Venerable Dr Ray Muller - RIP
UPDATE:
A Service of Thanksgiving for Ray's life will be held at St Mary's Anglican Church, 170 Karori Road, Wellington on Thursday 24 October 2024 at 11am, followed by a private burial. To watch via live stream go to www.kcfhvenues.nz
Clergy are to robe and wear white stole please. Robing will be in the ‘Kikorangi Room’ down the steps from Te Kororia Café and beside the Karori Anglican office from 10 am.
Bishops Justin and Anashuya ask us to join in prayer for the friends and family of Venerable Dr Ray Muller, who died on Sunday 6 October.
Ray became a Christian at St Peter’s Gonville as a teenager. He was ordained by Bishop Henry Baines in 1962, an experience which, to his astonishment, felt like 10,000 volts of divine electricity flowing through his body. It was overwhelming and returning to the choir stalls took careful effort!
From 1963-1968 Ray was Curate at All Saints’ Palmerston North and the first Chaplain of Massey University. He prayed, “Lord, send revival and let it begin with me”. He witnessed a phenomenal outpouring of the Holy Spirit. Hundreds of students came to faith; it was an everyday occurrence. There were miracles, including a man’s hearing restored even though he had no ear drum – he was interviewed on National Radio. 700 people regularly came to Evensong at All Saints. Ray and others’ recollections will be published in a book called “Hearts on Fire”.
Ray also made international connections. Ray and wife Elaine worked in England in 1971 for Michael Harper in the Fountain Trust. For 40 years thereafter Ray would bring international speakers to New Zealand to stir up and equip the national church through several organisations he established: Christian Advance Ministries (out of which came Anglican Renewal Ministries), Church Growth Resources and Alpha New Zealand.
In 1974 Ray became Vicar of St Christopher’s Tawa and applied renewal principles at the parish level. The Easter service was televised live nationally. Then followed St Michael’s Newlands in 1985. His first parish was Patea in 1968.
But Ray’s passion was for the wider church. In 1988 Archbishop Brian Davis appointed Ray as Parish Consultant for evangelism and he joined the Diocesan office staff. Ray valued the opportunity to support so many colleagues throughout the Diocese. In 1988 the Lambeth Conference declared the 1990s to be a Decade of Evangelism. Ray was involved in both Provincial and Diocesan bodies set up to work on this project. Looking for a way forward, Ray went to Holy Trinity Brompton in London in 1994 to meet Rev Nicky Gumbel. As a result, he launched the Alpha Course in New Zealand. By the late 1990s New Zealand had the highest proportion of Alpha Courses per head of population in the world. By 2000 one third of churches were doing Alpha. The first national initiative in 2000 saw 700 churches invite 50,000 people to dinner and sign up 17,000 people for the course, one third of them unchurched. New Zealanders are still coming to Christ through Alpha today.
Details of Ray's funeral are as follows: St Mary’s Church, Karori, on Thursday 24 October at 11 am.
May he rest in peace and rise in glory.
