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Telling the stories of the Anglican Church in Aotearoa, NZ and Polynesia

Mark Beale: into the challenging zone

The American author and pastor Eugene Peterson once described pastoral ministry as bringing “the story of salvation to specific people in a particular place.” For the last 20 years, Mark Beale has been doing just that in South Auckland.

Lloyd Ashton  |  11 Dec 2008  |

For folk in Manurewa, South Auckland, the last weekend in January was grim.

On Friday evening, a 22-year-old Indian man minding the family dairy in Finlayson Ave, Clendon (a low-cost housing zone on Manurewa’s western fringe), was stabbed and killed.

The following night, an enraged homeowner baled up a 15-year-old Maori boy he’d caught tagging – and stabbed and killed him, too. And on the Monday, a woman was slashed in a knife attack.

A senior police officer tried to sound encouraging: he told the Manukau Courier that Manurewa’s weekend of violence was a “statistical blip” and the community shouldn’t panic.

The same story quoted the Rev Mark Beale, long-serving vicar of St Elizabeth’s Clendon (just down the street from that Finlayson Ave dairy) and chairman of the Manukau Beautification Trust, which he’d helped set up to tackle tagging.

He told the paper that murders were not a true reflection of the community and that Manurewa had more good people than bad.

But blip or no blip, the bad news flared again in June.

This time a 30-year-old Indian father of three was shot dead in a liquor store hold-up; and a couple of weeks later a Chinese woman was killed in the car park of the Manukau Shopping Centre. She’d tried to stop a thief who snatched her bag – and, as her 8-year-old son watched, she was dragged under the stolen getaway wagon.

There was yet more bad news to come from Weymouth, an older community next to Clendon: on August 12, a 14-year-old boy was killed in his home by hammer-wielding attackers.

Auckland was already in the grips of a gloomy, incessantly rainy winter. And there’d been this steady drip, drip, drip of stories about the violence, lawlessness and poverty of South Auckland.

That’s when Mark Beale decided it was time to start cooking up some soup.

Not just any old cup of soup, mind you. This was The Big Soup. The ingredients – 18,000 litres of water, 5000kg of peeled and chopped spuds, 1200kg of onions, 333kg of vegetable stock powder, 125kg of salt, 60kg of tomato paste and 25kg sacks of curry powder, turmeric and paprika – were enough to make 25,000 litres of soup, which had to be brewed in a vat at Lion Nathan’s Otahuhu brewery.

On August 23 – 11 days after the Weymouth murder – milk tankers carted that soup to community centres in Otara and Clendon, to schools and the local indoor stadium.

Containers of the stuff were dispatched to retirement homes, to the women’s prison on Roscommon Rd (just a hop, skip and jump from St Elizabeth’s) and to people in the street.

The Big Soup had actually been months in the planning. Dozens of volunteers and civic-minded companies helped, and Guinness Book of Records folk are checking whether a zany world record has been set. Certainly, there was a good feed for folk who might otherwise have gone hungry.

But the real point of the exercise was to raise the spirits of the people.

Mark and his helpers wanted to put a smile on the face of neighbours and to demonstrate, as he put it, “the true nature and character of the people living here.”

And the thing is, Mark’s been out there, with his sleeves rolled up, working to lift Clendon for 20 years.

“What an amazing character,” says George Hawkins, MP for Manurewa. “Mark’s involved in everything. He helps individuals, families, schools, the community… and he’s always doing it with a smile.

“He has a knack of making people believe in themselves. They come away from dealing with him with some self-belief – a feeling that they can do something to lift themselves and their families.”

In the 1980s Auckland was busting at the seams, and a large area of farmland bordering Weymouth, Wiri, Alfriston Rd and Orams Rd was rezoned for subdivision. That’s how Clendon came into being.

Low-cost two and three-bedroom houses began springing up, and in 1986 Bishop Godfrey Wilson – who oversaw the southern part of the Diocese of Auckland – met with the Manurewa parish to nut out how best to serve this fast-growing community.

They settled on three churches to cover the parish. Two were there already – St David’s in Wiri and St Luke’s in Central Manurewa – and they decided to plant a new church, in Clendon.

At the time, Mark was Vicar at St Paul’s Te Atatu, in West Auckland. He and his wife Barbara’s four young children were thriving, and St Paul’s “was really going places.”

So when Bishop Godfrey asked him to plant that Clendon church, the answer was no. And then Mark had a rethink.

His refusal, he realised, was mostly about him wanting to stay in his comfort zone. So Mark made a promise to God: if, at the end of six months, no one else had come forward for the Clendon challenge, he’d do it. He’d go.

And sure enough, at the end of six months, when Mark checked again, no one else had stepped forward. That was in August 1987.

Mark was 38, and most of his friends reckoned he ought to be looking for an escape clause.

“The Anglican Church hadn’t been very successful in decile one communities,” he recalls. “It had planted very few churches for 20 years. I hadn’t a clue what to do. No one had a clue what to do. So I was courting disaster.

