The Biggest Church in New Zealand is being looked into by the government.

The government of New Zealand is now looking into the largest church in the country.

The largest megachurch in New Zealand is being looked into by the country’s Department of Internal Affairs after the church commissioned a bad report that it wouldn’t let the public see. The 49-page report says that the people in charge of Arise Church made “egregious and systemic” mistakes. Pathfinding, a Christian critical response management company, did the independent review. It called for board resignations and new leadership to fix many problems, such as how volunteers and interns at the Arise Ministry School were treated badly.

Pastors are said to have asked interns to work too many hours and to clean, drive, watch children, and garden for them. There were also claims of bullying, sexual harassment, and manipulation. Pathfinding talked to 545 current and former members of Arise, a Pentecostal church with 10,000 members and 13 campuses.

Senior pastor John Cameron, who was also chair of the board and had the sole power to approve new board members, has said in the past that the church “allowed a culture of performance,” which hurt Arise Ministry School students.

When he said in April that he was “stepping aside from his pastoral duties” and that Pathfinding was starting the independent review, he promised that things would change.

Cameron said, “We are going to listen and learn.” “We are willing to talk to you and will make the suggested changes to our organization,”

Cameron quit as senior pastor the month after that. In July, Pathfinding came up with 92 ideas. They ranged from starting a Mori group to promote diversity to having an outside group look at the church’s finances and how pastors spend their own money. Pathfinding also asked for resignations, saying that the church board “has lost its moral mandate to govern.”

Pathfinding said that in the future, Arise pastors shouldn’t be on the board so that the governing body can do its job better.

The board did not quit in the month after the report, though. It gave a spot on the governing body to Ben Kendrew, a campus pastor from Christchurch, one of New Zealand’s biggest cities. Cameron’s job as interim senior pastor is likely to be taken over by Kendrew later this month.

Even though they had said they would in the past, the board did not release the report or say in public what recommendations had been made.

Before Cameron and his wife, Gillian, left, they asked the Employment Relations Authority to keep the report from being made public. But when the document got out to the media and was published last week, the Employment Relations Authority overturned the order that said it couldn’t be published. The report made a lot of noise in New Zealand, both inside and outside of churches.

Ivan Wong Kee, who used to work there, said on social media that it broke his heart to see what he and other people had worked so hard to build.

““Jesus, we are sorry for worshiping idols,” he said.

“As a church, we had spiritual pride and put the name of Arise above the name of Jesus. I don’t know if God will let us get through this. If he does, I will pray for us to do better.

Peter Lineham, a retired history professor from Massey University who writes about religion, told Radio New Zealand that it was clear that the top leaders had to go.

“Arise will only last as long as it is willing to change,” he said. “As far as I can tell, John Cameron and the board members have no place after their huge number of failures.”

The general manager of Charities Services, which is part of Internal Affairs, Natasha Weight, said on August 18 that the megachurch would be looked into “in light of recent events.”

The leaders of the church did not answer CT’s requests for comments.

David Farrier, an independent journalist and filmmaker, started writing about the church in his email newsletter Webworm in April. This brought the church to the attention of people all over the country.

Farrier wrote in the first part, “Meet at the Arise church,” “Meet Arise.” “They have a lot of money and power, but you’ve never heard of them.”

By New Zealand standards, Arise is a very big church. It was started in 2002 by seven people in a dance and theater studio in Wellington, which is the capital of New Zealand. It now has about 70 full-time employees and 1,470 volunteers. The church is based on Hillsong, which has had its own scandals in Australia and the US. It has 13 locations all over the country and makes about $15 million (about $10.4 million USD) a year.

Farrier, who is 39 years old, has written about sexual predators online, a murder scandal in sports, and people who believe in conspiracies. He has, however, sometimes shown interest in conservative Christianity in New Zealand, talking about how he grew up in a Baptist church and how hard it was for him when his Christian college told him that being bisexual was wrong.

He is an agnostic now, but Farrier is quick to say that he has been a Christian before.

“I was born on Christmas Day and lived in a town called Bethlehem. I went to a Christian school.” I was made Head Boy when I was 17,” he said. “I was proud of the job, and I’d pray to God before school meetings.”

In his reporting on Arise, Farrier looked into claims of homophobia, sexual assault, and bullying, as well as things like “outlining,” which means sharing private information with senior leaders. Farrier told long parts of the stories of abuse and manipulation from former members.

New Zealand TV picked up on the story, and in April, the church said it would hire Pathfinding to do an independent review.

Frank Ritchie, a Wesleyan Methodist minister and media chaplain, joined the three-person review team at Pathfinding so that the report could be peer-reviewed before it was released. This month, he wrote a long piece about what he thought was wrong with theology and culture at Arise. He said that centralized power, an honor culture, a performance culture, and toxic positivity were all things to worry about.

“Arise can be a community where everyone is valued and their gifts help each other grow in Christlikeness as a deep internal journey of formation in Christ through all the ups and downs of life—in the ordinary, everyday journey of living in 21st-century Aotearoa New Zealand,” he wrote. “To get there, Arise will need to put discipleship and training in the way of Jesus at the center of the community. It needs to come before getting more money, buildings, people, or putting on bigger and better events.”

Five days after the report was leaked, on August 21, two board members apologized to the church. But the statement said nothing about the Pathfinding recommendations. Instead, it talked about how people felt and didn’t say much about what church leaders should do.

“We want to say sorry to everyone who has been hurt. We know that many things need to change. “This is our main goal for the upcoming season,” said Kylie Fletcher, who is in charge of the board right now.

Ben Kendrew also said, “We fell far short, and we’re sorry for how this affected every member of our church.”

There is no set time frame for the investigation by Internal Affairs.