Field Notes: Murray Edridge

Murray is a trained accountant and has spent many years working in the corporate sector, in education, and for social services, particularly focused on children and families. Murray is married to Alyson and they live in Paraparaumu on the Kapiti Coast. They have three adult children, and one grandson. Here, Murray talks to Olivia Witney about his career, faith, and God’s provision throughout.

Tell us about your life to date: where did you grow up, what was your family home like, and how did you come to faith?

I describe myself as having a privileged childhood. It wasn’t privileged in the sense that people normally associate that term with: having a lot of material things or wealth. We were a working-class family in a little town called Wainuiomata. It’s kind of an odd place—a low socioeconomic community and known for producing some excellent rugby and rugby league players. Of which I wasn’t one. But it was a fantastic community to grow up in.

I grew up in a Christian family—lovely, supportive family. I guess the things that I knew from my childhood were that I was loved and wanted, and, at least in the context of my family, that I was special. In the work I’ve done in the years since, particularly with children and families who are doing life hard, I’ve seen that not every child has that experience. I was taught about the value of hard work; my dad was a tradesperson, and we were brought up with the philosophy you never pay anybody to do things you can do yourself. I became quite practically useful, I guess. But always brought up to say hard work is important, respecting other people is important, and that everybody has value. A philosophy that got instilled in me early on was about not having an overinflated view of your own importance but a real acknowledgement of the importance and value of others. Coming out of that were the ideas: how do you provide care to people in the most effective way, and how do we care for people in whatever endeavour we’re involved with?

Mum and Dad were foundation members of the local Baptist Church. I came to faith at a youth group Easter camp as a teenager, aged 16. And I had an amazing group of young people around me throughout all those early years. It was a very effective, committed youth group and some amazing youth leaders, part of a vibrant church. I always wondered, in my later years, whether that was an easy passage into faith compared to some of the people I connected with who had these horrible backgrounds and then had these transformational conversions. But, actually, I had the privilege of having context for everything I did. I acknowledge the value of that now. Both of my parents have passed away and both left significant legacies in terms of the way we engage with others. Even now, I often think about how Mum and Dad would respond to circumstance. I look back on my childhood very favourably and credit that for a lot of who I wanted to be.

Did you follow your father into a trade?

No, I wanted to be an economist. I went to university to study it and got part way through then decided it was a load of nonsense. I was doing philosophy at the same time, and there was a vagueness of life that I felt permeated both disciplines. I discovered accounting, having never done accounting in my life. I took it up halfway through university and subsequently became a chartered accountant, which is an interesting career choice. It’s one where the structure of the discipline is what gives it its beauty. I am an inherently structured person, but it’s loose on the outside; becoming a chartered accountant was a hugely beneficial professional discipline for me to have. I’ve subsequently been a CEO on several occasions, and the good thing about knowing how to do the money and what the numbers are telling you is that you don’t need to spend so much time on them. Actually, the real transformation comes from people.

You got your accountancy degree, left university, and then, from what I’ve gathered, you went to work in the corporate world?

Yes, I did a variety of commercial-type roles in energy distribution initially. And then into media with Radio New Zealand and a bit of education work. But each of those were corporate roles using financial or other capabilities. And then I had this kind of midlife challenge, if you like, about what the real value was that I was contributing. I went on a school camp with my daughter down in the Marlborough Sounds. We were out in the bush one day, and one of the little girls said to me, “Are you Vanessa’s Dad?” And I said, “Yes, I am.” And the little girl said, “Do you live with her?” And I said, “Yeah, I do. Why do you ask me that?” And she said, “I don’t see my Dad.” We had something like 55 kids with us on this camp, and we did a straw poll: the vast majority didn’t have dads active in their lives. I got enormously challenged by that. Where are all the dads? We had this generation of young people growing up without decent male role models. I don’t know if I was naïve about that or just hadn’t paid attention. I decided I needed to do something about that.

About the same time, I was travelling to Melbourne on a business trip. One of the people I worked with turned up the day before with a book for me to read. It was called Half Time by a guy called Bob Buford. The byline on the book is: “Changing your game plan from success to significance.” Bob Buford is a Christian businessman in the United States. The philosophy of the book is this: you take time out mid-career to work out what God really wants you to do. The second half of your career needs to be about being significant in your context, whatever that looks like. I was quite convicted by that. I remember reading it on the way back from Melbourne. I thought, “This is a life-changing moment for me.”

