Retired farmer awarded New Zealand Order of Merit for helping struggling youth

[Anglican Taonga] There’s a lot of talk about connecting with communities in mission, and Ross McQueen, a retired farmer in the Canterbury region of New Zealand,  is exactly the kind of person our church could overlook if “connecting with communities” got left out of our plans.

Back in 1976 when Ross McQueen was a young farmer in Mount Grey Downs (north of Rangiora), he turned up to an evening led by Christchurch City Missioner, the Rev. Maurice Goodall, who would later become a much-loved Bishop of Christchurch.

Goodall was looking for a place where young men stuck on drugs and alcohol in the city, or courting problems with the law, could get a different view of life and learn skills to set them on a new trajectory.

His eye had alighted on a closed-down country school next to McQueen’s farm, spying its potential as a learning center where young men could do on-the-job training and gather life skills. As Goodall shared his vision for giving young men a second chance, McQueen and his wife Carol stepped up to offer a helping hand.

Although baptized in an Anglican Church, McQueen wasn’t a churchgoer, but he did know a bit about how life can deal a tough hand to young men. A few years earlier, when he was only 17 years old, his father died, leaving him and his brother in line to run the family farm.

That experience meant he knew that young men in crisis needed genuine help, not someone to tell them what was wrong with them.

“One thing I’ve always liked about the Mission is its only criteria is need…they don’t ask too many questions, they don’t judge – and it’s helped an awful lot of people.”

Jump forward to 2025 and McQueen’s commitment to the City Mission continues, from his 1970s efforts to get young men on track for a better future, to serving the Mission’s various operations teams, to bringing his business acumen into the Mission’s Finance, Risk Management and Property Committee for over 30 years.

McQueen is proud of the Mission’s recent successes getting people into supported housing, setting up social supermarkets and designing interventions that help people move out of charity and into developing the skills they’ll need to live a good life on their own terms.

He thinks that Christians should care most about people who miss out on a good life, and our governments also should focus on preventing problems rather than fixing their sights on the negative results.

“I volunteer at a high school here in Rangiora (with the Smallbore Rifle Club, also recognized in the honor) and the majority of kids are doing well. But there’s a group of children that school just doesn’t serve. But get them one on one, out there working on farms, or in forestry, in anything that’s a good job really, and it’s a different story. The vast majority are good kids.”

A year or two back, one of those 1970s kids bowled up to McQueen and told him that his time in Mount Grey Downs had changed his life for the better.

“‘I wouldn’t be here today if it hadn’t been for the Mission,’ he said.” Now he has a family and runs his own business as a gibstopper, a craftsperson who applies a special compound to plasterboard to create a smooth surface..

“When someone says thank you, or says, “What the Mission did for me has made a difference,” it makes it all worthwhile.

McQueen says it’s sad the Mission still has work to do, but that has shifted, too, over the years.

“The people are changing, they’re not always unemployed, they might be working two jobs, but it’s not enough if you are paying hundreds of dollars a week for your house and you have a couple of children. What they earn sounds alright, but when something goes wrong it’s hard to cope. People who were donors five years ago are now coming in for help.”

“I think half of New Zealand doesn’t know how the other half lives – and they don’t want to know. You talk to people and they say, ‘What a bunch of no-hopers’, and it’s just not true.”

Ross McQueen was appointed a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to Christchurch, Rangiora and Canterbury rural communities, including his almost 50 years’ service to the work of the Christchurch City Mission. His honor citation is in the 2025 New Year’s Honours MNZM list here.