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Chartered accountant Gendi Dwight first went to church in 2005 – and only because her four-year-old daughter was keen. Initially sceptical, Gendi began to believe there could be something to church after all. On November 26 the 43-year-old from Red Beach was ordained as a priest at Holy Trinity Cathedral with much pomp and ceremony. She tells Terry Moore about her newly found beliefs and how they are not a million miles away from the practice of accountancy.
I am a typical New Zealander in the sense that I was baptised at six months old but never went to church or had anything to do with church as I was growing up in Taranaki. I would have been 32, in 2005, when my four-year-old daughter all of a sudden wanted to go to church. She came home from daycare and said, “Ashley taught me to pray today and I want to go to church”. I thought, I’m Anglican, so we went there. I’m embarrassed to say we got to the church early and sat outside while I tried to talk them into going somewhere else. I just didn’t feel comfortable going in. I tried to talk them into going to McDonalds, the movies or the beach, but they insisted on church. I guess I thought it would be full of judgmental religious people, but it turned out they were lovely, so we kept going. After a few months, the vicar said, “how are you finding it” and I said, “it’s nice, but I’ll probably never believe what you believe, is that ok?” However, church was starting to answer some questions for me. At the time I was running a business coaching franchise and both children were in daycare but I had decided to step away from the business and come home and look after the kids. The stress of working all day, then being up with a toddler all night had made me unwell. I was starting to ask myself questions like “is this really all there is, how did we get here?” I’d never asked myself those ‘meaning of life’ questions before. I bought books on new age stuff, Buddhism, and so on but didn’t think I’d found the answers. It hadn’t entered my mind to go to a Christian church. One day when the kids weren’t with me at church, I thought I’d go forward for communion. I stood up and suddenly said to myself, if this is real, I’ll give it a crack. My husband often says that no one knows if any of that stuff that I now believe is really true. And he’s right, of course, but somehow in that moment before communion I knew there was something to it and that it was worth looking into further.After that I joined a home group with other mums and bought a Bible. Next year I enrolled in Bible college because, for me, there was a lot that had to stack up and studying is how I like to approach things. The Vicar at the time suggested it would be good to take a paper each semester because there is so much to learn. The Bible is a really hard to understand book, so I wanted to interpret it based on some of the history and context. It took me a long time to get to grips with the language and I still find that does not come naturally to me. When I first studied the Old Testament, I didn’t know any of those stories – apart from Noah’s Ark, which rang a bell. Quite early on I realised I was heading towards the priesthood. At one stage I realised that finding some kind of faith had really changed my life and that I wanted to help others do that too. For me, that meant becoming a priest to administer the sacraments. The process is long and involved and I started in 2011, with applying to be considered for the priesthood. At the end of 2010 I’d had a melanoma removed and that gave me a push towards fulfilling my goal.
Initially there is psychological profiling to find out whether or not you are suitable to become a priest, which is done by ministry advisors and the Bishops of Auckland. It’s an intense process and because I was doing it so soon after I became a Christian, it was a bit quick for their comfort levels. I spent a year doing a research project about worship and the role of the church so they would realise I was fully committed, and then applied again in 2012. I studied theology at university part time for two years and have nearly finished my degree. My family are really supportive but early on there was a bit of suspicion and my mum said I should be wary because of the extremes of religion. I was ordained on Saturday, November 26 and I’m now licensed to be a priest at the Anglican churches in Albany and Greenhithe. My family were at my ordination and my grandmother talks to everyone in her rest home about it. They are proud. There were a lot of challenges and I think that’s only just begun. The more you learn about anything, the more you find there is to know. The older I get the more I realise life is shades of grey, not black and white. I don’t think I’ve ever doubted that there is something beyond our experience of here and now – and some people like to call that ‘God’. I find Jesus easier to understand because he was human, like us.
I’m still working fulltime as a chartered accountant business advisor with RightWay Ltd, which I own a licence for. I am working hard so that my business will become more established before I complete my theology degree, which I need to do if I’m to be paid as a priest. Whether I’ll ever be paid in the church is neither here nor there, because I can do so much already. I became a Deacon a year ago so I have already baptised a baby, taken church services and can now do funerals and weddings. Church readings are fairly prescribed, but when I write my sermons I try to unpack those verses of the Bible to make it relevant. Otherwise it’s just a story about something that happened thousands of years ago and you hear it and go home unchanged. You often hear people say that church is boring and irrelevant, but the Jesus I encountered relatively recently is neither of those things. Stories like the Good Samaritan or the Prodigal Son tell of great human truths. The messages of foregiveness, love and reconciliation are still relevant and people need something to believe in. Even when people make business decisions they are based upon something they believe in, whether they are doing pricing or tax, or paying their staff. And when we debate euthanasia over the next few years all of it comes from something people believe. Sometimes I think the church is modernising. It has flaws as a human institution that’s trying its best. The larger organisations get, like a business, the more structure they have to have and that can cause problems. But I think the church is realising that it needs to change.
This year, my Christmas Day will be a little different because I’ll be the one up the front, preaching. I’ll help lead a service on Christmas Eve. In the morning we’ll get up and open Santa sacks. I’ll go to church in Greenhithe at 9am and Albany at 10.30am. Then we have a family Christmas and take the kids to the beach. My ordination really clarified that when I am leading, it’s not really me personally. You put on the robes, the Alb and the Stole, and you become a representation of God/church/Jesus and that’s a huge privilege. It’s also a privilege to be part of people’s lives – to do things like offering comfort. Ordination to the priesthood is the start of a whole new thing, as I’ll be juggling between being an accountant and business advisor, and a priest – but the two things are not a million miles apart. After all, if we can build better businesses, we can build better communities.
