Anglican Taonga Eastertide 2017 by Anglican Taonga

EASTERTIDE 2017 // No.54

Taonga ANGLICAN

PEOPLE

MISSION

An all-consuming zeal: Nick and Tessa’s story MINISTRY

Stirred into action Keeping the faith in rural fault-line zones

Standing on holy ground Why our two newest bishops took us off the beaten track EASTERTIDE

IN SICKNESS & IN HEALTH : : WHAT DRIVES YOUR FAITH? : : FAREWELL, PIHOPA MATĀMUA

2017 Page 1

ANGLICAN TAONGA

EASTERTIDE 2017

PEOPLE

New bishop to anchor ministry in Wellington

he Rev Canon Dr Eleanor Sanderson has been elected to serve as Assistant Bishop in the Diocese of Wellington. Bishop-elect Sanderson, who serves as vicar of St Alban’s, Eastbourne, is also chaplain of Wellesley College in Days Bay, and Wellington’s Diocesan Canon Theologian. Ordained to the priesthood in 2006, Ellie Sanderson holds a PhD in geography in which she explores the intersection between community development and Christian spirituality,

It's about enlivening the vision to which we've already committed.

through case studies of a Melanesian Anglican parish in Fiji, and a Mother’s Union group in rural Tanzania. She also holds a master’s degree in theology, is a Fellow of Public Theology at Virginia Theological Seminary, and a Research Associate at the School of Religious Studies at Victoria University. Ellie has served in various roles in the Diocese of Wellington over 16 years, where her leadership skills and pastoral gifts are celebrated. “We see a strength and depth of leadership in her that we believe will help catalyse a next generation of leaders amongst us.” says Bishop of Wellington Justin Duckworth. Bishop-elect Ellie’s appointment will allow Bishop Justin to spend more time in the north of the diocese, and he plans to move to Whanganui soon. “As we seek to build our family culture in this diocese,” he says, “the force of gravity tends to pull our focus towards Wellington. “I’m therefore looking forward to being more present on the ground in the north, knowing that the good work already underway in Wellington will have strong leadership.”

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What it means Ellie Sanderson, bishop-elect, has been reflecting on what becoming the Assistant Bishop of Wellington means for her: “For me, it's about enlivening the vision to which we’ve already committed.” “In this role, it’s important for me to get alongside the people of the diocese and listen, so that I can hear their challenges and lead with greater clarity. “When you enter ministry….you love the church in all its humanness, its beauty, and its brokenness. So in this position, I aim to operate from a place of love.” Eleanor, who was born and raised in the UK, is married to Tim, who was born and bred in the Hutt Valley, and they have two sons: Zachary (9) and Joseph (7). She was nominated at a Diocese of Wellington electoral college held in Palmerston North’s Convention Centre on May 11, and her nomination was then ratified by the House of Bishops and members of the General Synod. The Rev Canon Dr Sanderson’s episcopal ordination will take place in Wellington’s Cathedral of St Paul on the evening of Friday June 2nd, 2017. Note Bishop Elect Ellie shares some of her vision for ministry on pages 20-21.

ANGLICAN TAONGA

Anglican Taonga EASTERTIDE 2017

Contents 10

15 ANGLICAN TAONGA

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22 ANGLICAN ANGLICANTAONGA TAONGA EASTER 2017

EASTER 2017

ANGLICAN ANGLICANTAONGA TAONGA EASTER 2017

EASTER 2017

HURUNUI-KAIKOURA QUAKES

08 Young Adults: Spanky Moore on sharing the faith that drives us 24 Spirituality: Adrienne Thompson seeks her road to reconciliation 28 Children: Diana Langdon puts kids first for next Easter 42 Film: Watching Pork Pie and Ove dispense with men’s despair 43 The Far Side: Imogen de la Bere counts the cost of sacred space

Anglican Taonga is published by the Commission on Communications and distributed to all ministry units and agencies of the Anglican Church in Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia – Te Haahi Mihinare ki Aotearoa ki Niu Tireni ki nga Moutere o Te Moana Nui a Kiwa. Editor Julanne Clarke-Morris 786 Cumberland Street Otepoti – Dunedin 9016 Ph 03 477-1556 julanneclarkemorris@gmail.com Design Marcus Thomas Design info@marcusthomas.co.nz Distribution and subscriptions Aleshia Lawson Taonga Distribution Manager PO Box 6431, Dunedin 9059 taongadistribution@gmail.com Advertising Brian Watkins Ph 06 875-8488 021 072-9892 brian@grow.co.nz Media Officer Lloyd Ashton Ph 09 521-4439 021 348-470 mediaofficer@anglicanchurch.org.nz.

Bishop-elect Richard Wallace and his wife Mere walk on to Onuku Marae. Mere is holding hands with Susan Tito, who is Richard’s elder sister.

Te Ahi Kaa: Bishop Richard keeps the home fires burning If it wasn't for what happened at Onuku – there mightn't be a Treaty of Waitangi

About 400 wellDuring the ordination, two cruise wishers made the trek ships stood at anchor offshore. out to Onuku Marae on As Lloyd Ashton has been January 21 to tautoko the ordination1 of Bishop Richard learning, an earlier ship, standing offshore like those two luxury Wallace, who is now the new liners, forever changed Kai Tahu’s Pihopa o Te Waipounamu. fate – and shaped the course of Onuku is a meandering five New Zealand history. kilometre drive onwards from Akaroa township towards the heads of Akaroa Harbour, and the marae is a stone’s throw from the harbour’s edge.

ou could make a case to say that if wasn’t for Onuku — the marae near the heads of the Akaroa Harbour where Richard Wallace was ordained a bishop on January 21 — we wouldn’t have a Treaty of Waitangi. That’s how significant the place is. Let’s explain: just a couple of bays around from Onuku towards Akaroa township is Red House Bay — or Takapuneke, as it’s always been known by Kai Tahu. Back in the 1820s, Takapuneke was a thriving kaik, a settlement from which Kai Tahu traded flax fibre with European merchants who would moor their ships offshore, before sailing to Sydney or parts further afield. At the time, too, that was where Kai Tahu upoko ariki (paramount chief) Te Maiharanui lived. In early November 1830 the British brig Elizabeth sailed up the harbour, and anchored off Takapuneke. Captain John Stewart was at the helm, and he invited Te Maiharanui, his wife Te Whe and daughter Nga Roimata out to the ship to cut the latest flax-trading deal. They were enticed below decks — where the warlord Te Rauparaha and a 100-strong Ngati Toa taua overpowered them, and then took them to their Kapiti Island stronghold. But not before they’d slaughtered 100 Kai Tahu living at the kaik, and taken another 50 hostage. On the voyage back to Kapiti — Pihopa hou – Richard Wallace, the newly ordained Pihopa o Te Waipounamu.

The assembled bishops prepare to ordain Richard.

remember, good Captain Stewart is at the helm — Te Maiharanui strangled his daughter Nga Roimata and threw her overboard. He figured he was saving her from a fate worse than death. He was. Because both he and his wife Te Whe suffered a lingering death at their captors’ hands. The British government heard what had happened, and were so horrified at Captain Stewart’s complicity and at New Zealand’s lawlessness — that they sent James Busby to the Bay of Islands in 1833. Seven years later, the Treaty of Waitangi was signed, and in May 1840 Onuku became the first place in the South Island where Te Tiriti was signed. And on September 29, 1998, the then Prime Minister Jenny Shipley read the Crown’s formal apology for its breaches of that treaty to Kai Tahu on the mahau of Karaweko, the wharenui at Onuku. In other words, on the very same spot where Richard Wallace chose to be ordained as bishop. *

Kai Tahu were left reeling after that sneak attack at Takapuneke (and another later Te Rauparaha-led massacre at Onawe, further up the Akaroa Harbour). To make matters worse, they were also coming under intense pressure from landhungry English settlers. Then the French arrived in the late 1830s, and wanted to muscle in on the land grab, too.

...we feel the need to put stakes in the ground...

It was time, they decided, to nuku – to move away.

Where once Ngai Tahu were lords of the manor, they found themselves becoming mere serfs, toiling for Europeans who were farming what had been their own land. It was time, they decided, to move away. In te reo, to move is nuku. Hence: Onuku. *

Bishop Richard’s links2 to Onuku go back to his beginnings. He was baptised in 1945 in the tiny Whare Karakia o Onuku, which was opened in 1878, and which was the first non-denominational church in New Zealand. He was actually born and spent his early years at Little River, on the other side of the Banks Peninsula saddle. So he’s not entirely sure why he was christened at Onuku — but probably there was a tangi on there at the time, and that’s where the minister was. His whanau would have travelled over the summit of the peninsula by horse and cart, he says, or by an old Army truck — or by boat across the harbour from Wainui. Richard didn’t get to Onuku much during his high school years. The grandparents who’d brought him up in Little River had died, and he’d been whangai-ed to Motueka.

One great catch-cry of the Reformation was sola fide, sola gratia: salvation ‘by faith alone, by grace alone’. The Reformation bequeathed us with a stark dichotomy between faith and works. When we hear a preacher stress our responsibility in the process of salvation, we may start to get twitchy. Perhaps we fear the doctrine of ‘salvation by works,’ allegedly peddled by the late medieval Catholic Church. If we feel the need to put stakes in the ground, and defend the faith against such encroachment on God’s free grace, it is largely because we sense Martin Luther (or perhaps John Calvin) squirming in his grave. We may even debate predestination – whether God wills all that happens – or election – whether God selects who will be saved ahead of time – not realising these questions are not necessarily ones we need to ask. The early church fathers were not asking those questions, and some of their answers would set Protestant alarm bells ringing. What we may not realise, is that we inherit not only Protestant Christianity, but Western Christianity, and so we are shaped – by centuries of conditioning –

The International Monument of the Reformation looms large in Geneva city.

to understand the faith in a certain way. We have thoughts in our heads that we think are our own. But they are in our heads only because of a battle on the other side of the world 500 years ago. If this is making you nervous, then that only proves my point. Something is at stake: and it goes back to the Reformation. That is true of a second area where Reformation battle lines resurface: the subject of authority. Another great Reformation motto was sola scriptura: Scripture alone. Luther decided that if authority did not lie in the Pope, or in a church council, then it must lie in Scripture. This was a fatal move, and pregnant with unintended consequences, because Scripture does not speak with one voice. So when we say that Scripture is the authority, what we really mean is that my interpretation of Scripture is the authority: ‘my conscience is captive to the Word of God.’ That accounts for the way we Protestants tend to break up our churches. That’s why today there are well over 40,000 Protestant denominations in the world, each laying claim to the authority of Scripture. So when other Christians come to a different view from ours, we may feel the authority of Scripture is being challenged. When we escalate matters like that, we replicate the first years of the Reformation: when the focus quickly shifted from the

Dr Tim Cooper is Associate Professor of Church History in the Department of Theology and Religion at the University of Otago and a member of Dunedin City Baptist Church. tim.cooper@otago.ac.nz

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Mother Alena shares her journey into religious life during evensong at the Transitional Cathedral in February 2017. Sister Veronika greets her supporters after making her vows. L-R: Sister Veronika CSN, Bishop Victoria Matthews, Rev Andrew Starky.

Rev Dawn Daunauda (in pale blue jacket) joins the Awatere Christian Joint Venture congregation outside the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Seddon, where both Catholic and Protestant communities now worship.

Stirred into The 7.8 earthquake that shook Kaikoura last November was centred in Canterbury’s Hurunui district. As the quake pushed north, it slammed hard into southern Marlborough, too. Geonet recordings show the strongest shaking occurred in Waiau, a town in the Diocese of Christchurch’s Amuri Cooperating Parish. The next highest score was in Ward, which lies in Nelson’s Awatere Christian Joint Venture (CJV).

Called to witness

ministry

and prayer

Five months on, joint PresbyterianAnglican churches in both centres are still ministering to exhausted and money-stressed families, many of whom face winter without the basics back in order. In March, Taonga editor Julanne Clarke-Morris spoke with the vicar of Awatere, Rev Dawn Daunauda, whose flock takes in Seddon, Ward, Kekerengu and the Awatere Valley, and with Rev Colin Price, minister in charge of Amuri parish and its churches in Culverden, Rotherham and Waiau.

We're finding a mixture of exhaustion and hope.

ANGLICAN TAONGA

Hunkering down for a while

It was tunnel vision: one step after another.

Bishop John Bluck on the front porch at home in Northland.

hese days we can google any topic and find a hundred helpful hints. How to get fit or lose weight. How to manage your money or your marriage. How to maintain a prayer life in a busy working schedule. My last stay in hospital was for tonsil removal, as an 11 year old. So when I returned half a century later as a patient rather than visitor, I was out of practice. Everything except the food had changed, especially the policy of discharging you before you had settled in. Now, outpatienting rather than inpatienting is the way to go. Through 2016 I’d had my share of being in and out, thanks to a series of accidents and medical adventures too boring to dwell on, none of which have killed me. Some people like to linger over surgery details and compare medications like medals. I’m with those who prefer to forget, (though the ride in a rescue helicopter, while pumped full of pain killers, stays with me). But I can’t deny that my year of shuttling between hospital wards and doctor’s offices has transformed me. It gave me membership in an exclusive club of people living through health conditions and crises, most far more dramatic than mine. The American playwright Thornton Wilder once said that in the service of love, the wounded serve best. Suffering creates its own community. Once inside, you can never return to the old innocence of being ignorant, or indifferent to other people’s pain. Not that I spent much time worrying about others last year. The problem with being very ill is the self-absorption that comes with it. Recently, a friend of mine climbed Aoraki Mt Cook. I imagined him marvelling at the scenery, but instead all his energy and focus went into following his guide’s footsteps. It was tunnel vision: one step after another. That’s how it was for me too, for a while. My world shrank to the basic things I had once taken for granted: being able to sleep, shower, eat, drink, walk, read, or watch a movie. Happily through all that, I didn’t have to cope with any prolonged pain. We owe special admiration to anyone who suffers long, but still manages to interact with any grace.