At that stage, I was working at the Open Polytech as the General Manager of Corporate Services. There was a job advertised for Barnardos, a children’s charity. That was back in 2000 when you had job ads in newspapers. I remember cutting the ad out and putting it beside my bed and thinking, “I’ll just pray on that and reflect on that.” About a week later, someone turned up in my office with the same ad and gave it to me, saying, “This sounds like you.” I thought I’d better apply for it then. I rang the company up that was doing the recruitment, and they said, “Oh, we’ve been waiting for you to ring. We thought you’d be a suitable candidate for this role.”

I left my job and joined Barnardos New Zealand as a change manager. I then became the CEO about 18 months after I’d started and was CEO for the next eight-and-a-half years. During that season, I spent a lot of that time working with central government and complaining, in the right context, how difficult it was to work with them. So, then they decided to offer me a job. I went and became a senior public servant. I became the Deputy Chief Executive of the Ministry of Social Development, which, at that stage, was the largest government department. I sat with a group of colleagues who were all career public servants who had been in their careers for 30 plus years, and I’ve never been in government before. It was a fascinating journey, one that was never going to last long for me.

Why do you say it was never going to last long?

Well, government is this massive machine. And, because it’s a machine, it must have some rules about how it works. But those rules are sometimes quite abusive for people who work within the system. I’ll give you some examples. The first time I travelled with my staff, I’d been booked into a better hotel than my staff because I was “more important.” But, for me, it’s like: we can’t be doing this! Or another example: I’d have meetings with people throughout the day. If you were meeting with someone who was less important than you were, then they came to you. Because of my role, I was deemed to be more important than almost everybody. And I said, “Well, I’m not doing this; I’m going to go and meet with people at their desks.” But I was told I can’t do that. When I pushed back, they said I’d break the system. It sounded to me like it needs to be broken. I constantly came up against the bureaucracy and constantly got into strife with ministers and my boss—until, eventually, I got fired.

And then, through a variety of steps, I ended up at the Wellington City Mission. I knew the board chair, and he’d invited me when I left government to join the Board of the City Mission. I did some due diligence and decided yes, it’s something I’d like to do. I never got to a board meeting because I was in Auckland most of the time. They then were looking for a new City Missioner and asked if I’d put my hand up for it. Initially, I said no, that doesn’t sound like me at all.

Why did you have that response?

I’d been in the most fascinating experience—I’d left government, as I said, very suddenly. I didn’t know what I was going to do. It was a very stressful time and process for my wife, my family, and my close friends. But I didn’t feel that stress; I felt a complete calmness. I don’t know why because there was every reason not to be calm. I just had a real sense that God was holding me in this place.

When I finally agreed to put my hand up for the City Missioner role, God had spoken to me very clearly in between the time I said “no” until the time I was invited to go for an interview. When they asked why I’d applied for the job, my answer was, “Well, for the first time in my life, I have a complete confidence that God’s got a plan for me. And it may or may not be this job, but what I do know is that if it’s not this job, then God’s got something else in store.” It was a sense of certainty that I’d never experienced before.

I did say to the board at the time, “Can you cope with me? Because if I do this, I’m going to push you quite hard. And I get a sense that God is going to push all of us quite hard.” They said they were up for it, but I’m not sure they knew entirely what they were signing up for. That was four-and-a-half years ago. I started in May 2018, and it’s been the most privileged position. Every day, we see miracles happening.

It sounds like your whole worldview—your approach to career decisions and the work itself—is always framed around how to best help people.

When I first started work back in 1982, at the end of my degree, the big idea was to have a career plan. What were you going to be doing in five years, 10 years, 20 years? And, therefore, how do you set yourself up to do that? I was never very good at that. I said, “I don’t know—it’ll be what it is.” I’ve always been quite casual about lots of those things. When I had my commissioning service as the City Missioner back in 2018, I had a pastor friend who was in the congregation. He got up and spoke about the story of Esther—of being prepared for times such as this. I look back now on a career that feels haphazard and random and all over the place. And yet, it’s all inherently logical. I couldn’t have had a better preparation for what I do now than what I’ve done over the last 40 years. It’s cool to be able to reflect on that and say, “Yeah, actually, I can see a plan in this. I can see God’s will.” It must be God’s will because it wasn’t mine. I didn’t know what I was doing. There’s a logical, contributory pathway that’s happened right through my professional career. And it’s kind of cool.