“But I felt God calling me out of the comfort zone, into the challenging zone.”

First, the Beales had to find a Clendon house big enough not only for themselves but also for a worship centre.

But the only houses in Clendon were bare-bones two and three bedroom jobs. So Bishop Godfrey suggested something purpose-built – and that meant land.

Mark’s mad on cricket – for years, he opened the bowling attack for the Weymouth Cricket Club’s senior side – and through cricket he met the district surveyor, who knew of a site on Finlayson Ave big enough for a church and a vicarage.

In Full of Surprises, the book he’s just written to commemorate the first 20 years at St Elizabeth’s, Mark tells of checking out that Finlayson Ave site with the bishop, the diocesan secretary, and the surveyor.

They wandered among waist-high weeds, stood next to a tumble-down cowshed.

The possibilities, Mark sensed, were endless. “The place felt so right… I was just overwhelmed by God’s presence.”

They had a one-level prefabricated house trucked to the site, and the Beales moved in June 1988. They’d had a granny flat attached to the house, and that became the worship centre.

They held their first public service in The Unit – as they called the granny flat – on August 7, 1988. Ten people showed up, and the Beale clan made up six of them.

Mark knew he wanted to build a community church, so he had to get a handle on how the community ticked.

“We enrolled our children at the local schools and clubs. We shopped at the local shops. I walked and prayed around the streets, talked to people and attended all the public meetings. When the meeting was about building a public library or community centre, I did research before I went so that I could contribute…”

Barbara Beale volunteered to teach remedial reading at the local school. And when Tomorrow’s Schools was introduced, Mark became the first chairman of the Roscommon School Board of Trustees, and stayed on the board for nine years. He helped the principal write the school charter.

He did a mailbox drop about baptisms. With Barbara, he started a young mums’ support and coffee group, along with a youth group, Sunday school, family support group, parenting group, and various counselling services supported by the Anglican Trust for Women and Children.

Word got around. Within a couple of years, one family service in The Unit drew 108 people.

Folk were hanging out the windows, jammed in the doorways, spilling on to the veranda.

So many, that The Unit couldn’t cope any longer. So once a month Mark and Barbara would empty their lounge of furniture, and hold the family service there.

When Manurewa had settled on its three-church model, questions still hung over a couple of other churches in the parish. One was All Saints, in Weymouth.

Built in the 1920s, it was a local landmark. The folk who worshipped there were elderly, and they were fond of their old gothic church. But they could see it would never cope with the growth of Clendon.

So they decided to sell it, ploughing the $190,000 proceeds into a new Clendon Anglican Church Centre.

With a grant from the ASB Community Trust, more money from the sale of other parish property, and gifts from parishioners, they were now ready to get cracking on the new centre.

On November 17, 1991 – just three years after the Beales had arrived in Clendon – Bishop Godfrey opened and consecrated the new church: St Elizabeth’s.

Mark had named it after a 13th century Hungarian princess who lived to only 24. She had made her castle open to all – and Mark wanted his new church to be open, too.

St Elizabeth had also been a Franciscan tertiary – and the Beale family had links to the Anglican Franciscans. So St Elizabeth’s Clendon was consecrated on her feast day.

Mark meant what he said about St Elizabeth’s being an open church.

Soon after it opened, folk from the Assyrian Orthodox Church – mostly Iraqi refugees – asked if they could hire St Elizabeth’s for their services.

No chance, said Mark. But they could use the church for free on Sunday afternoons, in exchange for praying for Clendon. They did just that.

There are now about 300 Assyrian families in Manurewa, and they’ve had to find a bigger venue. But every Sunday night Mark Beale still takes a Bible study at St Elizabeth’s for the Assyrian youth.

In 1998 the leaders of a Niuean Presbyterian Church asked Mark if they too could use St Elizabeth’s. And this year, Mark preached at a service to commemorate the 10th anniversary of that arrangement.

There’s no Anglican Church in Niue. But at St Elizabeth’s Clendon, there’s a strong Niuean community, and one of their number, Iga Mokole, has just become the first Niuean Anglican deacon.

One Saturday in mid-90s, Mark was getting ready for Sunday services when he heard the rumble of a big motorbike under the portico of the church.

The doors whanged open – and there stood a big guy wearing a gang patch, clutching two small kids.

He marched up the aisle and said those two children needed to be baptised. There was a note of urgency in his request. Now’s good, in other words.

Mark explained that baptisms were normally done during a Sunday morning service.

But the man couldn’t wait. And Mark noticed, then, that one of the children was badly deformed.

He agreed to baptise those kids, there and then. As he was coming back with the water, Mark asked the man whether he’d been baptised. He hadn’t.

So Mark sat on the sanctuary steps with the three strangers and explained what baptism meant. Told them the Gospel story.