A gathering of 50 friends, family and CSN supporters included presider Bishop Victoria Matthews, whose role as bishop visitor of CSN is to strengthen and protect the order. “As a member of this community you will serve Christ and his world through a life of prayer and outreach to those in need.” said Bishop Victoria, who also praised the sisters for their faithful ministry in recent years. “Your presence in Christchurch before, during and after the earthquakes has been a sign of witness, an assurance of prayer and a place of refuge,” she said. Sister Veronika, who is from Fiji, came

Most of all I loved the prayer life.

eat,” she says. “You can’t do the Lord’s work if you are sick all the time. “Poverty is more that you are not worrying about material things. “We share what we are given, and keep only what we need. We have freedom from that commercial world.” Sr Veronika now returns to Suva, where she will care for visitors to the retreat house and chapel at St Christopher’s. Up to 30 guests come every week for quiet days and retreats. These come from Methodist and Pentecostal churches as well as Anglican churches and schools. But none of that will get in the way of her prayer life “The thing I love most is time with God every day. From 5 in the morning, I’m used to putting God first.”

- Julanne Clarke-Morris The Community of the Sacred Name was founded in Christchurch in 1893 by Sister Edith, a deaconess. Sister Edith was released from the Community of St Andrew in London to establish an indigenous community responding to the needs of the colonial church. Over the years, the sisters have undertaken healthcare, teaching, childcare and parish work. Today there are five houses across Fiji, Tonga and Aotearoa. Since 1966, the sisters have run a large children's home in Fiji and now also run St Mary's girls' hostel at Labasa, Vanua Levu. Three sisters live in Christchurch and run the retreat house at the Barbadoes Street property, while four sisters are based in Ashburton.

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HISTORY

MISSION

his Church’s home-grown women’s religious order, the Community of the Sacred Name, has launched into 2017 with a new spring in its step. In February the community’s new mother superior, Mother Alena CSN, celebrated with her sisters as Novice Mere Tuilevuka finished training and took her first vows as Sister Veronika CSN. Sister Veronika, whose new Christian name was her grandmother’s, committed to life as a member of the Community of the Sacred Name (CSN) after a Eucharist in the order’s Tuam Street Retreat House in Christchurch.

CSN Visiting Bishop Victoria Matthews and CSN Warden the late Rev Andrew Starky, line up with Sister Veronika and sisters for the Community of the Sacred Name. Photo: Patrina Cheer.

Lord helps us with what we need.” In fact it takes longer to join CSN than most people would spend studying for a degree. Much longer. After one year as a postulant, the trainee becomes a novice. Then, after no fewer than three years’ reading, working, praying, learning and listening, the novice can make her first vows. Permanent commitment, known as life profession, does not happen for at least another five years. Discerning the call to religious life cannot be rushed, says Mother Alena. The novice needs to practise the rule (the community’s pattern of daily prayer), live and work in the community, and listen deeply for God’s insistent call. “Not so many people can do this these days,” says Mother Alena. “Many people only want to think of themselves. But ours is a call to the life of servanthood.” When she was Novice Mere, Sr Veronika already wore the blue habit and vowed obedience to CSN. Now she has promised to embrace poverty and chastity as well. But neither vow worries our newest sister much. “Obedience is the hardest one,” she concedes. Mother Alena points out that those tough-sounding vows are not intended to make life miserable. “For us poverty doesn’t mean things like going through winter without a heater in your room, or not having enough to

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S P I R I T U A L I T Y & H E A LT H

John Bluck looks back on a season at the mercy of our public health system, and lauds the humble riches it helped him rediscover.

We become a visible sign of a life lived for God.

to Christchurch to make her vows with her Fijian mother superior, Tongan and Pakeha sisters. Unlike many religious orders today, CSN sisters always wear the traditional habit and veil. “Our calling is to make people more aware of the Kingdom of God,” says Mother Alena, “so our habits help us to be a visible sign of a life lived for God. “We hope that by being there, and being who we are, we will help others to grow in faith and trust in God. “So we care for those in need, pray for the world every day, and welcome whoever comes.” The sisters’ life first excited Sr Veronika 10 years ago when she was an Anglican teenager in the Solomoni village of Naviavia. She watched two older girls go to suss out the sisters in Suva, and in 2011 she too decided to test her vocation at the CSN-run St Christopher’s Children’s Home in Suva. Only 20, she began life as a postulant (seeker) who would live and work with the CSN sisters. “I loved looking after the kids and the babies there,” she recalls, “They needed a lot of love and care. “But most of all I loved the prayer life. We’d pray four times a day. It was a big part of life. It was in all of life.” According to Mother Alena, that time spent with God is what sets the sisters apart. “As sisters we all have different backgrounds, but for each of us prayer is the priority,” she says. “To be a sister you don’t need to reach a study level or have degrees. You just have to know you are called. That is enough. And when we follow that call, the

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Too often our The year was also a crash course in the art of waiting. It was never my strongest point and I’m still an apprentice, even now. But when you depend on the public health system, there is nothing to do but wait. Arguing with staff that you are more deserving is a waste of time, especially when someone desperately ill is ahead of you in the queue. But when I did try, I was met with courtesy, patience and civility. In fact, the dedication and skill of medical and nursing staff was inspirational. They demonstrated the kind of vocation that I wish was more common in the church: feeling called to what they did and being able to enjoy doing it. They also showed me what the face of multi-cultural New Zealand will look like a generation from now, when Pakeha will be a minority. In Auckland’s hospitals, that complex reality has already arrived. And it works. The art of waiting goes beyond patience and grace. It’s about learning to live more fully, and gratefully, in the in-between space between life and death. It’s a space we all share, but one we only occasionally get jolted into being aware of, let alone appreciating. The appreciation part, of course, depends on whether you believe in a future at both ends of the life and death spectrum. If there is a single article of faith that’s kept me going of late, it's the conviction that my life is bound and buoyed up by the life of God in me. Holding onto that in the middle of the night makes all the difference in the world. And as I learn to wait for the life to come, in whatever way it will, I start to refine and re-order the life I already have: to make it simpler, less cluttered, more focused on whatever is just and lovely and gracious. In Paul’s words, “if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.” That advice is a whole lot better than dwelling on the rubbish that can fill your head when you’re sick. And better than filling your stomach with the bread of anxiety. I’ve used this waiting time to hold a clearance sale, and make room for better stock. The year has also helped me appreciate ordinary things anew; like the taste of fresh vegetables, and practical routines like driving a car or riding a lawn mower. So much of what I’ve had to learn or relearn is very simple. Lie still. Breathe deeply. Do these exercises five times daily. Eat these good things. Kiss Burger King

ceremonies fail to challenge our

It was precisely those familiar things that spoke afresh.

national pride.

A German soldier's belt buckle which read: Gott Mit Uns – God with us.

goodbye. Walk the beach for a mile, then two. And after hunkering down for so long, I’ve sought out familiar things that can reconnect me with the wider world again. Oddly enough, when I was able to go back to church after a long absence, it was precisely those familiar things that spoke afresh, things that don’t happen much outside churches these days: lighting a candle, listening to an organ prelude that my mother used to play, watching the glow of morning sun through stained glass, standing up to sing among friends who’d been praying for me, eating bread, drinking wine with them, and later coffee and biscuits. The wine is pretty ordinary, the bread is not flash, nor are the biscuits, but it’s heavenly food no less. There must be easier ways to find all this out, but this is the way it happened to me. And why me? Well, why not? Which brings me to the hardest thing. That is to let what happens happen – without complaint or self-pity – to let it go, and trust that it will take you to a good place. I had never dared before to write down that illness might be good for you, because I didn’t know it could be, and I wasn’t about to reassure anyone else. Yet when I read in Dave Eggers’ marvellous new novel, Heroes of the Frontier: “comfort is the death of the soul which is by nature searching, insistent, unsatisfied,” I thought maybe he might be right. Yes, I do think back wistfully to my comfortable life before hospitals, and I expect to enjoy that again. But it won’t ever be quite the same as before. I’ve heard too many stories of other people’s suffering and found a new kinship with them. And I’ve had a glimpse of what I used to think was a deep abyss and found it’s more like a valley with mountains beyond. Daunting, but not so scary after all.

The author's father, Bavarian artilleryman Paul Oestreicher in France, 1916. Opposite page: New Zealand soldiers pictured in the James Allan Gallipoli memorial window, in All Saints' Dunedin.

The help is amongst us Lloyd Ashton has been talking with a young Christchurch couple, now serving in Uganda with CMS, whose lives are on fire for mission…

'Right. Let's do what Jesus said. For once.

Bishop John Bluck is a writer living in Northland. bluckbooks@gmail.com

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hen I first spoke with Nick Laing – on June 22 last year – he told me he hadn’t been sleeping well. He reckoned his last three nights were the worst he’d had in the three years he and his wife Tessa had lived in Northern Uganda. That’s understandable. On the first of those three nights, he’d woken in the small hours, to see flames licking the thatched roof above their bed1. Nick yelled blue murder. He and Tessa bolted from their bed. Neighbours came running, and between them, they managed to douse the flames. What made matters worse was knowing, instantly, that this was no accident. Knowing they’d been targeted. Three weeks before, someone had snuck into their next-door neighbour’s hut – she lives alone – and set fire to her bed. She was caught up in a family feud –

The war that left none

Top: Nick and Tessa's place in Lacor. They live in the hut at right - and guests stay in the hut at left. Above left: Dr Nick Laing in action. Above right: Celebrating the opening of St Philip's, Gulu. Nick and Tessa Laing, on leave, in Christchurch, January 2016.

conflict is common here – and it turns out an 11-year-old boy from her own family had torched her bed. Nick and Tessa had escorted the young culprit to the local police station. Now this had happened: The boy had taken reprisal. He’d turned his arsonist attentions on them. He was trying to run them out of town. And right now he was out there, somewhere, on the loose. What’s more, Nick’s mum and dad were about to fly in from Christchurch for a visit, and they were all about to head out of the village for a few days. Nick and Tessa knew that if that boy was left at large, they wouldn’t be returning to their home. They’d be returning to a heap of ashes. So they turned him into the police again. Welcome, Mum and Dad, to our life in Northern Uganda!

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Nine months later I checked in with Nick and Tessa again, and I asked how that saga had unfolded. Well, this time the police had thrown young Kenneth – that’s the firebug’s name – into youth prison. Nick and Tessa were OK with that. There was no other choice, they thought. “But once we’d taken some deep breaths,” says Nick, “we realised that’s not what Jesus would’ve done. We decided: ‘Right. Let’s do what Jesus said. For once.’ Tessa visited Kenneth every week he was inside. She tried to reach out to him – which wasn’t easy. “When you looked into his eyes,” says Tessa, “there was a gap there.” The probation officers, meanwhile, seemed happy to let the boy rot. Nick and Tessa hung in. They agitated on Kenneth’s behalf and when he was freed – after languishing in the slammer for six weeks – they continued to sow into his life. One of the extra-curricular tasks that

Nick and Tessa have taken on is running after-school tuition for local kids in their home. They got Kenneth turning up to those classes – and they found he’s a borderline genius.But Nick and Tessa could also see that Kenneth’s potential was being sabotaged at home. So Nick jacked up for his parents in Christchurch to sponsor Kenneth to go to a nearby boarding school. In the last term of 2016, Kenneth came 11th out of the 100 students in his year, having not been at school at all for the first two terms. Nick and Tessa stay in touch with Kenneth. “He’s an incredible kid,” says Nick, “and his demeanour has completely changed. He’s much happier now. He’s so resilient – and he smiles, he laughs, he talks. It’s an absolutely beautiful result.” *

He's an incredible kid. His demeanor has completely changed.

Paul Oestreicher looks back a century to the Battle of the Somme, the bloodiest battle in World War I, which left more than a million soldiers killed or wounded. As we remember, he stops to ask our nation: What seeds of hate remain that still endanger peace?

