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Faith follows friendship
The warmth of community that Teresa Curran experienced among Christian Pacific island rugby players over two years in Japan drew her to look into church again when she returned to New Zealand. Shortly afterwards she decided to become a Christian.
Curran had been interested in church since childhood. When she stayed at someone else's house and they had to go to church it was always quite exciting. And as a teenager she helped out with church community work.
While at university she found herself in a charismatic congregation where she did not feel comfortable so stopped attending. She continued to study and research all religions including Christianity.
While working in Japan from 2001 to 2002 she met a group of Pacific islanders who were playing rugby there. She spent a lot of time with them, and went with them to church on Sundays. "That was I think a really eye-opening experience and it was really nice to be part of the community," Curran said.
While in Japan, she compared Christianity with Shintoism and Buddhism. The Japanese may have their wedding as a Buddhist and their funeral as a Shinto or vice-versa. People often go to a beautiful wedding chapel that looks like a traditional brick chapel to get married. "They looked beautiful but inside they were soulless," Curran said. "I found that disturbing, so I did a lot of thinking in Japan."
When she returned to New Zealand she missed the community she had had with the Pacific boys in Japan. She went to a friend who was a Presbyterian minister and talked things through.
The minister invited her to join the church family, but promised that she would not be expected to make any kind of commitment. "You don't have to say that you'll stay here or put your name to it," he said. "You're a part of the church family but you can leave at any time."
She got involved and enjoyed doing youth work with small children. Then Christmas 2003 she made a commitment of faith.
Enlightenment
She did this after reading from the Bible for a crammed church service in the countryside on Christmas eve.
The tiny church was built to hold about 20 people but there were about 70 crammed into it because it was the only service that church holds each year," she explains. Curran before the congregation and read from Colossians 3: "You are the people of God, holy and dearly loved". "Halfway through it hit me that this was exactly where I was supposed to be and I could see God in the faces of the people.
"Their faces were glowing, it was joyful and you could see something behind it," she says. "I could see there was a reason why they were joyful. It was an intense experience." As Curran left the service she got into the car and cried. "That night I said, this is for me, so I made the decision to be baptised and I decided I wanted to serve the church in some way."
Curran applied for CWM's Training in Mission (TIM) programme for youth shortly after baptism in April 2004. "New Zealand has had some fairly dubious colonial and evangelical and downright cruel mission experiences," she said. "It's part of our history and we are very aware of it so if you say you're on a mission or you're going to do a mission, it's quite a scary thing."
On the TIM programme her faith has been revitalised by studying mission and working on church outreach projects with nine other young people from different CWM-member churches around the world.
She has put her community development work experience to use on her first TIM placement at a pre-school in a poor Cape Town township in South Africa.
She will be going to India in June.