Which has now led you to your work with the City Mission. Tell me about your work there: what has the last five years looked like for you?

It doesn’t feel like a job at all; it just feels like something I have the privilege to get up and do every day. When I was the CEO of Barnardos back in the 2000s, I thought that was my dream job. And then I did a stint in government, and I ran this this major child agency of 3,500 people, and that felt like a dream job too. But now I’ve got my third dream job. And it’s even better than the others. Every single day, I get the privilege of sitting alongside people who are doing life hard. That feels like an enormous privilege; I get way more out of my interactions with them than I’m sure they get from me.

I look at all the resources and knowledge and relationships I have, whether that’s in the commercial world, in government, or other places, and I ask, “How do I use those relationships and those capabilities to benefit people who are struggling?” Most of those people are struggling not of their own choices and decisions but because of how life has happened for them. There’s just a real sense of calling into this work.

And the most remarkable things happen. I’m constantly sitting in my office thinking, “How did that just happen?” I’ve wandered my way through the theology of miracles, asking, “Should we expect miracles? Should we be just grateful when they come? Is it wrong to expect them?” I don’t really know any of the answers; I just know that we’ve seen a huge blessing in what we’ve done.

I’ll give you an example. I decided very early on that the Mission couldn’t stay in the building we were in. It wasn’t adequate for what we did at the time let alone what we might want to do as an organisation going forward. I managed to convince the board that we should look to find another place. But the question was: where was that going to be? And what was it going to look like? I prayed over the city for five days, and I drove around, thinking God’s going to show me the right building. Now, I’m not sure that’s entirely the most efficient way to do it. But he did!

I looked at a few buildings with real estate agents, and they didn’t feel right. I then drove around the corner and came across a building that was pretty much deserted. I really got a sense that God wanted us to buy that building. So, we proceeded to do so. The building wasn’t for sale, but that was a minor obstacle. I found out who the owner was, and he agreed to show me around, protesting the whole time that the building wasn’t for sale. And it was awesome. It was very rundown, but I just got a real sense of possibility in it. He came to the end of the tour and said, “The building’s still not for sale.” And I said, “Well, will you let me know when it is?” He said, “Yes, if that ever happens.”

He rang me two weeks later and said the building’s for sale, and I said, “Well, of course it is.” I asked if he’d sell it to me without going to market. He said no unless we paid the asking price. That wasn’t going to happen. We spent the next four weeks doing due diligence on this building—seismic checks and building checks, geotech stuff. During that time, I had a property developer ring me up who said, “I’ve been looking at this building to purchase, but someone told me you might be wanting to buy it. Is that correct?” And I replied, “That’s my hope.” He said, “Okay, well, I won’t get involved then. Can I help you in any way?”

We got into this helpful conversation where he gave us some support and guidance as to where we needed to position ourselves in this process. He rang me up about two days before the bids were due and asked how much we’d spent on due diligence. I said, $20,000. He said, “Give me a bank account, and I’ll pay for that.” We bought the building in the end—it was a bit of an effort, but we got there. And seven days later, someone whom I’d met once rang me up and said, “Hey, we heard you bought this building.” I said, “That’s correct.” They said, “We’re so excited by what’s possible. We’d like to give you a million dollars.” I went to see them a week later, and I had to apologise. I must have sounded very unappreciative when they rang—I haven’t had a phone call like that before! I wrote to my board that afternoon and said, “This is what happens when we step out in faith. You see God’s hand in this thing.”

We bought this building with the intention of replacing the roof and giving it a coat of paint then moving in. But the vision changes and grows. And now, nearly four years on, the building’s gone—we ended up demolishing it—and we’re building a $40 million new one. I’ve raised just over $35 million of it. I don’t even know how this happened, but it’s going to be amazing. It’s going to be a real blessing for the community, and it’s going to change the way we think about ourselves and Wellington—well, that’s my hope for it anyway. It’s built on the premise of creating a community where there’s no “us” and “them.”