But how did this young couple (Nick’s 30, and Tessa 28), who both grew up in Riccarton, get to be in Northern Uganda, anyway? Well, back when they were teenagers – Nick at Christ’s College, Tessa at Riccarton High – they both found their way to the youth group at St Timothy’s, Bryndwr. That’s where they each found Christ, and they found each other. During his first year at university Nick had one evening free each week – which was the same evening that St Tim’s hosted its social justice group. “Out of that,” says Nick, “came a thirst for God’s justice. When you’ve got that inside you, it’s hard not to devote your life to it. “God’s justice is both God justifying Page 31

Both sides had recruited the same God to their crusade.

unchanged

could not be writing on the pity of war, had my father not survived the gruelling, seemingly endless months of the merciless Battle of the Somme a century ago. When I was twenty five and he sixty years old, my father took me across those battlefields on a sunny day, through cornflowers and poppies. It felt like the sun was caressing the earth that had been drenched in blood forty years before. We walked from graveyard to graveyard, where men with a name that could still be deciphered were buried in orderly, endless, well-tended rows. The war graves commissions had done their work with respect and care. The inscriptions differed only in their language: French, German, or English. Lives given, or taken, by Patrie, Vaterland, King & Country: the best part

of a generation, willing and not so willing victims, united in death. Yet walking across those fields that had witnessed that mindless nationalism did not, strangely, leave me in despair. I felt only a deep sadness for the grieving: those who had loved each one of these countless sons and lovers, fathers and brothers, whose memory was only very slowly fading. On the brightly sunlit day, it seemed as though nature had overcome death. But the clouds were already gathering over Europe. The war that had been ‘the war to end all wars’: was not. Instead, the vengeful Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I sowed the seeds of an even greater criminal catastrophe. In 1914, my father had gone straight from school to volunteer. He was 19, and filled with patriotic fervour – like so many

on both sides. ‘That war’, he often said, ‘left no-one unchanged: You either lost your faith, or you found it’. In my father, who was born a secular Jew, that war prepared the ground for a deep commitment to Jesus. Several years later, when he was a young country doctor, driving through the snow after visiting a sick baby, my father heard a voice: ‘Go and be baptised,’ it said. Going from private to lieutenant in the 11th Bavarian Artillery, the end of the war found my father in a field hospital in Alsace – just well enough to run for his life back to Germany, to escape being taken prisoner. Defeat was bitter, but his pride in the Fatherland was still intact – though not for very long. In 1918 he fled from the French. In 1938, the son of Jewish parents, he fled from the Germans. Hitler’s reign had changed everything. His mother would not survive the Holocaust: his mother to whom he had dutifully written, if only a few lines, every single day of the war. Those letters are now in the German

Museum of Military History in Dresden, a museum that glorifies not war, but peace. The Great War had been pure tragedy. As the historians tell us, the European powers had stumbled into that war in their quest for supremacy. The massacre had been senseless, yet both sides – with their chaplains – had been made to believe their call to arms was not only in service to their nation, but a sacrifice to God. I still have my father’s belt buckle inscribed with the words Gott mit Uns (God with us). The British Tommies didn’t need that spelled out. They knew which side God was on. Both sides had recruited the same God to their crusade. The Psalmist’s words 'His mercy endureth forever' might just cover even this unconscious blasphemy. On both sides, the young men’s duty was to kill and, if need be, to die. Such is the nature of war. In Britain, commemorations of the dead after two its victorious wars are still imbued with deeply rooted nationalism. That is not surprising. The red poppy is a symbol not just of grief, but of national pride. Not to wear it has become almost impossible in public life. Patriotism demands no less. Its charitable purpose, to assist all war veterans, could not be better. I will give to that gladly, but wear it: I will not.

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Not when its nationalist overtones fail to take account of our common humanity, or our shared vulnerability. Too often our ceremonies fail to challenge our national pride. How telling was Margaret Thatcher’s anger, when after the Falklands War, Archbishop Runcie prayed in St Paul’s for the Argentinian dead as well as the British fallen. Had he not been prepared to do so, Cardinal Hume had threatened to stay away. It should be obvious in our national consciousness that humanity is above all nations, yet still that is far from the case. Is Brexit’s success not warning enough? In Germany after two wars lost, the mood is very different: penitence rather than pride. In Berlin’s central act of worship on the National Day of Grief three years ago, the German War Graves Commission invited me to preach: an Anglican pacifist with a German Jewish background. Yes, the German top brass were there: military band and all, yet the President spoke only of the duty to be peacemakers. Would the British Legion have invited someone like me? Or would the New Zealand Army invite someone like me for ANZAC day? Before he died, my once chauvinist, right-wing German nationalist father had taken the long road to becoming a liberal Quaker. Nonetheless, he still loved dearly the Fatherland that had betrayed and rejected him. Patriotism takes many forms. In his wallet, close to his heart, he always carried the prayer attributed to St Francis: Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. Rev Dr Paul Oestreicher is an Anglican priest, and peace and human rights activist. After his parents fled Germany in 1938 he grew up in New Zealand. He now lives in the UK. paul.oestreicher.nz@gmail.com

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Features

Don Ta- mihere takes up his crozier at Porourangi marae

CSN welcomes their new sister

Tairāwhiti scores a try

Son of Te Waipounamu Sounding the depths of Bishop Richard Wallace’s call

Shadows of Reformers past Tim Cooper peels back 500 years of Reformation thinking

Stirred into ministry Keeping the faith in rural fault-line zones

Love, disciple & transform Eleanor Sanderson grounds mission close to home

Cover: L-R: Bishop of Te Waipounamu Richard Wallace at Te Whare Karakia o Onuku in February, and Bishop of Tairāwhiti Don Tamihere at Waiomatatini marae in March, 2017.

particular practice of indulgences, to the high-stakes question of authority. The third field where the Reformation lives on is in how we mark our Christian identity. At the beginning of the 16th century, the Catholic Church was a broad church, with plenty of room for different points of view. In its place, the Reformation produced a set of fixed boxes that carefully prescribed each group’s identity according to confession (or statement of faith). This made it very clear who was in and who was out: ‘we’ are not ‘them’. It is a myth that the Reformation opened up religious freedom – in the short-term, it closed it down. Every Christian in Europe was forced into one or other of these boxes, sometimes by force. I regret the loss of that broad church. I like being in a church where people say things I disagree with. Those tight boxes where everyone agrees are a product of the Reformation: they are contingent, but are not necessarily the way things have to be. Though it has its frustrations, the Anglican Church in Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia is a broad church. That is something to be treasured. There remain many complex issues for the church to work through. But in this anniversary year, Anglicans might be wise to recognise just how much their convictions – and the deep emotions triggered by them – have been shaped by events that took place centuries ago. Do not make the mistake of thinking that the past is irrelevant. It is far more present and powerful than we ever suspect. As the American novelist, William Faulkner, once said: ‘The past isn’t dead. It’s not even past.’ As we acknowledge the Reformation in 2017, we could take time to deepen our awareness of Christianity’s broad history. Perhaps then we may see how our independent thinking is not nearly as independent as we like to believe.

ANGLICAN TAONGA

RELIGIOUS LIFE

PEOPLE

REGULAR

EASTERTIDE 2017

Making vows to the Lord

In sickness and in health John Bluck looks back on a season in the health system

An all-consuming zeal: Nick and Tessa Laing’s life and mission in Northern Uganda

Farewelling our Pihopa Matāmua

How Archbishop Brown Tu-rei’s tangihanga showed us the way

Lest we forget Paul Oestreicher asks questions 100 years on from the Somme

For the latest on the Anglican world, check out our website:

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PEOPLE

Hundreds braved torrential rain and dicey East Coast roads on March 11 to witness the ordination and installation of Don Tāmihere, the new Pīhopa o Te Tairāwhiti. Lloyd Ashton was among them.

We’re going to do

what’s right

Roimata – the tears that tumble when labour is over and new birth has come.

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What were they thinking when they chose Porourangi, the wharenui at Waio-matatini Marae, as the venue for Bishop Don’s ordination? As I gunned the car up the steep, slippery clay hill1 that separates Ruatoria from Porourangi, we slithered around the first bend, high above the surging Waiapu River. My passengers had fallen silent – but they weren’t hard to read.

“Trust me,” Don had said two days before his ordination, “the logical part of us has been really worried about the rain, and the logistics.” But his elders were resolute. “‘We’re not going to do what’s easy,” they’d told him. “‘We’re going to do what’s right.’”

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The Rev Pane Kawhia beseeches God's people to go and make disciples. Pihopa hou – Don Tamihere, the newly ordained and installed Pihopa o Te Tairāwhiti.

hat ‘rightness’ Don spoke of relates first to his own family. The Ta-mihere wha-nau marae, Ra-kaihoea, is just five minutes down the road, and Don has direct links to Porourangi. But there were bigger reasons, too. For starters, Porourangi is in the Waiapu Valley, which is where the gospel arrived on the East Coast. Rightness too, because the elders wanted Sir Apirana Ngata to overlook the proceedings. Sir Apirana, who died in 1950, is buried on the edge of Puputa, the maunga which rises steeply behind Porourangi. His contributions to Ma-oridom – cultural, political and economic – are towering. What’s less well known is that he was also a pioneer in the Maori church2. He was instrumental in bringing Te Pi hopatanga o Aotearoa to birth in 1928 – after the Pa-keha--dominated church had stonewalled that development for decades. The person who Sir Apirana had wanted to become the first Ma-ori bishop3 didn’t get a look in. Because the North Island bishops of the day – Pa-keha- clergymen all – got to decide who that first Ma-ori bishop would be, and they chose Frederick Bennett4. Then, to add insult to injury, they wouldn’t let Fred Bennett be a full-fledged bishop. He was a suffragan – accountable to the Bishop of Waiapu – and the province paid him half a stipend, because ‘Ma-ori were good at gardening.’ “There’s no bitterness about these things,” says Bishop Don. “But there’s a memory of the hurt, and we wanted to honour our forebears who fought for the right for Te Pi hopatanga to exist.”

The moment of his ordination.

There were two marquees pitched in front of Porourangi, and Archbishop Philip Richardson reckoned there wouldn’t be anyone among the 600 or so present who wasn’t profoundly glad to have been in them. Not just because of the bucketing rain, either. “I had an overwhelming sense of Taira-whiti coming together around Don and saying: ‘This is who we want to be at the centre of our life and development for the next season’. At the po-whiri, Archbishop Winston spoke of the rain as roimata, or tears, that fell first for the loss of Archbishop Brown – and secondly as the tears that tumble when labour is over, and new birth has come. One of the innovations about the service was the ditching of the kauwhau, or sermon, in favour of five reflections. First up was the Rev Pane Kawhia, direct descendant of one of the first four Nga-ti Porou evangelists, who is an evangelist herself – as well as an outstanding gospel singer. Then there was the Rev Numia To-moana, who hails from Kahungunu, and whose ‘gospel weaving group’ made the stoles for Bishop Don’s ordination. Then it was the Rev Dr Hirini Kaa’s turn. He spoke as Don’s friend – but confessed he was sometimes intimidated by him: “Don is, I think, one of the greatest intellects our ha-hi has ever produced. “We’ve had priest-scholars who have both ministered the Word, and interpreted the Word in a way that relates to our matauranga5.

...younger, smarter, deeply faith-filled and deeply Maori.

“That’s harder than it seems, and is a never-ending challenge. Reconciling the two in a way that works for us, and gives life. He is in that tradition.” Hirini also said he was in awe of Don’s whakapapa and whakapono… “but most of all, I’m in awe of my friend’s friendship.” *

Dr Jenny Te Paa, the former Ahorangi of St Johns College, spoke next, and she began by asking who, like her, had been at the 1992 General Synod in Hamilton when the three tikanga constitution came into being. At that hui, Bishop Hui Vercoe had challenged Jenny “to help us train the next generation of Ma-ori priests and leaders – and I want them to be younger, smarter, deeply faith-filled and deeply Ma-ori.” Don Ta-mihere had come to St Johns in 1997, and he and a few other Ma-ori students had flourished, she said. “Their ministries since attest to the strength of their priestly character, for they like you, Donald, have chosen – as Michelle Obama urges – to take the high road when others have chosen to ‘go low’.” Finally, the Nga-ti Porou rangatira Selwyn Parata spoke of Don’s whakapapa – of the tu-puna who would have been proud to see that day, and on whose shoulders the new bishop proudly stands.

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Their new bishop ordained, the people of Tairāwhiti launch into an exuberant rendition of Paikea.

Having invoked the Holy Spirit, the bishops laid hands on Don and ordained him to the episcopate. The next stanza of the service was Te Whakamihi – in which the new bishop was gifted with his episcopal vestments, pectoral cross, stoles, ring, cope, mitre and crozier. There were personal gifts, too, including a framed portrait of the late Archbishop Brown presented by his widow, wha-ea Mihi, on behalf of the Tu-rei whanau. Then there was the taonga brought by the ‘other’ Ta-mihere clan, the one led by former MP, broadcaster and urban Maori leader John Ta-mihere. John Tamihere and Don are connected by Aperahama Taitaiko-ko- Ta-mihere, the vicar of Tu-pa-roa from 1901- 1909. He was JT’s great-great grandfather, and Don’s great-great-great grandfather. JT’s nephew Regan Ta-mihere gifted Don with a taonga held for generations on their side of family: their tupuna-priest’s Bible. The next day, John reflected on the ordination: “If you score a try,” he said, “then the

If you score a try – then the whole tribe scores a try.

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Don celebrating his first Eucharist as a bishop.

whole tribe scores a try. “So yesterday, Don scored a try – and the whole tribe celebrated.” *

Bishops are usually ordained in cathedrals – then installed into the cathedra, or bishop’s chair. That’s not how they did things at Porourangi. The Rev Canon Morehu Te Maro just led Bishop Don to a slightly flasher wooden chair in the middle of the marquee. But for the Rev Chris Huriwai, that moment was deeply meaningful: “In that act, I saw Bishop Don coming into the fullness of his whakapapa.” The new bishop’s wha-nau and whakapono lines, he explained, “both converge in this place.” Canon Te Maro is one of Bishop Don’s “Papa’s”, in terms of family lineage and in terms of faith. Secondly, Bishop Don was being installed into the a-tea – the court in front of the wharenui – “which is where our people have always looked for preaching and for teaching.” Ultimately, says Chris, “he was being installed into his people”. “We were joking with one another beforehand: ‘All this rain… this is why we need cathedrals!’ “But actually, we wouldn’t want to do this anywhere else. “This is who we are as a ha-hi, and as a people.”

* * * We mentioned Tu-pa-roa earlier: Tu-pa-roa is east of Ruatoria, and it was one of the original parishes in Waiapu. When Aperahama Ta-mihere died in 1909, Tu-pa-roa parish was amalgamated with its neighbouring parish, Whareponga – the vicar of which was Archbishop Brown’s namesake, the Rev Brown Tu-rei, snr. The new combined parish was called Hikurangi, and Brown Tu-rei snr6 was its first vicar. Don Ta-mihere was declared elected as the next Pihopa o Te Taira-whiti on December 20, 2016. He went up to Gisborne Hospital to tell the man he’d served for 20 years. Archbishop Brown was delighted – and quipped that a Tu-rei had once followed in the footsteps of a Ta-mihere… And now a Ta-mihere would succeed a Turei. 1. That hill is called: Kainanga (Kai-Īnanga = lit. “eat whitebait”). 2. Late in life Sir Apirana also helped bring Te Paipera Tapu – the Bible translation that’s the King James of the Māori world – into being. Sir Apirana was, said Bishop Wiremu Panapa later, “the mind and the spirit soaring above the whole work.” 3. Pine Tamahori. 4. Sir Apirana became Bishop Bennett’s “powerful supporter and ally,” says Don. 5. Traditional knowledge. 6. He died in 1912, aged just 28, of typhoid fever.

