Chris Wyatt

Kingsway School science teacher Chris Wyatt sees no conflict between his religious faith and his passion for science. He describes evolution as “a tidy idea, but riddled with holes” but he is not a card-carrying creationist either. “We are using our God given intelligence to make sense of the world, despite there being many unanswered questions,” he says. The 67-year-old spoke with Terry Moore about his life and faith.

I have a three-pronged passion: my faith, science and teaching and the third is drama and music. My family was a typical middle class, small town family in Te Aroha in the Thames Valley. My father was an accountant and my mother lived for the theatre – she was an actress and director; she would pull me and my two brothers into productions whenever she could. We lived beside the Kaimai Ranges and I did a lot of walking through the bush and loved being among the native plants.

I loved science, particularly biology, at school, so I did a biology degree at Massey in the late 1960s and got fascinated with plant physiology. I  got a job as a research assistant, which fostered my interest. I had taken on board a teacher studentship where they help pay your way through university and you are committed to teach for four years. Otherwise I would have liked to go into research. Plant growth hormones, and the rate of photosynthesis – how fast products are distributed through the plant –are a particular interest. I designed and carried out an investigation that involved feeding radioactive carbon dioxide into leaves, which turns into radioactive sugar. Then in a few minutes we freeze dried the plant in liquid nitrogen, cut up the stem and measured the radioactivity. I was expecting it to take ages, but the products were converted and distributed within moments: it rockets through the plants.

I went to teachers’ college in Christchurch and once I got into teaching, I liked it so much I put research aside. My first teaching job was in 1972 and I’ve been doing it ever since. At Kingsway I teach general sciences and biology, which is a delight and almost like semi-retirement – for around 25 years before that I was a teaching principal in small Christian schools, and that’s incredibly demanding.

My faith began at Massey University. I was brought up in a strong Anglican household. My father was a lay reader in the church and I admired him greatly for his faith but it was just ‘head knowledge’ for me, until I discovered a lively bunch of young Anglicans at Massey. It was the early days of the charismatic renewal, which began a few years earlier at the university and was starting to spread. It was a very noisy kind of worship, with music, praying and expecting God to move in supernatural ways – but within the Anglican context. It was very exciting. Because my first job was in Christchurch, I had to leave it all behind but we soon made contact with a charismatic Anglican minister there. My involvement grew to include leading worship, and forming an interdenominational music group called the Unity Singers. We sang and led worship at conferences and seminars and in churches around the country and made quite an impact. One of the biggest events where we led worship was at QEII Park when the Archbishop of Canterbury came in the 1980s – there must have been 8000-9000 in the crowd. What was most exciting for me though was working with people from all denominations.

I’ve led a blessed life. My wife Monica and I raised six children of our own plus four long-term foster children. For quite some time we lived in a Christian community with several other families in Christchurch. It was about not pursuing the materialistic lifestyle, but the caring, sharing way of life. I suppose it was ‘alternative’ in terms of sharing an enormous house with other families – we were all members of the Unity Singers and our focus was the music. That community feeling of support set me up to be able to cope, so when I got cancer last year I was never in despair. The cancer really was a bolt out of the blue. I’d had sore muscles and aching bones, and it was about six months before it was picked up in a blood test that it was Multiple Myeloma, a form of bone marrow cancer. It weakens the bones, which is why I had muscular skeletal problems. The specialist said it was “a good one” to get because they know a lot about it. I know people who have died from this form of cancer, but when they get it early the treatment has a good success rate. The treatment is chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant. They used stem cells taken from my blood, cleaned up and re-introduced to the body after the cancer is killed off with ferocious chemo. As a biology teacher, I was fascinated by all of that. It was very successful and I am in complete remission and very grateful – as well as very thankful for the NZ health system.

I had to recover for around six months, three of that in isolation, because the chemo kills all your white blood cells and so you have no resistance. I spent a lot of time thinking about why do some people survive these kinds of afflictions and others don’t. It’s like looking at a tapestry from the wrong side – it looks like a mess to us, but there is a pattern on the other side. We have to trust that God has a plan and there’s a process underway. I read a book by Gene Edwards based on the life of John the Baptist. That book, and a few others, inspired me to write my first musical, The Prisoner, which was put on at Centrestage Theatre this year.

We moved to the Coast in 2008 so I could take the job at Kingsway. It’s freed me to get more involved in drama – including acting and singing in Centrestage productions. I always loved the theatre and in Christchurch I was involved with the Canterbury Opera, Showbiz Christchurch ad the Harlequin Players. When I was at university I teamed up with a friend, Ian, who played the guitar and had the same sense of humour as me. We entertained our friends and then it went to balls and bigger functions around the country where we preformed as a comedy duo. That got me into the theatre. The challenge that Ian and I set ourselves was to be different from a lot of the other entertainers at student ‘dos’, who usually resorted to dirty jokes. We wanted to make people laugh with a set that was entirely clean and people loved it because it was so different.

When I was a principal I created my own science curriculum and I developed courses that had a biblical world view.
The jury is out on evolution, for me personally. I say to the students that to be a good scientist you have to be open-minded, whereas many in the scientific community are not open to the possibility of a creator or anything supernatural. I believe without a shadow of a doubt that there is a creator and the details are still unknown. Evolution may not be proved right in the end – a good scientist is always looking for better explanations. For me, science and faith are not contradictory. The reason that schools with Christian values are still  in demand is that people are looking for values and a point to life. To reject the supernatural is to accept pointlessness and that worries me. If you extrapolate from evolutionary thinking, and accept evolution holus bolus, it’s very difficult to get values and foundations for life.

I’ve always been an early riser and I start the day with breakfast and reading the Bible. I go for walks and reflect and pray as I walk. I live near Wenderholm Regional Park, so there are lots of nice places to walk. One day I’ll retire and head back to Christchurch, because that’s where my heart lies. We have family there and it’s my spiritual home. I hope to develop my involvement in drama further using the model of the Crossbridge Theatre, which I set up as a community theatre to put on decent drama with a message of hope and to challenge people to think.