Editorial: Mike Bain
As part of any anthology of New Zealand music, the name Don McGlashan will inevitably appear among this country’s finest songwriters.
His career stretches across Blam Blam Blam, The Front Lawn, The Mutton Birds, and decades of solo work. To be honest, I was never much of a fan. In fact, when Anchor Me appeared on the playlist of a radio station I worked for years ago, I played it because it was my job.
Back then, the song never really grabbed me.
These days, it does.
Perhaps that’s because the older you get, the more you realise how important anchors actually are.
For most people, an anchor is just a lump of metal hanging off the front of a boat. Something fishermen use. Something yacht owners worry about. Something the rest of us never think about.
Yet anchors are everywhere.
Every person has one. Every family. Every church. Every community. Every nation.
An anchor is the thing that keeps you from drifting when the tide changes. It allows movement, but only within limits. It doesn’t stop the storm. It simply prevents the storm from carrying you away.
The question isn’t whether you have an anchor.
The question is what you’re anchored to.
A boat cut loose from its anchor might feel free for a while. It can go wherever the current takes it. There are no restrictions. No ropes. No chains. No limits.
Until it hits the rocks.
That image describes much of modern New Zealand.
For generations, this country was anchored to a broadly Christian worldview. It wasn’t perfect. No nation ever is. But the anchor was there. God. Church. Family. Personal responsibility. Right and wrong were not simply matters of personal opinion. They were truths to be recognised, not invented.
People knew where the anchor lay.
Today, that anchor has largely been hauled aboard.
We are told this is progress.
The MV Rena struck Astrolabe Reef and left a trail of damage felt across an entire region. That’s the danger of drift. Ships don’t run aground overnight, and neither do people, churches or nations. We remove the anchor and then wonder why we’re drifting. The damage is rarely confined to the ship. The wise will remain anchored to Gods word.
When your life runs aground, the casualties are rarely limited to you.
That’s the lesson many people never learn until it is too late.
When your life runs aground, the casualties are rarely limited to you.
The father who abandons his faith doesn’t drift alone.
The church that abandons Scripture doesn’t drift alone.
The nation that abandons its moral foundations doesn’t drift alone.
Others always pay a price. Broken homes. Broken relationships. Broken communities.
We are told freedom comes from shedding old beliefs, abandoning biblical truth, rejecting tradition and redefining everything from marriage to morality to human identity.
The promise was that cutting ourselves loose from Christianity would make us happier, wiser and more enlightened.
Instead, we appear more anxious, more confused and more divided than ever.
We have never been more connected, yet loneliness has become an epidemic.
We have never enjoyed greater comfort, yet anxiety stalks every generation.
We have never talked more about identity, yet so many people seem uncertain about who they are.
We have spent decades looking for ourselves and somehow managed to lose ourselves in the process.
The currents are stronger than people realise.
A society without an anchor does not sail confidently into the future.
It drifts. The trouble with drift is that it happens slowly.
Nobody wakes up one morning and discovers they’ve drifted miles out to sea.
It happens metre by metre. Current by current. Compromise by compromise.
The same is true of individuals, churches and nations. Even the church has not escaped.
Many churches still claim to be anchored to Scripture while frantically checking which way the cultural wind is blowing before deciding what they believe.
Too many Christians are being discipled by social media before they are being discipled by Scripture.
Too many churches have become more concerned about offending people than offending God.
Conviction has been traded for comfort. Truth has been traded for popularity. Faithfulness has been traded for relevance.
Yet a church that sounds exactly like the culture eventually discovers it has nothing distinctive left to say.
An anchor is only useful if it actually reaches the bottom.
For many churches, the rope no longer reaches.
The tragedy is that most people don’t realise how far they have drifted until the storm arrives.
And eventually, it arrives for everyone. The diagnosis has your name on it. The funeral is someone you love. The financial pressure arrives at your door. The child you’ve prayed for walks away. The marriage you thought was secure suddenly isn’t. When that moment comes, all the slogans in the world won’t save you.
Not politics. Not money. Not public opinion. Not social media. Not whatever madness happens to be fashionable this week.
A boat without an anchor does not become free. It becomes lost.
Perhaps that is the lesson modern New Zealand has yet to learn.
We have spent decades cutting ourselves loose from the very foundations that helped build this nation, and now seem surprised that so many people feel adrift.
We removed the anchor and express shock that we’re drifting.
We abandoned the compass and wonder why we’re lost.
We threw away the map and blame somebody else when we hit the rocks.
The problem is not that God moved. The Rock has not moved. The Word has not changed. Christ has not surrendered His throne.
The question is not whether God has drifted from us. The question is whether we have drifted from Him.
King David understood this when he wrote, “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for You are with me.”
Notice what he didn’t say. He didn’t stop in the valley. He didn’t build a house there. He didn’t surrender there. He walked through it because he knew who was walking beside him. That is what an anchor does. It doesn’t remove the storm. It holds.
And perhaps the prayer New Zealand needs today sounds remarkably like the title of an old Don McGlashan song.
Not anchor me to comfort. Not anchor me to popularity. Not anchor me to political promises. Not anchor me to whatever madness happens to be fashionable this week.
Anchor me to truth. Anchor me to something eternal. Anchor me to the Rock that cannot be moved. Anchor me to Christ.
Anchor me.