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OVERSEAS AID

Gillian Southey from Christian World Service has a challenge for Kiwi Christians.

Will you take the refugee ration challenge?

n response to the urgent needs of displaced Syrian families, Christian World Service has launched a new fundraiser: Operation Refugee. The CWS campaign sits against the backdrop of Syria’s bitter war, which has forced more than five million refugees onto Syria's neighbours: Turkey, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon and Jordan. Inside Syria, another 6.3 million are displaced and 13 million rely on humanitarian assistance to survive. In Jordan, where CWS partner DSPR1 works, there are 650,000 registered Syrian refugees and 60,000 from Iraq. But even as the Syrian crisis worsens, governments and NGO agencies are being forced to withdraw refugee services due to lack of funds. As a result, refugee families face cuts in their children’s rations, schooling and medical care, and many underaged youths are forced into work or premature marriages. As the war continues, refugee services in Jordan must rely on global supporters to help their Syrian refugee populations survive.

In 2016, CWS launched Operation Refugee, where challenge takers raise funds and awareness on the Middle East refugee crisis, and pledge to live on refugee rations for five days. This year’s challenge runs from June 16-20 with the first 150 to join receiving a food box containing beans, lentils, flour, fish (or more pulses) salt and vegetable oil to add to their own rice for the five-day stretch. Last year’s Operation Refugee trial boosted the CWS Syria Appeal by $40,000 – enough to pay for 566 emergency family food parcels or 1600 medical check-ups. This year we aim to double that figure. “It was an awesome and humbling experience for me to participate in this very noble cause.” says Charmaine, one of 73 Kiwis who signed up last year. “Living on these rations gave me a new appreciation for what we have, and what to be thankful for.” she said. Operation Refugee challengers join online at: www.cwsoperationrefugee. nz. There, they can download resources, and design a fundraising page to invite

supporters. School students taking part in Operation Refugee can choose the two-day ‘Operation Lite’ challenge, and when fundraising dollar totals are met, challenge-takers can add extras to their Operation Refugee diet. Churches not taking on the challenge can pray for refugees and mark their Christian responsibility to their care on Refugee Sunday, 2 July 2017. CWS resources for Refugee Sunday are due out soon. Gillian Southey is Communications Coordinator for Christian World Service. gillian.southey@cws.org.nz Notes 1. CWS partner, DSPR (The Department of Service to Palestinian Refugees) has worked with Palestinian refugees since it was set up by a coalition of churches in 1948. Today it also cares for Syrian and Iraqi refugees. 2. Operation Refugee funds will go to provide refugees with: emergency food parcels or rental support, free medical check-ups, health workshops, children’s schooling and recreation days, and micro-enterprise training for women.

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Y O U N G A D U LT S

What passion drives your When Spanky Moore did a pre-Lent spiritual survey with a faithful team of young Anglicans, he was in for a shock.

When it comes to faith no question should be off limits.

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bove my desk sits a reproduction of one my favourite pieces of Christian art: a painting from 1601 by the Italian painter Caravaggio. It’s called ‘The Incredulity of Saint Thomas’ aka, ‘Tom the Cynic’. Thomas is the disciple who famously wanted proof that Jesus was back from the dead, and demanded he stick his finger into Jesus' wounds. He's the original 'Doubting Thomas,' and he's one of my favourites. I love how gruesome the painting is. I imagine Thomas squishing his finger into Jesus’ wound, and the fragments of

bone and flesh oozing. I wonder if halfway through his finger test Thomas felt a twinge of regret? Like when we ask our friends to show us their mountain biking gash, and then quickly wish we hadn’t. I love how the other disciples are looking on with such interest, as if they wished they’d had the bravado to ask Jesus for a prod. But the main reason I love this painting, is because it reminds me that when it comes to faith, no question should be off limits. No belief should escape the right to be prodded. But at the same time, it reminds me that our faith is grounded in something real, something that leads us to conviction

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Who are you Good News for? Things started getting tense upon the second question. One told me they “tried to let people cut in front of me during bad traffic,” while another said he would “do my best not to swear too much, or steal pencils from work like the other employees do.” Now, I’m not sure this was quite the radical lifestyle that Jesus had in mind. But hey, it was something.

No wonder they think good biscuits are as good as God gets.

Where have you known the Good News in your life?

life? and courage. After all, this moment in the upper room is the central point that we as Easter Sunday people say changed everything. Right?

The big three questions A few months back I decided to ask a bunch of Anglican young adults three questions about the gospel, as a sort of Lenten spiritual check-up: What would you say the Good News is? How are you Good News to other people? Have you experienced the Good News as being Good News in your own life? They met the first question with the most confidence. A series of mumbles came back, words like: Jesus, God, love, community and biscuits. Not great, but not terrible either (depending on the kind of biscuits of course).

But it was the answer to the third question – or lack of one – that really caught me off guard. With almost every person I asked, there came a deafening, awkward silence. After about 30 seconds one looked me straight in the eye and asked, “Ahhh, what do you mean?” Many in the church have been questionasking and hand-wringing lately about why millennials and young people seem so hesitant about mission, ministry and the church. I wonder if these three questions might give us a clue to a problem lurking beneath the surface? From my experience, it’s pretty clear that sharing the good news of Jesus with their friends isn’t something most Anglican millennials (which, at 36, is a club I only just scrape into) get passionate about. It’s true - most have a deep desire to seek justice in the world, but for many of them that impulse doesn’t flow out of a deep conviction rooted in the Good News of Jesus, but more often from the ethical cues they absorb from popular culture. And yet for past generations it was this conviction, that the good news of Jesus was literally good news for everyone - that saw CMS missionaries come to Aotearoa, saw thousands of church communities planted all over New Zealand, and saw money poured into youth groups and food banks. That’s just what the Good News did to people. It made them do crazy things. So after hearing the answers to those three questions, here’s my conclusion: before we will be willing to share the Good News of Jesus to the world, each of us has to have experienced the Good News as being good for ourselves. After all - how can we share something that we don’t even have? Yet many of the ways Anglicans have approached sharing the good news has been about head knowledge – which isn’t

all bad, of course. But a lot of the younger people I talk to sound a bit like pirates looking for elusive buried treasure. If they could just hear that one special sermon, or attend that one life-changing Bible study - then they would finally have the missing link to enable them to go into the world with confidence and conviction. But I’ve seen too many young people stuck waiting for that mythical missing last piece of information. All this begs the question, are we intentionally offering our young people opportunities to experience God and his Good News as being profoundly, lifechangingly, problematically Good? Or have we spent all our time focusing on Orthodoxy (right thinking), and Orthopraxy (right actions) while ignoring Orthopathos (right passions)? I know I have. Because if we haven’t had the courage to stick our own finger in Jesus’ wounds, to become convinced by his scars for ourselves, and then had that experience profoundly change us in a way that oozes out of us with passion… well, it’s no wonder that some people think good biscuits is as good as God gets. So this Eastertide, can I invite you to take the space to ask yourself: How have I really experienced the Good News as being Good News in my life? And have I shared passionately with a young person how that experience has changed my life? I pray your answer involves more than Tim Tams. Rev Joshua (Spanky) Moore is University of Canterbury chaplain and works in young adult ministry for the Diocese of Christchurch. spankymoore@gmail.com

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Te Ahi Kaa: Bishop Richard keeps the home fires burning If it wasn't for what happened at Onuku – there mightn't be a Treaty of Waitangi

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About 400 wellwishers made the trek out to Onuku Marae on January 21 to tautoko the ordination1 of Bishop Richard Wallace, who is now the new Pihopa o Te Waipounamu. Onuku is a meandering five kilometre drive onwards from Akaroa township towards the heads of Akaroa Harbour, and the marae is a stone’s throw from the harbour’s edge.

During the ordination, two cruise ships stood at anchor offshore. As Lloyd Ashton has been learning, an earlier ship, standing offshore like those two luxury liners, forever changed Kai Tahu’s fate – and shaped the course of New Zealand history.

ANGLICAN TAONGA

Bishop-elect Richard Wallace and his wife Mere walk on to Onuku Marae. Mere is holding hands with Susan Tito, who is Richard’s elder sister.

The assembled bishops prepare to ordain Richard.

EASTERTIDE 2017

It was time, they decided, to nuku – to move away.

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Bishop Richard pronounces the blessing. Pihopa hou - Richard Wallace, the newly ordained Pihopa o Te Waipounamu.

But when he and Mere started a family of their own, they’d go back to Onuku every summer, to swim, picnic, relax — and “to visit our people in the urupa.” There were few buildings out there in Richard’s early days. Just the wee church, and a couple of run-down houses. In the 1980s, though, Henare Robinson, who was the head of the Onuku runaka at the time, started talking about building a wharekai. So the whanau fund-raised. They raffled chooks, they scrimped and saved — and in the late 1980s, Richard Wallace, by now a deacon, took part in the pre-dawn ceremony to watea, or bless, land set aside for the wharekai. In February 1990, Ta Paul Reeves and the

Rev Richard Wallace blessed the opening of Puhirere3. The people then turned to the building of a whare tupuna, and in February, 1997, Rev Richard also took part in the blessing and opening of Karaweko.4 Today, Karaweko is the only fully-carved whare tupuna on Banks Peninsula. Te Maiharanui is the tekoteko with the shining eyes atop the house, and his wife Te Whe and daughter Roimata are represented in the pare (or lintel) at the entrance to the house. In the late 1990s Richard was living and ministering in Nelson5. In 1998, though, he was back at Onuku — to hear Jenny Shipley read the Crown’s formal apology for its breaches of the Treaty. *

He's determined to revitalise Te Waipounamu.

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Bishop Richard has barely had time to put his feet under the desk. But his priorities are clear: he’s determined to bring restoration and revitalisation to Te Wai Pounamu. First things first, he says. “I need to stabilise ministry here.” “I want to identify those who can lead ministry. And to start some training. We’ll do that in a team, and it’s about slowly building up that team. “I have identified someone who is going to re-establish the rangatahi around us, and to bring them into ministry.

“I now have someone who is restarting a Sunday school here at Te Wai Pounamu Centre. I’ll be encouraging that to happen in the other areas, too. And I’m spending a lot of time meeting with people.” In his candidate statement, Richard had pledged to leave his Hokitika home, and move across to Christchurch by April. But he decided that too much needs doing for him to stick with that timetable. So in February, he moved into a flat at the Te Waipounamu centre. His wife — Archdeacon Mere Wallace — was due to join him in April, and life will be complete when Mere makes that move. Well, almost complete. “One of the things we’ve done forever,” he says, “is to have grandchildren living with us. Great grandchildren, too. “I really miss that. “So I’m trying to entice them to come too.” Tutira mai, nga iwi Tatou, tatou e! Lloyd Ashton is Media Officer for this Church. mediaofficer@anglicanchurch.org.nz

Notes 1. Bishop Richard was installed as Pihopa o Te Waipounamu the next day, Sunday January 22, at the Te Waipounamu Centre in Phillipstown, in Christchurch. 2. Richard Rangi Wallace was born at Little River on September 23, 1945. His hapu are Kati Huirapa; Kati Irakehu; Kati Mahaki ki Makaawhio, and Kai to Ruahikihiki. His iwi ties are Waitaha; Kati Mamoe and Kai Tahu. 3. The wharekai was named after Amiria Puhirere, who died in 1944. In April last year a swish new wharekai — also named Puhirere — was opened, and Bishop Richard’s ordination hakari was held there. 4. Named after the Ngai Tarewa chief Karaweko who, as a youth, was among those taken prisoner from Takapuneke. 5. He served there both as Maori Missioner to Whakatu, and as a chaplain in Nelson Hospital.

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CHURCH HISTORY

Shutterstock.com/ Elenarts

Otago University church historian Dr Tim Cooper digs into a 500 year-old triad of theological bugbears to find out how they might shape us today. According to Tim, if we understand the Reformation better, it can tell us why Christians like us – with a western church inheritance – still think, believe and argue the way we do.

Giant statues of the Geneva Reformers peer down the centuries: L-R Guillaume Farel, Jean Calvin, Théodore de Bèze and John Knox, with Luther in the wings.

500 T

his year marks 500 years since the Protestant Reformation began, when Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the church door in Wittenberg, on 31 October 1517. Due to an explosive combination of personality, print and politics, that event triggered a challenge to the western Catholic Church’s authority that left it irreparably fractured. 500 years is a very long time. But the more I teach church history, the more I recognise the pull of the past on our own mental furniture. The Reformation continues to shape

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years on: Is the Reformation still pulling our strings? the thinking of many Christians who might know next to nothing about the Reformation itself. When we hear Martin Luther declare, ‘I consider myself convicted by the testimony of Holy Scripture, which is my basis; my conscience is captive to the Word of God’ many modern Christians can almost hear our own voices. His voice has become ours. I can see the Reformation’s after-effects at work in three main areas of our thinking today: Firstly, it crouches behind the matter of salvation.

In his words, modern Christians can almost hear our own voices.

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...we feel the need to put stakes in the ground...

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The International Monument of the Reformation looms large in Geneva city.