We’ve got several facilities in the building, including 35 residential apartments, the offices of the City Mission, and shared common spaces for the residents and the staff so we can demonstrate intentionality of community with them. We’re going to have a public cafe. We’re going to have a commercial laundry, a medical centre, a conference venue; we’re going to have a chapel that’s open 24/7—and it’d be the only church in the city that’s open 24/7. We’ve modelled that part of the building on a place called the Chapel of the Light in Japan where the only natural light into the chapel space comes through a glass cross in the front of the building. The shape of a cross will move depending on where the sun is in relation to the building over the course of the day. So, it’s going to be a very beautiful space.

Because the building will be open all the time, it’s become transformational in terms of defining who we will be in the future. Right now, we’re an effective organisation during business hours, and we’re not available outside of that time—for most of our services. And that’s no longer acceptable. We’re a faith-led, faith-centred organisation. Our logo has a cross on it—a stylised cross—and it’s going to be prominent in our building. It’s part and parcel of everything we do. It doesn’t require anything of people who come to the Mission. So, we’re not there to evangelise, or proselytise, or anything else. But we are demonstrating the compassion of Christ in everything we do. That’s the reason and the basis for what we do. But it’s available for anybody, of any faith, or any belief. But we’re a prayerful, considered organisation, and it’s awesome.

When you talk about the residents, who will they be and where will they come from?

We don’t know yet. They’ll be people who need some additional support to live independent lives. So, it’s long-term transitional housing. We’ve got a couple of other big buildings that we’re doing. We’ve got an 83-apartment building down in the middle of Wellington that we run transitional housing services in. We’re not a housing provider—we’re a social services provider, but we offer accommodation to deliver social services. That distinction is important since we want people to engage because we want to help them change their life journey. You can’t just come and stay with us and not be interested in changing the things that got you there in the first place. We’ve got another building we’re doing a major refurbishment on—the Wellington Men’s Night Shelter—which got gifted to me some time ago. We’re looking at a highly specialised residential facility, which will open next year, probably focused on alcohol as causation for some of the people who have nowhere else to go. This is being the hands and feet of the church, you know. This is doing church in the community. We’re overt about that. But, funnily enough, that doesn’t create any issues for us as an organisation. The people I’m raising all this money from, generally, are secular businesspeople who know who we are and know what we stand for but believe in the difference we’re trying to make in the community.

Can you tell us what the lockdowns in 2020 looked like for you?

Along with other agencies, we managed to house every street-living person in the region. Part of that was because of the uniqueness of circumstances. And the fact that a hardcore group of rough sleepers, many of whom lived on the town belt or in the streets for 10 plus years, got afraid of this virus they couldn’t see. All of the city infrastructure closed: the public toilets and the public showers all closed, there was no place to get food, there was no one around so they couldn’t beg on the streets. There was no support at all for people. Because the government was prepared to be quite creative and innovative in a time of extreme crisis, we managed to acquire some housing stock and some accommodation, and so we offered people the opportunity to move into self-contained units with their own bathroom, their own kitchen, 36 channels of Sky TV, and beautiful facilities. We operated, essentially, a housing support service. That achieved something that no one had ever done before, which was eliminate the street community. It was such a powerful example of what’s possible if everyone put it all together.

If I look at what’s happened over the four-and-a-half years I’ve been in the Mission, the most important thing hasn’t been about buildings and other developments or new ways of thinking about what we do. It’s that we’ve raised the standard as to how we will treat everyone who comes in our door. The standard we’ve set is that irrespective of how people present themselves to us—irrespective of what they say and how they behave, what they have or don’t have—we will treat them with dignity and respect and without judgement. There are no exceptions to that.

By making that our threshold and our standard, everything we do is designed with that in mind. Eighteen months ago, we opened New Zealand’s first social supermarket. We were a major food bank, yet it bothered me that when people came to us at a point of desperation, of high stress, of embarrassment, and feeling ashamed of their circumstances, we would give them a bunch of food that they may not like or may not be able to eat for some reason, or they didn’t know what to do with. That wasn’t a dignity-enhancing experience for them. So, the question was: how do we do it better? Well, we offer people the same dignity the rest of us have where we go and choose our own. The best thing was to open a supermarket. So, we did!

