Arise Church Prospering at interns' expense

Arise church is near to my heart - when I first arrived in New Zealand back in 2005, my wife joined the church while it was still small, and before it was even called Arise. Since then it has grown to be a behemoth - every so often I check on Arise's annual returns, and it seemed that each year they would expand enough to make about $1 million more than the previous year. At the moment that number stands at $13 million in income for the last year. They also own several properties worth a combined $21 million, including a church building in Wellington worth $10 million or more.

How have they ended up becoming so rich? In part the church appears to target young adults with large disposable incomes. The times that I've been to church services over the years they have always seemed to be filled with young people. Arise leans heavily on recruiting members from local universities as well. The experience of my wife, and of people she was friends with at Arise church, was that there was a lot of pressure to get new people into the church, and then to keep them coming back. Leaders were given spreadsheets tracking everyone who had come to a service, with a set target each week of how many people needed to be contacted to try to get them to come back to the next weekend's service, or the next mid-week meeting. I've even experienced this tenacity myself - as an experiment a few years ago, at the end of an Arise church service, I filled in their visitor card that they hand out to all new people. I ticked the box saying that I did not want to be contacted, and over the next few months I received several phone calls and at least one text message a week checking that I was going to be coming to the Sunday service.

Once people are emotionally invested in the church, after this pressure has been applied, they are asked to donate to “offerings” (such as a building fund or money for a visiting speaker), and they are told about the importance of tithing. For a normal church this tithe is 10% of your salary, but for Arise it's also 10% of an inheritance, 10% of money from the sale of a house, 10% of etc.

Here's the head of Arise church, John Cameron, talking about money:

John talks about a “blessing” of someone's finances when they tithe, and this is an oblique promise of future riches in return for an investment in the church, and is what's known as the Prosperity Gospel. This is usually seen in some of the worst evangelical churches in the US, and it's really disappointing to see it being preached here. But what's worse is what John has to say about people who might not be able to afford to tithe, those whose finances are not in great shape. His recommendation is that it's important for them to ensure they tithe, because the blessing that will come to them from this is apparently the key to their progress and their freedom. So, in essence he's telling people who can't afford to give him 10% of their money that they have to do this in order to prosper.

John also talks about how he himself tithes, but of course his salary comes from the church, and so the 10% tithe he makes to his own church will eventually find its way back into his pocket!

It takes a lot to run a church as large as Arise has become. The church's latest annual return states that it has 2,500 volunteers - out of a membership of around 10,000 - working around 16,500 unpaid hours a week - an average of 7 hours per volunteer. A part of this unpaid workforce is Arise church's internship program, which is entangled with a “Ministry School”, and this week David Farrier wrote an exposé on how Arise is abusing the idea of internships to provide it with a free workforce.

Obviously the idea of an internship is that, in return for offering their services for free for a period of time, an intern will gain valuable knowledge and skills that they otherwise might not have been able to gain, and that this will help them to find a paid job in the same vocation they interned in. Except that I'm guessing the skills learned at an Arise internship are unlikely to be very useful outside of the church - especially given the rapidly dropping number of Christians in New Zealand.

David documents the stories of several interns who not only worked for free for the church, but actually paid for the privilege to be there! And when it comes to church internships, it seems that people are often told that serving for free is what their God wants from them - it's a real pressure to give as much as you can to the church.

Interns at Arise are expected to help with office work, where they may well learn some useful skills, but they're also expected to help set up before and pack up after church meetings and run evening prayer groups for local church members. And on Sunday, the big day of services, interns can find themselves working from 5am until midnight. To top it off, one of the interns said that they are frequently used for jobs such as babysitting the church leaders' kids, driving staff around and even cleaning.

Employment NZ sets out some guidelines for internships, and among them are:

• ensure that the internship is mainly about learning new skills and gaining experience
• limit the duration of work and the hours worked by the intern

It seems likely that Arise church is not following these guidelines, and I can only hope that someone who has read David Farrier's article is in a position to do something about this treatment of young members who are signing up to help the church because they're trying to be good people.

It'd be awesome to see Arise consider actually paying these young people who work for them. The church seems to have a lot of money - maybe they could set aside a tithe, 10% of their $13 million income, to pay their interns. If they have 50 interns, they could be paid $26,000 each for part-time work - barely enough to live on for a year, but better than nothing. Plus, if they're being paid the interns would also be protected under employment laws - an added bonus.