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HURUNUI-KAIKOURA QUAKES

ministry Five months on, joint PresbyterianAnglican churches in both centres are still ministering to exhausted and money-stressed families, many of whom face winter without the basics back in order. In March, Taonga editor Julanne Clarke-Morris spoke with the vicar of Awatere, Rev Dawn Daunauda, whose flock takes in Seddon, Ward, Kekerengu and the Awatere Valley, and with Rev Colin Price, minister in charge of Amuri parish and its churches in Culverden, Rotherham and Waiau.

We're finding a mixture of exhaustion and hope.

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t was the rudest of midnight awakenings for Hurunui and Awatere people on November 14: a jolt that broke Geonet records and redrew the coastal landscape. But local church communities quickly took stock, then swung into action: checking on neighbours, clearing debris, and helping to salvage broken belongings. In the days that followed, churchgoers supported Civil Defence compounds, applied first aid, housed homeless farm workers, organised community gatherings and offered many a listening ear. The 7.8 earthquake, which was many times more powerful than Christchurch’s worst, was a case of déjà vu for both regions, after the shakes in Christchurch (in 2011) and Seddon (2013). For Dawn Daunauda, sole clergy person living in Awatere, the earthquake totally upended her daily schedule. “Now I spend a lot of my time juggling requests and referrals: Who is in need? Who is OK?” she says. “Because people know me, I’ve become a co-ordinator of community care. “It’s a privilege to be a go-to person but it’s a weight to carry, too.” In North Canterbury, Colin Price’s pastoral brief includes Waiau’s centuryold All Saints’ Anglican Church, which is seriously damaged and so red-zoned. The little stone church is not the only casualty. Faults run under many of Waiau’s public amenities, so cordons have closed off the scout den, Plunket rooms, bowling club and public swimming pool.

It has strengthened his faith.

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For now, Waiau folk gather with Amuri parishioners in St Mary’s Rotherham. L-R: Ian Lackey, Fay Preston, John Beaven, Brent Tamatea, Colin Salkeld, Chris Scarlett, Diane Norrie, Marten Satterthwaite, Rev Colin Price, Gail Kenyon, Liz Teulon, Zara Leslie and Gwen Beaven.

A dozen Waiau churchgoers now must drive 13km to Rotherham, to worship in St Mary’s Anglican Church, a sturdy wooden structure built in 1917. Most farmers in Waiau and Ward have significant damage to land and property, which came on top of a three-year drought. “We’re finding a mixture of exhaustion and hope,” Colin says. “People are very tired. “Resilience is under threat from financial stress, aftershocks, EQC and insurance worries.” But many folk can fall back on a bigger perspective, Colin adds. “Some can remember the five-year drought of the ‘70s, or the 1992 snowstorm that wiped out a whole season’s lambs.” So they’ve survived tough stuff before, even though the November quake is still testing everyone. Amuri parish has diocesan friends who know too well what earthquakes bring. So when North Canterbury Archdeacon Lynette Lightfoot called for relief funds, Cantabrians dug deep. Their goal: to help struggling North Canterbury families underwrite school costs for their kids. Now, with help from Christchurch’s Transitional Cathedral and its visitors, the

diocese has raised money for school fees, stationery, sports or camp fees, and exam costs. Around Waiau, people are still camped in caravans, with no sign of getting home before 10deg frosts bite. In southern Marlborough, vicar Dawn Daunauda and Awatere’s parish nurse, Rachael Westenra, both see people’s money running thin. Normal living costs don’t disappear after earthquakes, says Dawn, so with all the new expenses there’s little room to move. “It’s alright to say you have insurance, but the excess payments can be crippling. Especially in places like Seddon and Ward, where the last payout was only three years ago. “Excess bills can run from $300 on broken household goods to $200,000 on a large-scale agri-business. That affects everyone.” In Amuri some families face insurance companies back pedalling on emergency home repairs, or the prospect of legal fees before they can reach settlements. “No one has anything to spare,” Dawn says.

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Amuri parishioners head out of the still intact St Mary’s Church in Rotherham on Palm Sunday 2017.

All Saints’ Anglican Church: now broken and redzoned like many of Waiau’s public amenities.

The Department of Internal Affairs has a fund to meet urgent needs – if you can do the paperwork. With Dawn’s help, Rachael got one of her post-operative cancer patients a new bed from that pot. In Waiau, regional councillors have bought emergency housing units from Christchurch to shelter people over winter. Of course, all this financial stress hits church offertories hard, too. And neither stipends nor church expenses can be met from government earthquake relief.

But there’s no lack of need for what the church has to offer. Pastoral care is at a premium. Some folk are even turning to the church, and to God, for the first time. In Ward, Dawn has welcomed new faces to church on Sundays. “These might be people who have earthquakes waking them every night, right under their homes. Then there’s their daily work, and earthquake dealings on top of that. They’ve got no energy left. “They have heard scriptures that speak of the peace that passes all understanding. “They’re coming looking for that peace – they know they need it.” But others of the flock have scattered. One church family had moved to the Hurunui to escape the Christchurch quakes, only to be shaken again in 2013. For them, last November’s 7.8 was the limit. In Seddon and Ward, broken buildings and closed roads wrecked local businesses, costing some parishioners their jobs. They had no choice but to

They are coming looking for that peace...

move on. But those who remain are searching for ways to stay resilient. For one Amuri parishioner, the November earthquake has actually turned into an epiphany. “It has really strengthened his faith,” Colin Price says. “He has been energised by what needs to be done to help others. “His response reminded me of what C. S. Lewis once said, God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains.” In Awatere, many of the faithful are digging deeper. “You know something is happening when people start going to the Bible looking for earthquakes,” Dawn says. “It’s

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Dawn Daunauda packs hampers at St Peter's Ward with help from Bex Sinclair and Rob Cameron.

Dealing with the trauma loop Awatere CJV warden Dr Rob Cameron says recovery from the November earthquake has an unlikely ally: the 2013 shakes. “We no longer expect that things are going to get better quickly. “That takes the pressure off; we can just plod on.” That approach has long-term benefits, according to the people bringing government-funded psycho-social support to Awatere. Southern Marlborough has gained the help of a child psychologist, doctor and nurse, as well as visits from trauma expert Rob Gordon. Top of page: Awatere CJV parishioners put on a community barbeque to welcome Bishop Richard Ellena three weeks on from the 7.8 quake. Above: Bishop Richard of Nelson checks out earthquake damage south of Kekerengu.

surprising how many are there. “They are looking for scripture which talks about holding on in difficult times. “People are looking for hope.” They’ve turned to their Anglican and Presbyterian whanau for resources, too. It’s a relief to draw on others’ ideas, Dawn says, because clergy in the region are tired, too. And that heaviness can sap creativity for ministry. This year Awatere CJV followed Lenten studies from the Theology House series Risk: Through Lent with Acts. “That study was great for us,” Dawn says. “It was talking about living with risk: being brave, being courageous, being full of hope. “And it said, God has not abandoned you, God knows you and loves you. “That’s the kind of message that is going to get us through the long haul Page 18

ahead.” Colin Price reckons the long vision is what his people need to draw on, too. “We say that country people are resilient, but it’s about Christian maturity as well. “They know they are part of a bigger story. “They know that disasters and stress come with life. “And they have the confidence that, with God’s help, they will see their way through.” Note 1. Gifts towards ministry in Amuri Cooperating Church can made online to: Diocese of Christchurch, A/C: 06-0821-0009491-00, subject line: Amuri EQ. To lend a hand to Awatere Christian Joint Venture donate to: Diocese of Nelson A/C: 06-0705-001214002, subject line: Awatere CJV.

Rob's field is trauma physiology, and he’s well practised after helping Australians recover from wildfires and floods. “He was really good at making stressed people feel like we were normal,” Dawn Daunauda says. “He explained what adrenalin and cortisol were doing to our bodies, both during the 7.8 and with each aftershock that comes around.” Rob also explained why it’s so easy to feel dogged by constant anxiety. “It was reassuring to hear that our bodies’ chemical reactions can tell us why we’re feeling the way we’re feeling,” Dawn says. “People can get stuck in their crisis response – what Rob calls the ‘reptilian response’. “That’s when we struggle to move on, and instead keep looping back into the emergency state again and again.” So listening for that loop is another skill in Dawn’s toolkit for when the experts go home.

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BOOKS

VOLKNER AND MOKOMOKO: A 150 YEAR QUEST FOR JUSTICE AND RECONCILIATION

ANGLICAN CHURCH IN AOTEAROA, NZ & POLYNESIA, $ 25.00 PLUS P&P GENSEC@ANGLICANCHURCH.ORG.NZ KATENE ERUERA

EARLE HOWE

arle Howe’s Volkner and Mokomoko: A 150-year quest for justice and reconciliation is a short and readable book that provides an Anglican perspective on a well-known episode from the New Zealand Land Wars. The book begins with an integrated account of two famous 1865 deaths: of CMS missionary Carl Volkner, and Mokomoko of Nga-ti Patu, who was one of those convicted and executed for Volkner’s murder. Earle Howe1 wrote the book after a request from Hiona St Stephen’s Opotiki

VÖLKNER AND MOKOMOKO A 150 year quest for justice and reconciliation

A 150 year quest for justice and reconciliation

BY EARLE HOWE

vestry, who asked for an updated record of their church: the church that Volkner had established, and in whose grounds he was Earle Howe is Priest-in-charge at St Thomas’ buried. Church, Whitford. He has served in parishes in Taranaki and Auckland. A former The first Waikato, chapters deal with Christianity’s Bicultural - Educator for the Anglican Church, he has arrival in O potiki, then Carl Volkner’s authored several articles and books, including life, Bring Me Justice, his previous work on Carl and an account of his execution and its Völkner and Mokomoko. He is President of the Historical Society. settler aftermath from Anglican a contemporary perspective. Then it follows with the arrest and trial of Mokomoko, and the subsequent confiscations of Ma-ori land. The text brings us through to the present via commemorations of Volkner’s death at St Stephen the Martyr, the late 20th century return of Mokomoko’s remains, the 1970s-80s lectionary debates over Volkner, and background on the 2013 Crown pardon for Mokomoko. The author describes these events in a neutral tone, and while in places he revisits historical records in great detail, Howe neither judges nor assesses the facts, taking care to fairly span scholarly opinion. The book stands as a record of the

VÖLKNER AND MOKOMOKOA

Revisiting the story: Mokomoko and Volkner

EARLE HOWE

bicultural journey of reconciliation between Ma-ori and Pa-keha- in this one parish, and as a local history with no assumptions about right or wrong over the deaths of Volkner and Mokomoko. This may well be a correct interpretation for current theological thinking in a Three Tikanga Church, which takes seriously bicultural partnership between Ma-ori and Pa-keha-. The book does however highlight the violence of warfare in the 1800s: and the pain of injustice, noting how the consequences of decisions and actions would impact on generations to come. To finish, the author describes a commissioned pare (door lintel) at Hiona St Stephen’s Church, which was unveiled on Easter Day 2014. It depicts both Volkner and Mokomoko exchanging a hongi – to symbolise reconciliation. This hopes to serve as a model of hope for the future of bicultural journeys, renewed in the light of justice and reconciliation. I hope many people with an interest in Aotearoa New Zealand’s history will read this book. Earle Howe’s study expands our historical record, and demonstrates a local church’s desire to make biculturalism a concrete expression of its faith journey. The Rev Katene Eruera is the Dean of Tikanga Māori at the College of St John the Evangelist, Auckland. k.eruera@stjohnscollege.ac.nz Note 1. Author of Volkner and Mokomoko, the Rev Earl Howe, is an Anglican Priest, a former bicultural educator for the Anglican Church, and president of the Anglican Historical Society.

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PUBLIC THEOLOGY

Eleanor Sanderson with her friend Scotte in Tanzania.

Rising from dust to

resurrection

According to Eleanor Sanderson, when we centre our lives on Jesus and are grounded in the dust of local communities, we’re on our way to the Kingdom.

Caring for families quickly becomes a radical task in the face of war, poverty and disease.

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ach year we enter Lent with the words, ‘Remember O mortal you are dust, and to dust you shall return.’ That familiar phrase calls us back into communion: with God, the earth, and the people to whom we belong. Mission begins where we stand, and we must look to the soil of our context before we plant our theological roots. When North Atlantic and British theologians first articulated ‘public theology,’ they spoke as academics, directing their critiques toward the world’s political and economic elites. But when majority world theologians raised their voices, they argued from the margins: from grassroots missions among city slums or peasant farmers. So now, public theology must be a conversation between the halls of power and voices from the periphery – as women, indigenous and majority world Christians articulate God’s call on their lives.

This shift from centre to edge resonates across the Anglican Communion, and within our three-tikanga Church. Many Anglicans living among the poor now locate the sins of exploitation and unequal wealth distribution in the heart of their theology. These commentators no longer allow God’s justice to slip on to the fringes of church debate. No wonder that on return from his first Communion-wide pilgrimage as Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby proclaimed the Anglican Church as “a church of the poor, and for the poor.” *

I saw the value of theology at the periphery in Tanzania in the early 2000s. There, I studied Anglican women leaders in the Mothers’ Union who wove their lives with ministry to the last, the lost and the least. These women’s common pledge to care for families had formed them into the

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Mother's Union leader Mama Nora stands outside her home with a fellow MU member.

backbone of society. The MU mission begins with a very simple call – to care for families’ material and spiritual needs. But that quickly becomes a radical task in the face of war, poverty, family violence and disease. Mothers’ Union members carry out their mission in everything from health care and literacy training, to microenterprise start-ups – where sewing or miniature farming lifts families out of poverty. Each of these women also ministered in their own homes. Many ran households that cared for an extra child or children – orphans whose parents were dead from HIV-AIDS or other diseases, or because of the Rwandan genocide. “Our hearts are our homes, and our homes are our hearts,” was the phrase these women used to define their call from God. But that sweet-seeming phrase contained a caution, “Beware: if your home is not open, then your heart is not open either.” The women’s vision of family meant becoming family for those who had none, even if that stretched their own resources to meet others’ needs. As a result, their families grew wider. And the Kingdom of God grew. *

The Tanzanian Mothers’ vision stands in sharp contrast to the “us not them” divides of BREXIT and the new American presidency. Nations are blocking borders and building walls, rather than communing with others. Everywhere, it seems, homes and hearts are closing tighter. How do we respond? From where we are planted. As Anglicans, we connect and commune in the local parish, the place that holds us to the dust. Parishes are not only congregations, but places of calling, rootedness and mission. That local dust is our foothold for seeking a new creation in communion with Christ. That is our calling. As we give of ourselves, and receive from others in genuine communion, with

Eleanor lines up with her Eastbourne parish extended family of discipleship and mission. Celebration time in Tanzania.