I rang up Chris Quinn, who’s the CEO of Foodstuffs North Island, and said, “Would you come and build me a supermarket?” And he said, “Yes!” I went to my board, who are used to me asking for obscure things. I said, “I want to build a supermarket.” And they said, “What do you need?” I said, “Nothing, because I’ve got someone to come and build it for me. But what I want is permission to fail.”

That got their attention. They asked if I thought it would fail, and I said, “No, not at all. But it doesn’t matter what you think, and it doesn’t matter what I think. What matters is the experience of the people that come in the door, and we don’t really know what we’re doing. So, here’s an opportunity for us to test that.” We wanted to find out how we can do this in a way that honours the people we’re here to serve.

Is it working?

It’s fantastic. And people can’t believe it when they come into it. It looks like a Four Square—it’s about that size. We have 3,000 product lines, so it looks like a normal supermarket. Everything’s beautifully faced. We’ve got budget products; we’ve got premium products.

The biggest emotional response we get from our shoppers is when they’re offered a trolley. That wouldn’t have even occurred to us. But if you’ve never had enough money to bother taking the trolley, and you’re offered one and given the freedom to choose whatever you want in the supermarket, it’s just amazing. There’s no cost involved. We help people to shop if they wish us to help them; otherwise, they can do it themselves. We have fresh produce, the best sausages in New Zealand—Beard Brothers sausages out of the Hawke’s Bay—we have premium mince and chicken, we have Blue Frog cereal. It’s a fantastic space. And the team has been wonderful in terms of developing responses to opportunities they see.

It’s interesting because when people come to us for food, it’s not usually a food problem. There’s a whole lot of other stuff going on in their lives. This is our chance to build a relationship with them so that we can connect them into some of the things we might be able to help them with—whether that’s a social worker who can give them a hand with some stuff, or a parenting expert, or financial mentor. The supermarket helps build that relationship. We don’t want to create a dependency model, so the first two times that people come and shop, there are no questions asked. You’ve come to us with a need, and we say, “Yep, that’s great. You’re welcome. Come on in and you can do whatever shop you want.” If they need to be here on a more regular basis, we have a talk about what’s happening for them, what’s going on in their lives and the lives of their families. It doesn’t mean they can’t shop; it just means there’s a chance for us to help them start to make good decisions about what their future looks like.

It’s such extraordinary work, Murray. It must be quite emotional for people listening to your stories

Well, people burst into tears quite regularly in the supermarket. It’s just the coolest of places. I’ve got to avoid the temptation of going over there to watch people shop because it’s beautiful. It’s all around this premise of dignity and respect. These people are our honoured guests—they’re not the poor, they’re not the people who are needy, they’re not people who’ve failed in some way. In fact, we’ve stopped doing supermarket visits while people are shopping because too many people want to come and look at it. They can only do that outside of shopping hours now.

How do we work alongside people better? I quote a lot from Gregory Boyle. He’s a Jesuit priest operating in Los Angeles who set up an organisation called Homeboy Industries, which is the largest gang intervention programme in the world. He’s written a couple of books, and the first is called Tattoos on the Heart and the second is called Barking to the Choir. They’re anecdotes about his work. He talks a lot about compassion. At one point, he says, “Compassion is not a transaction between the healer and the wounded. Compassion is a covenant between equals.” When we start to frame our compassion as engaging with people—not as someone we come in here to fix but as someone we’re engaging with as an equal—this changes the nature of the relationship. My job is not to heal people and fix people. God does that. My job is to walk alongside them and to help them where they’re at in the moment in the hope that with support and guidance, they can make the right decisions for them—they can make the changes they need so that, ultimately, lives can be better.

That makes a lot of sense, and it’s such a beautiful model for how we might all work with people.

