Morningside for Life! : Contextual Theology Meets Animated Television in bro'Town

Abstract

For five years the television show bro'Town represented a novel and somewhat controversial approach to telling stories about New Zealand society in mainstream media. The particular characters and setting connected to Pacific Island and urban Maori immigrant communities, but the stories being told were broader than that and resonated with the wider New Zealand public. One unique characteristic of the show was the way in which it mediated religion both sympathetically and critically to this wider audience. In doing so the show functioned as a site of theological reflection and a vehicle for the doing of contextual theology. Through the way in which religion was mediated in the show, issues related to personal, ethnic, religious, family and community identity are explored, drawing upon the negotiation of the three-way relationship between God, land and people running through Māori and Pacific Island cultures. The end result of this negotiation is a narrative that is simultaneously respectful and irreverent, promoting the need to find friends, love, respect and home in an often complicated and conflicted world.