God’s help we will transform all whom our community enfolds. This transforming mission in local communities is what Anglican churches in the Diocese of Wellington are seeking to grow. We draw on new models of ministry as Christ-centred community, such as locally-grown Urban Vision, and overseas examples like 3DM (3-dimensional ministries) from Sheffield in the UK. The first step is to form hubs of Anglican Christians who will opt for ‘intentional mission’ through their homes and families. In Wellington, one two-household family hub is forming as a support base to foster at risk teenage boys within a suburban parish. The Blueprint church hub pioneers work amongst urban youth and through their four intentional homes, where Christian teams live alongside those they support. Our Diocesan Anglican Youth Ministry (AYM) work is anchored through intentional AYM houses who live with a daily rhythm of prayer and community. In Eastbourne parish, we gather young Kiwi and ex-pat families for regular social times in four core families’ homes. In only a year since it began, that group has already grown into an extended family.

Beware: if your home is not open, then your heart is not open either.

Whenever our mission leads to healthier and better communities, our work as followers of Jesus is done. Sometimes others see what we’re doing, and want to be part of it. Sometimes they decide to give church a try. We know that in many places the Anglican Church suffers from serious decline. But new life appears whenever we focus on mission and spirituality that will renew our communities. At these missional edges, the Holy Spirit enlivens our Communion and our thinking. Often, as we converse and commune between the centre and the edges, we find the recreating life of the Kingdom begins to unfold. Rev Dr Eleanor Sanderson is Assistant Bishop-Elect of Wellington and currently serves as vicar of St Alban’s, Eastbourne.

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RELIGIOUS LIFE

Called to witness

and prayer

We become a visible sign of a life lived for God.

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CSN Visiting Bishop Victoria Matthews and CSN Warden the late Rev Andrew Starky, line up with Sister Veronika and sisters from the Community of the Sacred Name. Photo: Patrina Cheer.

Most of all I loved the prayer life.

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B I C U LT U R A L L I F E

Mummy, is there apartheid in New Zealand? Adrienne Thomson works on how to live as a reconciling Pakeha in Aotearoa New Zealand today.

I gained a glimmering of an understanding that theft could be legal.

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rowing up in India, New Zealand represented my promised land. It was always summer. There were ice-cream, beaches and fish’n’chips, loving, lavish relations, no beggars, and no rubbish in the streets. Paradise! When I was about ten, one of the senior classes in our school put on a play based on Alan Paton’s famous book, ‘Cry, the Beloved Country.’ It was my introduction to the concept of discrimination based on race. My thoughtful, loving parents talked about it, and how wrong it was. I knew that the Ma-ori people had been the first in New Zealand. So, I asked my question. “Mummy, is there apartheid in New Zealand?” “No, darling, certainly not. The

Maori people and the white people are absolutely equal!” She believed it implicitly. I believed her implicitly. When I started university in New Zealand at the age of 18, I studied history. Medieval European history of course, like all the other first years. I also did French, and English Literature. It never entered my head to read New Zealand authors, far less to learn the Ma-ori language. If there were Ma-ori students in any of my classes, I didn’t identify them. In October 1975, the great Hikoi, the long land march arrived in Wellington. I deeply regret that I chose not even to witness, let alone to participate in that historic event. I was timid. None of my Christian friends were involved, so it probably wasn’t right to go. I was detached. It

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Adrienne Thompson (front right) lines up with her fellow students at the Ngāti Kahungunu Kura Reo in Masterton, 2016.

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Above all, I can learn from the stories of real people.

seemed to have nothing to do with me. Above all, I was uninformed. I had little idea why they marched. Something to do with the land and history… In 1978 I was involved in an Auckland church located a stone’s throw from Bastion Point. I visited the protestors. For the first time, I read a little New Zealand history. For the first time, I gained a glimmering of an understanding that theft could be legal, and Acts of Parliament could be acts of injustice. And then I left New Zealand again and stayed away for 20 years. Since my return, I’ve begun to try and live within the complex story of Aotearoa. How do l relate to the history I inherit? How do I respond to it as a disciple of Jesus? What does it mean to seek reconciliation? Reconciliation has the basic meaning of ‘restoring friendly relations’. How this is done on a national and institutional level is deeply important. It affects how we vote, what protests or petitions we make to parliament, what we teach in schools, how we make decisions in churches or work places. But while not forgetting the significance of that work, what I’m wrestling with is my individual response. I’m not personally guilty of injustices that robbed Ma-ori of their land and language. But I am also the inheritor and beneficiary of many of those acts. One set of my great-great-grandparents arrived in Dunedin in 1882, a few months after the destruction of Parihaka village. At that time prisoners from Parihaka were bonded in slave labour constructing the streets of that city. Later, relatives of mine settled in Wellington, profiting, as I do today, from the ruthless success of the New Zealand Company. So, what do I do? Feeling guilty generally results in reacting defensively. I can rant angrily, or I can self-justify. Or I can blame others for failing to honour the Treaty. I would like instead to find ways to respond. I have three so far. My first is to learn. The history is all around me. It is there in books, buildings, monuments, on the internet, and above all, in the stories of real people. I heard one just recently at Passionfest. Hannah

Students relax during a residential course in Te Reo Māori at Wainuiomata Marae, 2016. Photo: Adrienne Thompson.

Chapman told us how her family land had been requisitioned in the 1960s. In my lifetime. In the living memory of her grandmother. A Treaty of Waitangi settlement was agreed in the 1990s. The land is still not returned to its owners. My second response is to study the reo. Last year I met a 79-year-old kuia who had heard and spoken Ma-ori as a child, but had lost it as she grew up. The truth is she was robbed. Robbed of her language, robbed of her birth right. Not just by the infamous policies that forbade it in schools, but by the overwhelmingly English-speaking world she lives in. There was and is almost nowhere for her to hear her language spoken, to hear its jokes and word-play, its insults and its compliments, and its commonplace conversations. By learning and using Te Reo I can do my tiny, tiny little bit to make Aotearoa a place where the injustice done to that woman and so many others can begin to be redressed. Thirdly, I am responding by listening to, and talking with Maori friends. To appreciate the hospitality with which they

share their language, land and culture. Gratefully, I enjoy the differences and similarities between us. I keep learning more about how to acknowledge the right of Ma-ori to occupy the cultural and spiritual space I so casually take for granted as mine. When I looked up ‘reconcile’ on Google it provided a second meaning: Reconcile: make (one account) consistent with another, especially by allowing for transactions begun but not yet completed. There is a hopeful feeling in that. Transactions between Ma-ori and Pakeha began more than 200 years ago, and are not yet completed. We have different accounts. There is real work of reconciliation to be done. And we may yet hope and strive to make our accounts consistent with one another here in Aotearoa. Adrienne Thompson is a spiritual director and professional supervisor in Wellington. She is involved in the Stillwaters Community and Wellington Central Baptist Church. lekhika@paradise.net.nz

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S P I R I T U A L I T Y & H E A LT H

John Bluck looks back on a season at the mercy of our public health system, and lauds the humble riches it helped him rediscover.

Hunkering down for a while

It was tunnel vision: one step after another.

Bishop John Bluck on the front porch at home in Northland.

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The year was also a crash course in the art of waiting. It was never my strongest point and I’m still an apprentice, even now. But when you depend on the public health system, there is nothing to do but wait. Arguing with staff that you are more deserving is a waste of time, especially when someone desperately ill is ahead of you in the queue. But when I did try, I was met with courtesy, patience and civility. In fact, the dedication and skill of medical and nursing staff was inspirational. They demonstrated the kind of vocation that I wish was more common in the church: feeling called to what they did and being able to enjoy doing it. They also showed me what the face of multi-cultural New Zealand will look like a generation from now, when Pakeha will be a minority. In Auckland’s hospitals, that complex reality has already arrived. And it works. The art of waiting goes beyond patience and grace. It’s about learning to live more fully, and gratefully, in the in-between space between life and death. It’s a space we all share, but one we only occasionally get jolted into being aware of, let alone appreciating. The appreciation part, of course, depends on whether you believe in a future at both ends of the life and death spectrum. If there is a single article of faith that’s kept me going of late, it's the conviction that my life is bound and buoyed up by the life of God in me. Holding onto that in the middle of the night makes all the difference in the world. And as I learn to wait for the life to come, in whatever way it will, I start to refine and re-order the life I already have: to make it simpler, less cluttered, more focused on whatever is just and lovely and gracious. In Paul’s words, “if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.” That advice is a whole lot better than dwelling on the rubbish that can fill your head when you’re sick. And better than filling your stomach with the bread of anxiety. I’ve used this waiting time to hold a clearance sale, and make room for better stock. The year has also helped me appreciate ordinary things anew; like the taste of fresh vegetables, and practical routines like driving a car or riding a lawn mower. So much of what I’ve had to learn or relearn is very simple. Lie still. Breathe deeply. Do these exercises five times daily. Eat these good things. Kiss Burger King

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It was precisely those familiar things that spoke afresh.

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CHILDREN

Annabel Howe from St Christopher’s Avonhead and Strandz Enabler Diana Langdon spell out their favourite ways to journey with children through Holy Week and Easter.

Putting kids first next Easter

npacking the Easter story for children can seem like a daunting task, particularly when Good Friday is filled with violence, pain, sorrow and death – all things we try to protect our children from. But if we don’t properly remember the events of this holy day, the joy and wonder of the resurrection can be robbed of its power. So how do we take our youngest disciples through Holy Week, without glossing over Good Friday, or leaping straight from Palm Sunday to Easter day?

Step one: know what you’re going to do The Easter story, and its mix of grace, hope, hurt, separation, redemption and restoration, is a vital part of our Christian faith. We cannot avoid it. But we need to plan ahead for age-appropriate ways to share this story. Some children will only visit a church at Easter. If that day is your annual sombre Good Friday service, then what will it show

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them about God? Don’t assume that children know the full story. Explain that while it’s hard, and sad, to spend time on the crucifixion, the story doesn’t end this way… Sunday is coming. Be prepared for children at all of your services. Be ready to paint the big picture for them: through pictures, multimedia, stories, handouts, prayer stations, drama or real life explanations. Look on the Strandz website for plenty of good intergenerational Good Friday service ideas.

Bring the story to life “But didn’t he just get born?” many children ask as Lent begins. From a child’s point of view we have just had Christmas. How come Jesus was only just born and now he is dying? We need to give children context, and take them through the Easter journey to show how the cross fits into Jesus’ whole life. Walk through Holy Week, a Barnabas online resource, helps connect the dots in a creative and active way. It unpacks each day based on core symbols: talking about Palm Day, Pigeon Day, Perfume Day, Parable Day and Passover Day, creates a rich and

meaningful experience for all ages.1 Don’t forget to personally invite children and families to your Maundy Thursday foot washing service to give them an insight into that part of the story. Annette Osborne, from Scripture Union New Zealand recommends we ground children in the Easter story by appealing to their senses, rather than leaving it in a land far away like in a fairytale. “What did it look like, smell like, sound like?” she asks, “Use background information, history, photographs, the gospel accounts and a little imagination to put flesh and bones on this story.” 2

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Connect the story with symbols Using symbols and metaphors of death and resurrection can help children unfold the Easter story. • Palm Sunday: a leaf, Jesus enters Jerusalem • Monday: small cup, last supper • Tuesday: coins, Judas’ betrayal • Wednesday: dice, soldiers cast lots for Jesus’ clothes • Maundy Thursday: thorn/toothpick, crown of thorns on Jesus’ head • Good Friday: Cross • Saturday: Stone • Easter Sunday: An Easter egg, or nothing – the tomb is empty Retell the story with the symbols hidden inside Holy Week boxes or resurrection eggs. Use fewer symbols for younger children, or add more to help older ones get inside the story. Or try seed planting, making an Easter garden, or telling the story with chalk drawings.3 Last year Samuel Marsden Collegiate School set up reflective prayer activities for ‘Stations of the Cross’ in their chapel, so that teenaged pupils could explore them through Holy Week.

Provide age-appropriate ways to take part Palm Sunday comes to life with a reenactment: try to find a real donkey, and add palm branches and scenery to help children and adults enter into Jesus’ arrival in Jerusalem. Keep sermons short and clear, with stories that help children stay with the message. Jargon or complex language tells children you are not speaking to them – so keep it simple. Test your talk on a child beforehand, taking care how you present the painful aspects of the Easter story. At St Christopher’s in Christchurch, they give out children’s packs at Palm Sunday and Easter services, which include treasures and activities for children. Easter activity packs are also a great idea for older congregants to share with children in their extended families.

Include children in your celebrations If young people feel a sense of ownership in events and activities, they will feel both welcomed and affirmed in what they have to offer.

