight, my memories may well be clouded by the passage of time and in conflict with stories told by others involved. With that caveat, I offer my perspective as one who was involved from late 1969 to September 1977.

This all happened a long time ago

It should be understood within a broader social context of 1970’s alternative lifestyles and self-sufficient communities, based on various ideologies. We knew about many such groups and where they were going wrong. Such arrogance was probably our biggest flaw.

1. For the first few years of its life under Neville Cooper’s leadership, we were a fairly normal local church within the broader Pentecostal movement, with all families living in separate homes dispersed around Rangiora and its rural environs.
2. While we had a distinctive emphasis on sharing financial resources, this began on a voluntary basis. In my own case, as founding principal of our private school in 1971, I entered into a “common purse” commitment with Neville and one other leader to make the venture financially viable, and other teachers later joined the staff on the same basis. This become an example of sacrificial living for others in the group to emulate, leading (after my time) to a compulsory common purse for all families.

Recruiting young adults

My wife and I moved from Christchurch to Rangiora in late 1969 to team up with Neville Cooper just when he moved his family from Fielding. I was then 26 years old and she was 22. Our recruitment by Neville to join him in his mission was typical of the way this community grew during those early years.

1. There was an attraction for young adults like us, impatient to change the world by modelling something better than the material values of wider society. However, an increasing isolation from that world was never part of the deal for me, and never sat well with my aspirations and call to an effective Christian ministry.
2. A key element of Neville’s attraction for many of us came from the stories he told of his earlier adventures as an itinerant evangelist in Australia. We were blinded to how desperately he needed to leave that life behind and build a stable economic base for his family. His real needs for economic security did not quite match his preaching.
3. Our minimal self-awareness as young adults meant we were ignorant of our own unfinished parental business and our unconscious need to please a new mentor.

Idealism about personality defects

Everyone recognized that Neville had a rather abrasive personality, and Christian leaders who had worked with him in other contexts warned us that he was a loose cannon who hated to be held accountable to other leaders. We discounted these warnings from the outset.

1. We upheld mutual accountability within the group as preferable to institutional safeguards imposed from outside.
2. Misgivings we felt about potential dangers were assuaged to some extent by the warmth of community and common purpose we shared as a small group. Submission to one another in that context was natural and easy.
3. However, that safeguard was undercut quite early on by a few new recruits who proclaimed that Neville was God’s Man, the prophet they had been looking for all their lives. While some of us said quietly “Oh really?”, Neville’s acceptance of this adulation meant that mutual submission was never going to work in the long run. We would all end up being forced to choose between blindly following him or leaving.
4. Issues of power and control became increasingly central to our communal life, with “submission” elevated to the prime virtue.
5. Neville was in fact a deeply narcissistic person whose need for validation from others came to dominate the life of the group.
   1. He had a canny intuition for how to manipulate others through intermittent displays of kindness or reasonableness.
   2. We capitulated to this manipulation, avoiding confrontations in which he could turn into a bully, thus keeping him “good” for us.
   3. We ignored his lack of personal loyalty. To this day I wonder if he ever grieved for those who left him and the group, including half of his own children.

Submission to the group was actually infantilising.

Those of us who joined this group from outside underwent a gradual process in which we gave away essential aspects of our adult status. Those born into the community would never experience themselves as adults until they left.

1. We began to renounce individual responsibility for our actions, submitting our own moral judgement to decisions made on a group level. This eventually left to an unscriptural doctrine that only the leadership would give account to God for the lives led by all.
2. The eventual emergence of “What We Believe”, after my time, as a detailed and prescriptive definition of a shared ideology demonstrates how we had subordinated our own sense of truth and falsehood to a process of group thinking. However, everyone held onto their own reservations, saying one thing openly but another inwardly, or when in the company of safe confidants. This double talk became an essential feature of the group’s life. We all became adept at living a lie.
3. As a consequence of this moral and intellectual infantilizing, we became spiritually impoverished, unable to grow the simple virtues of faith, hope and love which are the only basis for developing any relationship with God, and the blossoming of individual gifts fostered by the Spirit. We had renounced our Christian birth right for an unhealthy mess of communal potage.

There was a subtle erosion of essential boundaries.

The wellbeing of families, marriages and individuals requires a healthy respect for privacy on each of these levels.

1. Autonomy is the key concept here, but given Neville’s insatiable need to exert control over others, it increasingly came under siege. Why would anyone want to control their own lives, he asked us? The answer should have been obvious.
2. The tipping point for me and my wife came when Neville began to subvert privacy around the intimacy of newly married young couples. We did not want our children growing up in an atmosphere of shared prurience. After we left, other churches all felt clean in comparison.
3. His own prurience was what eventually led to Neville’s conviction for sexual abuse of a young woman, several years after we had left. What was disappointing rather than surprising to me was the group’s refusal to take that judgement as a wake-up call, and their retreat into deeper isolation on the West Coast when he came out of jail.

My hope for those who remain.

Many of those I knew and loved back then have since left the community and taken up more normal lives in wider society. But for those who remain, whom I still remember with affection and concern after 45 years of separation, along with their descendants who are unknown to me, I offer a belief and a prayer.

1. I believe that the Gloriavale community can only emerge safely from its current troubles by engaging in some fundamental process of truth-telling within the community. Pressure from outside will only produce real change if the whole community learns to speak honestly among themselves, from the leadership on down, rather than finding new ways to justify their errors. God does not guarantee that believers won’t make mistakes, but rather requires us to learn from them, in life’s “university of hard knocks”.
2. I pray that they will all find the courage required for that process of internal reconciliation by making a fresh discovery of God’s redeeming grace offered to us all in Christ.

Howard Pilgrim – hnp@howardpilgrim.com – November 2022

(Please connect with Howard if this has been helpful for your journey, and ask him any other questions you may have).