Little Revolutions comes to Wellington

On Monday and Tuesday this week, more than 150 people from across Aotearoa gathered in central Wellington for Little Revolutions — two days of dreaming, wrestling, praying and imagining what it looks like to follow the revolutionary Jesus in this particular moment.

Hosted at Meow Nui - in a former life, a Salvation Army Citadel; today it is one of Wellington's live-music venues. Where the medium is the message — there is something fitting about a roomful of church-planters and renewers gathering in a space that has already lived through its own transformation.

Hosted by the Catch Network, led by Archdeacon Scottie Reeve, the conference drew a genuinely ecumenical crowd. Baptist, Anglican, Salvation Army, Presbyterian and more were all in the one room. Scottie shared some of his own experience of starting and reviving small, creative faith communities in central Wellington. Now, with Catch, he walks alongside groups sensing a similar call in their own context.

Between the main gatherings, workshops and case studies told stories on church renewal already underway around the motu and the largely unglamorous, deeply hopeful work of ordinary communities trying something new.

The keynote line-up included missiologist Alan Hirsch — author of the landmark The Forgotten Ways and founder of the Forge network and 100Movements. Alan has spent a career arguing that the inherited formulas no longer work, and that the Western church must recover its instincts as a movement rather than an institution. "Disruption gives us a chance to innovate, to try new things, to explore different possibilities," he told the room. "That's what Little Revolutions is about." He was sharp, too, on what faithfulness to tradition actually asks of us: "The best way to preserve tradition is not to wear granddad's old hat, but to have children — tell the story properly, and form them to carry your DNA into the future."

From East London came Dave Mann, who with his wife Sally has given more than thirty years to Bonny Downs, a deeply rooted church and community in the borough of Newham. His keynote, "Looking for Lydia and the Bonny Downs Story," traced that long, ordinary faithfulness to a single neighbourhood; and in a second session he spoke on staying faithful to the call and persevering. Dave put the conference's title into plain words: "We are revolting — we are bringing this transformation into our communities. The church is the engine room of God's energy to bring kingdom transformation."

Salvation Army officer Faye Molen (Ngāti Awa, Ngā Puhi, Ngāi Tūhoe) brought a distinctly Aotearoa voice with "The Reluctant Pioneer and the Prophet." With her husband Steve, Faye has decades of youth work and innovative mission behind her — from Wellington to South Auckland, where the couple now live and minister. Hers was a reminder that pioneering is rarely tidy, and rarely something we are not changed by.

Running beneath the practical talk of structures and strategy was a quieter thread about prayer and longing. Col Salisbury offered some of the conference's most tender lines: "What if longing itself is a prayer? What if longing is not absence, but evidence of relationship — the ache of a daughter or son for the Father, whose love already holds them?" Or, more simply: "We long because we belong."

Likewise, Dave Mann tied prayer back to the street: "If our churches are praying and they're healthy, there should be major impacts around us in our towns and in our cities."

If there was a shared theology beneath it all, it might be caught in two lines. Alan Hirsh: "God is ever greater. God is always bigger than what we would make of Him." And Col Salisbury: "We do not bring God into the neighbourhood — we follow God into it. Mission is noticing where life is already stirring, and joining in with what God is already doing."

Little Revolutions now travels south to Christchurch - where the conversation, prayers and dreams continue.

Head to the Little Revolutions website to find out more.