CHRISTIAN RESOURCES AND SERVICES
Scattering the Everlasting Gospel like the Leaves of Autumn
We are a Christian Charitable Company offering resources and services to connect Christians and reach others with messages of faith, hope, and charity.
Who We Are
Autumn Leaves NZ Limited is a Christian resource and service organisation. Our purpose is to serve the Christian community and reach out to those individuals who are searching for solutions for the spiritual, physical and mental challenges that they face from day to day. We create, import and offer Bibles, books, gifts, media, health, and family resources as well as offer a variety of services via our website or in person.
As a charity, we work in the areas of:
• Fostering individuals, churches and community groups by supplying Christian books, media and events.
• Nurturing children by providing character-building books, toys, gifts and home-school resources.
• Helping families with resources to support marriage, family, child-rearing, and various personal challenges we all face from time to time. We are a registered organisation for performing marriages and we assist many families through grief and funeral services.
• Promoting preventative health and lifestyle. We have a sub-brand, Lifestyle Works that supplies practical lifestyle training events and media resources, health & cooking books and a selection of health products.
We serve all of these areas in a Christian framework using Biblical principles that have positively built up societies in the past and seek to promote and nurture individuals to face challenges and find answers in our changing world.
Be in touch and see how we can help you, or you can help us to help others!
Our Purpose
Autumn Leaves took its name from the desire to scatter messages of truth, grace, love, peace and hope like the leaves of autumn. It still holds to the original mission of helping others in a practical and beneficial way.
The main field of work includes New Zealand, Australia and the Pacific Islands, with more and more reach worldwide. Although the work is wide and varied, Autumn Leaves is still relatively small in regards to company and budget.
Autumn Leaves was established as a family passion to share the benefits of Christianity and as such is not owned or controlled by a larger organisation, church or denomination.
Our experience and observation has developed less focus on religion and more on practical Christianity.
Christianity is a faith based on the Bible. It gets it name from the New Testament understanding that Jesus Christ came, in love, to save the human race from guilt and destruction of sin and will come again to eradicate sin and evil. This has its foundation in the Old Testament of the Bible which reveals God as creator and His continual involvement throughout history and hence our accountability to Him and the laws and principles He gave for our benefit and happiness.
Some of our staff enjoy fellowship with local congregations of the Seventh-day Adventist Church and due to their more complete emphasis on the complete Bible, quite a number of the products we supply are sourced from Seventh-day Adventist authors or publishers, although we stock a diverse range of items from a variety of sources that we have seen to be beneficial for scattering God’s truth like the leaves of autumn.
Our History
Founders Doug and Angela Hurley are both from established local families in rural Canterbury, New Zealand. In the 1980's when they were raising their young children, they started to look for practical ways to best prepare the family to face the world they were growing into while also dealing with some personal health challenges themselves.
Through their own search and discoveries, they found simple and practical solutions that they implemented into their lifestyle. Having a heart to help others, and continuing to learn as they went, they took the benefits that they were enjoying and began to share them. These expanded into practical, social, family, spiritual, and health aspects. This passion for helping others soon took over their regular work and developed into a family ministry based in their home and garage.
Over the years, the demand for the simple yet proven principles they shared grew; they registered as a charity and took on staff. The organisation grew to include events such as family camps, youth camps, health and cooking classes as well as offering imported and locally generated resources, visits by international speakers, and production of media for distribution and nationwide television.
All of Doug and Angela's four children have enjoyed the family and ministry life and they have all have worked for the organization at some point, with three of them currently involved as well as pursuing other family and community endeavors.
The charitable company operated from Doug and Angela's home on a rural property in Ashley, near Rangiora and as it grew, these facilities became too small and fragmented for the increased demand. With the expansion into media production requiring better facilities, an ambitious project was initiated to build a larger, custom designed building in Rangiora itself to make the ministry’s services more effective and more available to the public.
Meet The Team
Doug & Angela Hurley - Founders, General Manager.
Doug and Angela are both from rural Canterbury and developed a desire to serve others through the ministry as it has grown and developed from their home in the 1980s. Doug's work involves a lot of writing, communicating and traveling as he connects and ministers with people and coordinates events which include anything from camp meetings, funeral services, wedding services and outreach projects. When Angela is not traveling with Doug as they serve as a team, she helps at the ministry base with day to day upkeep, hospitality and special projects.
Damon Hurley - Operations Manager
Damon, Doug and Angela's oldest son, has been working with the ministry since finishing school and coordinates the day-to-day work of the ministry and projects. He lives on a rural property in Loburn with his wife, Cherie and three children.
Cherie Hurley - Graphic Design
Cherie, Damon's wife, has worked with the team at Autumn Leaves from 2010 when she bought her training and experience in video production to help develop this aspect of the ministry. As a busy mother of three, and home-school teacher, she now works part-time assisting other areas of the ministry and with graphic design.
Lena Malcolm - Office Secretary and Product Sourcing
Lena joined the team in 2015 after working with EQC during their intensely busy period following the Canterbury Earthquakes. She initially worked in reception, order processing and sourcing products, but as Autumn Leaves grew and we became more busy, her experience was valuable in finding and ordering books and other resources and stock management. Lena was born and raised in South Canterbury and now lives in North Canterbury.
Korina Schoolderman - Secretary/Admin
Korina is Doug and Angela's younger daughter. She trained and worked as a early Childhood teacher, before coming to work full time in the ministry in 2004. She still continues to help us part time, managing the office admin and accounts but her primary focus is now homeschooling her two children. She lives in the old family home where the ministry used to be based in Ashley, just north of Rangiora.
Malcolm Hurley - Production and Resources
Malcolm is Doug and Angela's youngest son. He trained and worked for many years as an Electrician in New Zealand and Australia before returning to serve in the ministry in 2020. Malcolm's practical skills are valuable within the ministry and he works with the development and production of printed and digital resources. He lives with his wife and two boys in rural Loburn.
Vincent Zhang - Graphics Design / Video Production
Vincent joined our team in early 2023 after training in Graphic Design and has some experience with Video Production. He is filling his role with some of our graphic design needs and also working in video production. Vincent has an amazing testimony. From when he was a young teen, he was fighting brain cancer, not only once but twice when it returned in his later teens. He thanks God for saving him from predicted death and has a heart to serve Him in return.
Peter Olney - Production
Peter, retired from a career in the RAF, RNZAF, and the NZ army as a civilian, joined our team in a part-time role in 2004. He primarily works in print and media reproduction. Peter lives in semi-retirement in Rangiora.
Tracy Brown - Reception and Orders
Tracy joined the team in 2023. She is the first point of contact many people have with the ministry via the phone, email or in person at our ministry base. She works at reception and also processes most orders.