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Ask young people to contribute art, photography or other media to make their own stations of the cross, or include them in your brainstorming for the Easter season. At St Christopher’s in Christchurch, they break a giant Easter egg to share after the Easter Sunday service, at their big Easter party, which includes a shared meal. Before the party, children come up and break off part of the Easter egg as a child-friendly form of remembrance. Whatever you do for Easter with children, be creative and ask the Holy Spirit to guide and lead your words as you reflect, talk and pray with them. Annabel Howe is Children and Families Coordinator at St Christopher’s Avonhead in Christchurch, and Diana Langdon is Enabler for Strandz, the children and family ministries hub of the NZ dioceses. diana@strandz.org.nz

1. http://www.barnabasinchurches.org.uk/walking-throughholy-week/ 2. SUNZ blog posts for all ages to read together and a downloadable booklet at childrenandfamiliesnz.blogspot.co.nz For more ideas on how to share Easter with children, see the Strandz website http://www.strandz.org.nz/lent--easter.html scroll down to find sections on Lent, Palm Sunday, Holy Week plus handy Youtube clips on Lent and Easter stories.

www.sunz.org.nz/way2go Page 29

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MISSION

The help is amongst us Lloyd Ashton has been talking with a young Christchurch couple, now serving in Uganda with CMS, whose lives are on fire for mission…

'Right. Let's do what Jesus said. For once.

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Nick and Tessa have taken on is running after-school tuition – she teaches English – he maths – in their own home. They got Kenneth turning up to those classes – and they found he’s a borderline genius.But Nick and Tessa could also see that Kenneth’s potential was being sabotaged at home. So Nick jacked up for his parents in Christchurch to sponsor Kenneth to go to a nearby boarding school. In the last term of 2016, Kenneth came 11th out of the 100 students in his year, having not been at school at all for the first two terms. Nick and Tessa stay in touch with Kenneth. “He’s an incredible kid,” says Nick, “and his demeanour has completely changed. He’s much happier now. He’s so resilient – and he smiles, he laughs, he talks. It’s an absolutely beautiful result.” *

He's an incredible kid. His demeanor has completely changed.

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Isaac, one of the Wakoye Kenwa group, celebrates the drilling of a new bore hole.

us through what He did – God bringing people to Him – and then working to bring people out of whatever struggle they’re caught in. That’s what we’d call mission, and we wanted to devote our lives to that.” And Uganda? Well, St Tim’s legends Ross and Pauline Eliot were influences there, says Tessa. They’d served in Uganda with CMS. Then, in 2008, which was Nick’s final year at Med School, he chose to do his three-month “elective” at an Anglican mission hospital in southern Uganda. Tessa decided she’d check Uganda out too. Working in that mission hospital was all Nick hoped it would be, and they both came away wanting to serve in Uganda. In 2010, their plans came into sharper focus. Tessa headed back to Uganda, on her own this time, to do field research for her master’s thesis. She’d been thinking deeply about forgiveness and reconciliation, and she’d begun talking with a lecturer in Canterbury’s Anthropology Department. “He said to me: ‘Don’t go to my area in Uganda. ‘Go to the north, where they’re emerging from a 20-year war.’ ” *

“Out of that,” says Nick, “came a thirst for God’s justice."

The guy in front is Norbert Mao, a local Acholi hero and opposition politician. He got in behind the drive to ban the sachets - and is celebrating here with Wakonye Kenwa members.

Nick and Tessa married in 2012, then linked up with CMS, and in 2013 they headed to Northern Uganda long term, to work among the Acholi people. Nick served his first year at a Catholic hospital in Lacor, which is now the second biggest hospital in Uganda with 700 staff, and 500 beds. Lacor Hospital was set up in the 1960s, by an Italian missionary doctor and his Canadian surgeon wife3. They’d kept that hospital going through the 1970s when it was caught in the crossfire between Idi Amin’s forces and supporters of the regime he overthrew. And they kept it going, and growing, when Northern Uganda slid into another deadly conflict between the Ugandan army and the Lord’s Resistance Army, led by Joseph Kony. That war started in 1986, and dragged on for 22 years. In its worst phases, 95% of rural people were forced to live in camps – while up to 15,000 people from Gulu moved into the walled hospital compound each night to escape the violence. The war ended in 2008. But its effects still loom large. “We’re only in the early stages of recovery,” says Nick. “There’s mental, emotional and spiritual trauma, and there are massive issues with land conflict.” *

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After his year at Lacor Hospital, Nick was asked by the Rt Rev Johnson Gakumba, the Anglican Bishop of Northern Uganda, to oversee eight rural diocesan health centres. “They each had between one and eight staff,” says Nick, “and they were all run by nurses, who had to deal with everything. It’s been a real joy working with them, trying to help them get better at treating patients.” At Nick’s instigation, they’ve opened two more clinics, and are about to open another two, including one on the border with South Sudan. In November last year, Gulu celebrated – with bishops en masse and brass bands – when Bishop Johnson opened St Philip’s mini hospital, not 50 metres from Gulu’s Anglican cathedral. St Philip’s opens a new world of possibilities. It’s got 25 rooms. Ten toilets. It’s wired for electricity. And it delivers on speed, quality – “we’ve got very stringent systems”, says Nick – and cost. You won’t find top-flite medical care cheaper than here. At St Philip’s, they started with outpatients, added maternity, and they’re on the cusp of offering inpatient care. Nick is looking forward to that step up – but feeling the responsibility, too. “When people show up at hospital here,” he explains, “they’re really sick.” He’s also nervous because Donald Trump plans to slash America’s foreign

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The Bible Study group from St Catherine's Gulu, meeting at Nick and Tessa's place. (Tessa at centre.) A brass band leads Gulu's religious leaders – Bishop Johnson Gakumba in front – in celebration of the passing of the sachet-banning bylaw.

There’s something else that patients can expect from their treatment at St Philip’s, and at those outlying health centres. That’s prayer. “We talk about God,” says Nick “and we pray with patients. Praying is recorded, the same way we record medical treatments.” “People are very, very open to prayer here, and I’m passionate about it. It’s good spiritually, it’s good emotionally, and it builds trust. There really are no down sides.” Nick admits to one other peculiarity, which sets him apart from many of his medical colleagues. That’s the fact that he’s not on the ladder of success. “I no longer have, as you might call it, a career path,” he says. “Because if you’re out of training for any period, then you’re writing off a high-flying medical career. “But that’s meaningless to me – it really is. “I mean, the Bible never talks about advancing your career. “I’m able to be a doctor, and I believe I’m where God wants me to be.” *

Nick’s work among the Acholi people of Northern Uganda is in the best traditions of the medical missionary. Tessa, on the other hand, is a pioneer. She had worked in Christchurch’s social justice unit with Jolyon White, and before she left for Uganda, and they’d been talking about ‘community organising’. “Which means drawing together people from a common area,” says Tessa, “helping them work through a process of identifying a local problem that they all care about. “Then going through a landscaping process: understanding the problem deeply, understanding what’s been tried before, what worked, what failed – and identifying one thing that’s achievable, that could make an impact on that problem. “Strategizing, and understanding who could help us fix it – and then working the plan through to completion. “I got really excited about that idea.” Three years ago, Tessa started to put theory into practice. She got talking to some people at St Catherine’s, and they set up a group they called: Wakonye Kenwa, which is Acholi for: ‘The help is amongst us.’ The first issue Wakonye Kenwa tackled was a severe lack of clean drinking water where some of their members lived. There was one contaminated spring in the area – people were forever getting crook – and there were far too many people spending far too long drawing water. Turns out that Lacor Hospital – the same

hospital that Nick had worked for – was the culprit. During that dragged-out war, when they were protecting vast numbers within their compound, they’d needed a sewage lagoon to deal with all the waste being generated – and that lagoon had fouled the water. “No-one’s blaming the hospital,” says Tessa. “That was a very urgent and desperate time. But they had promised to replace that water source, and their promise had got lost.” Over three days, members of Wakonye Kenwa sat by the spring and registered everybody who came by. They plotted their homes on a printout of a Google map, to show how many households depended on the spring, and how far they each had to trek. They negotiated. They persisted. And eventually the hospital drilled a new borehole – and the local government drilled a second borehole. That was a big win. *

Then, at the start of last year, Wakonye Kenwa decided to tackle heavy drinking. That’s a major problem here, with alcohol companies in far-off Kampala cashing in by saturating Gulu with cheap, 100ml sachets of 40 percent proof alcohol. No matter where you were in the town, you’d be within 200m of a place that sold sachets – and the results were devastating. So Wakonye Kenwa decided to go for a district law to ban sachet sales, and to Page 33

Shutterstock.com/ Dmitry Pichugin

aid budget by 30 percent – “and America pays for all of the HIV and malaria testing, treatment and management in Uganda.” “Malaria,” he explains, “is the number one, two and three problem here4.”

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Tessa and friends.

regulate alcohol packaging and sales. They gathered over 10,000 signatures for a petition. They got the local religious leaders on board. They kept the heat on the local government – till last June the Gulu District Council passed the bylaw. They kept pressing. They kept following up – and finally, last November, Kampala ratified the bylaw. Cue big celebrations in Gulu. Marquees. Brass bands. VIPs. Police escorts – and the District Commissioner, drilling the crowd on the enforcement start date, which was December 6. Tessa organised all that hoop-la. But given that she’s not into big productions, why did she bother? Because the law had already been passed, right? "Even if a law is approved by the Attorney General," she says, "and published in the national gazette, it can still result in absolutely no change. “People have to feel like it is their law. They have to feel like it’s worth it to kick up a massive fuss if they don’t see police enforcing the new law.” *

Over the next 60 hours they frantically worked their phones.

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Destined for the flames - the tip truck is about to dump some of the 307 boxes of sachets seized in a police raid. That's Tessa with the backpack.

Since December 6, the police have conducted one major enforcement operation. They seized 307 boxes of cartons, containing 40,000 sachets. But that operation – which generated headlines – generated serious pushback. The Minister of Trade in Kampala has been leaning, hard, on the authorities in Gulu to pull their law. Telling them a national law banning sachets is in the pipeline. Bribery is rampant in Uganda5, and Tessa fears the minister is on the take. She’s seen a draft of this long-promised law – and reckons it’s worthless, because it lacks comprehensive regulation about packaging. “We’ve already seen manufacturers shifting to packaging in very small plastic bottles, which are almost as cheap as sachets.” Things came to a head one day in January. Tessa got word that big shots from the ministry were heading to Gulu to insist the councillors row back on their ordinance. Over the next 60 hours she and her friends frantically worked their phones. Come the meeting, the venue was packed, and national TV was there. The minister’s chief representative tried to argue that the nation and Gulu were heading in the same direction – but he insisted Gulu had to wait. The tide began to turn in Gulu’s favour when the chairman invited the VIPs present –bishops, sheiks, chiefs, and local heroes, Wakonye Kenwa had rallied them all – to speak. They told of how Acholis had suffered through decades of war, and many had been driven to drink.

The grog companies just wanted to exploit their vulnerability, they said, and the ministry wanted to protect company profits at the expense of Acholi people. So how dare these Kampala pen pushers tell us Acholi to get rid of our law? “The meeting took on new dimensions,” says Tessa. “It became a matter of Acholi pride, and the protection of Acholi people – and it achieved something quite profound.” So, Wakonye Kenwa began 2017 with a heady sense of triumph – but no complacency. “We’re going to see this sachet issue right through to the end”, says Tessa. As for what they’ll do after the alcohol issue – well, that’s not her call. That’s something for Wakonye Kenwa to decide. And while the sachet ban is a big win, says Tessa, she’s stoked – perhaps above all – that community organising has delivered on its promise. It’s empowered the people. *

Nick and Tessa worship at St Catherine’s, Gulu. “We love our church so much,” says Nick. “It’s a huge source of life for us.” St Catherine’s runs two main services – English or Acholi – and Nick and Tessa especially love their Wednesday evening Bible studies. “Even if the week’s been hard,” says Nick, “we know that when we go to Bible study, we’re going to be lifted.” Then there’s the youth – which, in Uganda, means people under 30. They’re on fire, says Nick.

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Wakonye Kenwa and supporters take to the streets campaigning for the alcohol bylaw.

They show up at Wednesday’s Bible study, they pray and fast on Thursdays, they send prayer teams into Lacor Hospital every week – “and we can see four or five young people who have amazing leadership potential,” says Nick. “This is where the church is growing.” *

Nick and Tessa haven’t decided whether they’ll stay beyond the end of their present three-year stint. But this much is for sure. In the space of four years, they’ve delivered. Thousands have sampled the change Nick and Tessa have brought – whether in

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2013 shot – Nick and Tessa with Aringo Vicky, who was their first Acholi language helper.

their health, or their circumstances. None more so, perhaps, than the young man who tried to burn their home down, and run them out of town. None more so than young Kenneth. If you’d like to check out how Nick and Tessa’s story unfolds, they publish a blogsite called: UgandaPanda: https://ugandapanda.com/ 1. Nick and Tessa live in a thatched-roof hut on the edge of Lacor, which is a village 10 km from Gulu, the main town in the north. They’ve chosen to live as the villagers do. They have no plumbing – so no running water or flush loo – and they use a charcoal stove. Their chief addition is solar electricity, which they use to run lights, and charge their laptops. They don’t have a fridge or TV.

3. Piero Corti, and Lucille Teasdale-Corti. Lucille died in 1996 – of AIDs she’d contracted while operating – and Matthew Lukwiya, the doctor who’d taken over as Director of Lacor Hospital, died of Ebola in 2000, fighting an outbreak of Ebola, which killed 173 people. 4. Nick has contracted malaria three times. The first time, he says, he was a write-off for three weeks – unable to function because of fever and headaches. He’s learned to act “the minute I feel a bit funny in the head”. Last time he came down with malaria, he was off work for one day. And Tessa? She doesn’t get bitten. 5. New Zealand and Denmark were ranked the cleanest countries in the world in Transparency International’s Corruption Report for 2016. Uganda was ranked 151st.