Then, after prayer, he baptised all three of his unexpected candidates. In Full of Surprises, Mark tells how that story ended:

“He left with a smile on his face, and with a child tucked under each arm. As I heard the bike rumble away into the distance, I couldn’t help but think of Philip and the eunuch.”

Come the mid-1990s, and just about every fence and lamp-post in Clendon and Manurewa had been tagged, initialled and scrawled over. The place looked forsaken, and that was tough on community morale.

The St Elizabeth’s youth group decided they’d like to become graffiti busters. Mark approached the Manukau City Council, which came up with paint, and each Saturday the kids would spread out and paint over those tags.

That went on for months. By the Monday the graffiti would be back, and Mark would spend his Monday mornings painting it over.

Mark then tackled WINZ to set up a work scheme. After that, two or three people would head out each day to tackle the graffiti.

Manukau City liked the look of what was happening in Clendon, and in 2001 it set up the Manukau Beautification Charitable Trust. The mayor, Sir Barry Curtis, persuaded Mark to chair that trust.

The graffiti-busting operation has now spread to the whole city. The trust has five vehicles, 20 people on the road every day, and it slaps through $20,000 of paint a month. The whole city looks and feels better.

But Mark didn’t leave it there. In 2003, while he was in Phoenix (Arizona) for a Promise Keepers’ conference – we’ll talk about that elsewhere – he arranged to meet the city’s top brass.

Graffiti had been costing Phoenix millions each year, so they’d developed a strategy of removal, education and enforcement. In Manukau they were now getting sorted with removal and education, but they had nothing going on enforcement.

So the Phoenix group gave Mark a copy of their new anti-graffiti bylaws. Mark took these to Barry Curtis, and George Hawkins used them as the basis for a private member’s bill.

Last April, after five years of lobbying, Manukau City had its own anti-graffiti legislation.

It wasn’t a bad example of how a church can bring change to its community.

In 1991 the National Government brought in full market rentals for state houses. Tenants unable to cope could apply for accommodation supplements, but within a couple of years Mark noticed this policy was having a disastrous effect on Clendon.

Because state rentals had shot up, private landlords could jack up rents for their own properties. That, in turn, inflated the sale prices of Clendon houses, driving them out of the reach of first-home owners.

And though the government was pouring millions into accommodation supplements, tenants were getting no benefit: that supplement went straight into landlords’ pockets.

Mark also noticed that Roscommon Rd School was losing one third of its children each term. Clendon was being undermined by transience.

That’s the backdrop for the St Elizabeth’s Housing Project, which kicked off in 1996. During a break in an Alpha course, Mark and Neil Carney were leaning on the fence that separated St Elizabeth’s from horse paddocks.

Neil, who’d built heaps of upmarket houses, told Mark he wanted to do something to help Clendon.

That’s when Mark shared a dream about building houses for hard-pressed folk who would be the core of the church. He had in mind the community described in Acts 2, and together, Mark and Neil decided to make it happen.

Mark found that Fletchers owned the land, so he met with a Fletchers manager and spelled out his vision of buying land to build homes for people who couldn’t get out of the rent trap.

That meeting took place at 11am – good timing, because at 1pm the Fletchers man was due to sign an agreement to sell the land to someone else.

The Fletchers man liked what he heard, and he steered the other buyer to another block. There were six sections, he said, at $38,000 each, and he didn’t have authority to sell them for less. St Elizabeth’s had 30 days to find the money.

That’s when Mark began to haunt Fletchers’ HQ. Finally, he won an audience with the board that handled that land. Mark made another pitch – and the next day all six sections were offered to St Elizabeth’s for $90,000. Better still, the church didn’t have to settle for 12 months.

With Neil Carney calling the shots, six high-quality, brick-and-tile houses were built in nine months.

Five were sold to needy families, and the sixth is managed by the St Elizabeth’s Community Housing Trust. Families pay lower than market rentals to occupy that house – and that lets them save a deposit for their first home. In the last seven years, 16 families have been helped in this way.

Mark didn’t leave it there, either. He went public about the pitfalls of the market rentals scheme, and the plight of struggling families.

He did a St Simeon Stylites and spent 48 hours up a cherrypicker – ‘High priest prays for community,’ said the NZ Herald’s front page.

No surprise, then, that when Labour won the 1999 election it launched its housing policy at St Elizabeth’s. The Prime Minister obviously saw the housing project as a prototype of what was possible.

In 20 years, St Elizabeth’s has grown to over 300 parishioners and has long since become a parish in its own right.

It runs a thriving men’s ministry; the Manurewa Family Christmas in the Park; play group and work schemes; specialist care for the elderly (through the Selwyn Foundation); film nights for low-income families; as well as a prison ministry. Then there’s the food bank, the op shop, and the Alpha courses…

Little wonder that in 2001 Mark was made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for “services to the community”.

But by that time, he’d long since won the only accolade that really counts in South Auckland: streetcred.

Mark Beale has that, in spades.

Lloyd Ashton is the Anglican Media Officer

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