Yeah, absolutely. I’ll tell you a story that leads into this. I spoke at a church three years ago in the Hutt Valley, and there was one individual who looked different than everybody else in the church in the back row. He came and saw me afterwards. He described himself as an ex-streetie so used to live on the street. And I said to him, “Tell me this: when you were begging on the street, what did you most want?” And he said, “What I really wanted was for people to make eye contact with me because that reinforces me as a real person.” I thought, wow, that’s powerful. How many of us avoid eye contact because that brings you into some sort of relationship with this person and, surely, that’s dangerous and wrong? So, I started making eye contact with everybody who’s sitting on the street. And because I’m the City Missioner, I get to sit down and chat with them as well. It’s just awesome. We have this relationship with the street community that’s completely non-judgmental. I’m constantly encouraging and supporting my staff to think about how they do what they do. Lots of them have professional stuff behind them: they’re social workers or nurses. And that’s all important, but, at our most fundamental, we’re just fellow human beings, and we’re doing the best we can in context.

It’s inspiring and exciting to see what you’re able to do with the people you serve. What does Christmas look like for the Mission?

It’s funny, you know, because Christmas is the most fascinating time of the year when you work in my space. It’s this wonderful time of joy and celebration. But for a lot of our community, Christmas is such a stressful time. The demarcation between people gets accentuated. For those who are struggling, Christmas is a horrible time. They look at the rest of the world and they look at all the ads on TV, and it’s not them. It’s not their space. And if their family is disconnected because of addiction, or economic circumstances, or whatever it happens to be, we’ve got to work hard to make Christmas the joyous, wonderful thing it needs to be for them.

Firstly, we don’t do anything now on Christmas Day. We used to have a Christmas community lunch, but that became too hard. It didn’t feel like the right model. Now we try and connect groups of people together, and we provide all their food so they can host other people. So, we still do community support on Christmas Day, but it’s not a big community lunch where everyone comes and gets filled up and goes. Everything that leads up to Christmas—the huge distribution of food and of toys—again, we do it in a different way. We run a toy store now. This is our third year of running it. We only do brand new toys; we don’t give out secondhand anything anymore, which is quite a fundamental change. Like the supermarket—I don’t do end-of-shelf-life products, I don’t do second-rate anything. We give people the best we can. The toy store was set up in late November, and it’s open from early December. For about three weeks, parents can come in and shop. They can choose for their children. We help them because some don’t have a lot of a lot of ideas. They get to choose these beautiful sporting goods, books, toys—it’s the most amazing place. On Christmas Day, we don’t want them to be given presents from the City Mission—that doesn’t feel okay. I don’t care that we don’t get acknowledged in that process. It doesn’t matter. All we’re doing is facilitating an outcome here; we’re enabling parents to be able to do what other parents do.

When you develop, design, and deliver services like that, you see the outcomes. A good example is this massive apartment building that we operate in Wellington. It’s on Tory Street and known as “the zebra building” because it’s painted like a zebra. It used to be a backpacker’s. Just prior to COVID-19, the owner decided to refurbish it as a boutique hotel. That was cool except the bottom dropped out of the hotel market during the COVID-19 lock downs. So, we managed to take a commercial lease on that building for six years. There’s two amazing parts to that story. The first is, when the purpose of the building changed, the quality of the fit-out did not. I have 83 apartments, and they are beautiful. They have a very high stud—3.8 metres; they’ve got recessed lighting; they’re beautifully painted; they’ve got ornate scotia work and architraves. They’ve got high-end kitchen appliances; they’ve got enormous bathrooms, all tiled and beautifully done. So, we are offering people who are homeless the most beautiful spaces. The cool second part of that story, though, is that we’ve been operating that building since 1 July, and we’ve had no damage. When you think of the cohort of people that we’re housing in that space, it just doesn’t make any sense. What it tells us, and what it reminds us, is that if you treat people with dignity, people treat you the same in return. There’s a reciprocity in that engagement that’s powerful. It’s a reminder that we should do for people the very best that we can.

You’ve told me some remarkable stories of the ways God has provided for you and for the Mission and for the people you serve. What has been the biggest surprise or delight for you in recent times?

That’s quite hard because I live in this bizarre state of constant expectation. Every morning, I get up, and I think, “I wonder what God’s going to do for us today?” And things happen all the time! I’ve got this relationship with my God now that’s become simple and clear. We talk all the time, like chatting to your best mate. I just feel that we’ve been honoured in such an extraordinary way in what we’ve done over the last few years. I don’t recall ever having felt this way about work, about life. Maybe it’s part of age, and state of family, and grandchildren, I don’t know. But there’s a joy in it that’s just remarkable.