2. The first language here is Acholi.

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IN MEMORIAM

Some 700 mourners poured on to Kauaetangohia Marae at Whangaparaoa on January 14 for Archbishop Brown Turei’s funeral. Lloyd Ashton has been catching the reflections of some of the key players at his tangi.

Mihinaretanga,

any a true word is spoken in jest. So: huakina mai nga tatau o te whare! cried Derek Lardelli1 at

Whangara. Which roughly means: ‘Open the gates!’ Archbishop Brown had lain in state

We have to dig deep, and be what our ancestors were.

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at its best

in Whangara for one night, as his tangi progressed north from the place of his death – Gisborne, on January 9 – to Whangaparaoa, which was the place of his birth 92 years earlier, and his final resting place. So: huakina mai nga tatau o te whare! Derek had called out, just before the cortege pulled out of Whangara. And if we teased out that phrase, we’d get something like: All you farmers and shepherds, open your farm gates – let the cattle out, and block Highway 35! Don't let them spirit that body away! Everybody at Whangara got the joke, that’s for sure. But maybe there is a serious point to be made here. Thirty minutes up the road, and the funeral cortege ground to a halt. Roadworks, perhaps? An accident? No: this was a blockade. A blockade of aroha, for sure. The parishioners at Mihaia, the Tikanga Maori Church at Tolaga, wanted to honour

Archbishop Brown because he’d served there as a young priest. And then, an hour’s journey north, the cortege bounced up the gravel driveway to Rahui, the marae across Highway 35 from St Mary’s Tikitiki. The local people wanted the cortege to stop there, too. The serious point about these stoppages, says Selwyn Parata, is that they were no sure things. Because no tangi for a person held in the esteem Archbishop Brown was would be complete without some contest for the tupapaku2. “You know we went to Whangara,” says Selwyn. “His daughter is buried there, and his wife is from there. “And they had all the reasons to stop us and keep him there.” Same story at Rahui, says Selwyn. “They had all the reasons to keep him there too – because his mother’s from there.” It was Selwyn’s duty as kaiarahi to keep

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Derek Lardelli in full cry at Rahui marae, Tikitiki. Archbishops Philip and Winston commend their brother archbishop to Almighty God.

the show on the road. To fulfil the family’s wishes, and to make sure we reached our destination in Whanau Apanui country. Mission accomplished, of course. And as Selwyn has concluded since, this tangi was about more than mourning, more even than celebrating a life well-lived. It was about the Three Tikanga church operating as he’d always hoped it would. “In my opinion, Bishop Brown’s tangi set the Three Tikanga church on the path that we’d always wanted to go on. This was Mihinaretanga. In practice. Not just in words. From all the tikanga.” Bishop Don Tamihere agrees. Because at the tangi he witnessed a flourishing of culture, interwoven with gospel, such as he’s seldom experienced. That’s exactly as Archbishop Brown would have planned it. He was “showing us the way forward,” says Don, “by returning us to the way we used to be. “He was saying, all along: ‘I always knew this level existed. “I’ve been waiting for the church to get back there.” *

Don saw that return to past glories in the whaikorero we heard throughout the tangi. “In any other setting,” says Don, “you’d award those orators a PhD for the sheer amount of information, cultural knowledge, reference material that they carry around inside their heads – hundreds of years of genealogy, historical events, cultural compositions – all of which they cite on the fly, and connect directly to the people and the event in front of them.” “The only thing is that in the Maori

Top: Archbishop Brown's son William delivers his tribute at the funeral - while his grandson Dwayne waits to speak. Above: Selwyn Parata in the hongi line at Rahui.

world, the PhD examinations don’t just happen once. “They happen every time you stand up on the marae atea.” That’s the orators. Then there’s the waiata, and the kapa haka – and the Maori church is inextricably linked with the lot, says Don. “Look at any of our great composers: they have a songbook saturated with gospel and faith understanding. “People were hit in the heart – and that’s the work of the Holy Spirit. “But we understand that if we want to continue to operate that way, to express the gospel with the honour and the glory that it deserves, we can’t just leave it to ad

People were hit in the heart – and that’s the work of the Holy Spirit.

hoc events. “We have to dig deep, and be what our ancestors were: Orators. Composers. People of emotion and spirit.” *

There’s another aspect of the tangi that shone through for Don. That’s the way things came together so smoothly. “In the business world,” says Don, “they talk about: ‘The speed of trust.’ When Page 37

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The ope from the Kingitanga arrive to pay their tribute. Archbishop Brown's sons, grandsons and nephews lower him to his rest. That's Willie Te Aho at the far right.

you have high trust between people, everything moves quickly. There are no obstacles.” Selwyn agrees: “We’re all related,” he says. “We all work together. There is no coincidence.” “But those connections… they didn’t just happen with Brown. They happened with our parents, and grandparents. We were rekindling all those family ties with the Turei family, and with the Waititi family.” Willie Te Aho is a case in point. In his professional life, Willie’s a tough operator. He has to be. He’s a lawyer, arguing the case for iwi in Treaty of Waitangi settlement cases, going up against Crown negotiators determined to give as little as they can. “But when you see him among his people at times like this,” says Don, “you

see the real Willie Te Aho – full of aroha and manaaki.” Full of energy, too. He was the Eveready man. Tirelessly helping and organising. But why was Willie even there? Well, when he was a kid, he became a ward of the state. John Waititi and his wife Matakuariki Alison rescued him. They raised him. And John Waititi – “John the Major”, of C Company fame – was Archbishop Brown’s older brother. So that’s Willie’s first connection. “On the second level,” says Willie, “I’m seen as a go-to person for big events for our family, and for our tribe.” The whanau chose well there, too because Willie used his government contacts to get that giant marquee they pitched at Kauaetangohia. “And the third thing is, I had the confidence of Uncle Brown’s family,

particularly Aunty Mihi.” Willie says the tangi was “outstanding. No less than that.” That success flowed, he thinks, from “Uncle Brown” himself. “He was a very loving, ngawari4 man, and people got into that spirit.” “Like everybody else,” he says, “I absolutely loved and adored him. He was a truly humble man. “And I was honoured and privileged, not just as a relation, but as a person who admired that level of humility, to be able to support him in the final part of his journey.” 1. Besides composing Kapo o Pango, the All Black haka, Derek Lardelli is a relative of Mihi Turei – and an Olympic-level orator. 2. Body. 3. Heneriata Goldsmith. 4. Easygoing.

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BOOKS

Marsden: a driven man of his time THE WORLD, THE FLESH & THE DEVIL THE LIFE AND OPINIONS OF SAMUEL MARSDEN IN ENGLAND AND THE ANTIPODES, 1765-1838 BY ANDREW SHARP AUCKLAND UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2016. $75 ALLAN DAVIDSON

ny biographer of Marsden enters an historical minefield, but Andrew Sharp’s massive tome is a work of far-reaching research and considerable scholarship. It comprises 777 pages of text – over 400,000 words, 100 pages of endnotes and a 20-page bibliography. Marsden was shaped by late 18th century evangelical theology and activism, seen in the ‘reformation of manners,’ philanthropy and missionary undertakings. He was a preacher of ‘the plain and simple Gospel’, steeped in the Bible, promoting repentance and faith in Jesus Christ. As a Church of England chaplain in New South Wales, Marsden promoted Christian society in a context where personal and social morality fell far below his evangelical standards. He was a philanthropist, concerned with good works: orphanages, schooling, and the better treatment of women convicts; but he was also a law enforcer, serving as a magistrate. His reputation as the ‘flogging parson’ is carefully evaluated by Sharp against the standards of Marsden’s day. Sharp’s primary focus is on Marsden’s world, providing an ‘essay in the philosophy

of judging others’, using the concept of amour-propre, self esteem, both to evaluate and comprehend Marsden’s tempestuous disputes with others. Lengthy quotations, replete with biblical verses, enable us to hear Marsden’s voice and almost see the world through his eyes. For Sharp, Marsden is not the hypocritical, vindictive bigot of some of his detractors. Instead, he is an active evangelical enthusiast, easily wounded by criticism, repulsed by immorality and defensive of his own reputation. Marsden’s support for the London Missionary Society’s work in Tahiti, and his oversight of the Church Missionary Society in New Zealand, are analysed in great detail against a background of failures, criticism, financial and moral anxieties. The issues of private trading and musket selling by the first missionaries were a source of considerable pain for Marsden, although he could not fully sympathise with their struggles for survival. He felt betrayed by Thomas Kendall’s adultery and let down by John Butler’s unsatisfactory leadership. He struggled to deal with the tendency to ‘Christian anarchic individualism’ among the missionaries; and his authoritarian rule provoked misunderstandings and antagonistic reactions. Despite opposition and failures, he retained his optimism and generous support for the missions in Tahiti and New Zealand. Marsden was respected by Ma-ori for the hospitality extended to them in Parramatta, and his fearless defence of Ma-ori when injustices were perpetrated

against them by Europeans. His involvement with mission work among Aboriginal Australians, however, contrasts with his approach to Ma-ori. It raises questions about both his, and other Europeans’ understanding of indigenous Australians and their interactions with them. Marsden was ‘an extraordinary man because of his energy and commitment’ as a preacher, pastor, missionary agent, philanthropist, magistrate, farmer and family man. Sharp’s rich study repays reading; and at the least it is well worth dipping into. The Rev Dr Allan Davidson ONZM is an Honorary Research Fellow at St John’s College, Auckland, where he taught church history for many years. a.davidson@stjohnscollege.ac.nz

a faith as intelligent as it is courageous THEOLOGY | MISSION | TEACHING | COUNSELLING | MINISTRY

www.laidlaw.ac.nz | info@laidlaw.ac.nz | 0800 999 777

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HISTORY

The war that left none Paul Oestreicher looks back a century to the Battle of the Somme, the bloodiest battle in World War I, which left more than a million soldiers killed or wounded. As we remember, he stops to ask our nation: What seeds of hate remain that still endanger peace?

Both sides had recruited the same God to their crusade.

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unchanged

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Too often our ceremonies fail to challenge our national pride.

A German soldier's belt buckle which read: Gott Mit Uns – God with us. The author's father, Bavarian artilleryman Paul Oestreicher in France, 1916. Opposite page: New Zealand soldiers pictured in the James Allan Gallipoli memorial window, in All Saints' Dunedin.

Museum of Military History in Dresden, a museum that glorifies not war, but peace. The Great War had been pure tragedy. As the historians tell us, the European powers had stumbled into that war in their quest for supremacy. The massacre had been senseless, yet both sides – with their chaplains – had been made to believe their call to arms was not only in service to their nation, but a sacrifice to God. I still have my father’s belt buckle inscribed with the words Gott mit Uns – God with us. The British Tommies didn’t need that spelled out. They knew which side God was on. Both sides had recruited the same God to their crusade. The Psalmist’s words 'His mercy endureth forever' might just cover even this unconscious blasphemy. On both sides, the young men’s duty was to kill and, if need be, to die. Such is the nature of war. In Britain, commemorations of the dead after two its victorious wars are still imbued with deeply rooted nationalism. That is not surprising. The red poppy is a symbol not just of grief, but of national pride. Not to wear it has become almost impossible in public life. Patriotism demands no less. Its charitable purpose, to assist all war veterans, could not be better. I will give to that gladly, but wear it: I will not.

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FILM

Swedish calm versus Kiwi chaos John Bluck goes to the movies and finds two roads to redemption that couldn’t be further apart: in A man called Ove and the 2016 remake of Goodbye Pork Pie.

f you’re heading into the bush or out to sea you need a locator beacon to know where you are and be able to tell others. Movies serve the same purpose for me. The last two I’ve seen couldn’t be more different. The first will soon slip into back shelves of the video stores, even though it’s been Oscar nominated as Best Foreign film. The critics love it. A man called Ove is about a despairing 59 year-old Swede, made redundant, widowed and suicidal, trying to cope with a new immigrant family next door. Director Hannes Holm gives us a story of despair that laughs its way into his redemption through unlikely friendship and generosity. Goodbye Pork Pie is a remake of the 1981 classic that till recently was the most watched Kiwi movie ever. This one, made by the original director Geoff Murphy’s son Matt, will find a big audience to join the drive

One is resigned, defeated... the other refuses to despair.

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to Invercargill, this time in a Mini Cooper, even though the critics refuse to enjoy the ride. And it is a pretty silly ride we make with Jon, played by Dean O’Gorman, failed lover and writer, and his boy racer driver Luke, played by James Rolleston. They are joined by animal rights activist Keira, played by Ashleigh Cummings, who joins the duo by jumping out a drive-through window in a fast food outlet. The police chase them down the length of the South Island, rendering incredible damage to their vehicle fleet in the process. Judith Collins, had she still been Police Minister, would never have allowed it. Both Jon and Ove are desperate men. In the Old World of Europe, Ove is resigned to his plight: fatalistic, defeated. In the New World of Aotearoa, with the support of his Maori mate Luke, who nearly gets himself killed for helping out, Jon refuses to despair and carries us with him on this outrageously madcap adventure. And even if you can’t laugh at all the very raw slapstick, your heart will sing with the stunning images of southern landscapes, beautifully filmed by Crighton Bone. The energy of these two films couldn’t be more contrasting. Ove is studied, careful, subtle, slow release. Pork Pie is quirky, volatile, all

over the place. One film is about a culture that President Trump thinks is being corrupted by terrorist immigrants. The other is about our culture that the president doesn’t begin to take seriously. His judgement is wrong about both. Ove shows us that no matter how bad things get, and how forbiddingly formal your social conventions might be, there could well be something good waiting for you close by; an offer of friendship, a child’s painting, a meal to share that could turn your life around. Pork Pie shows us that in a young unfinished country like ours, where social conventions are still evolving and collapsing with seismic unpredictability, opportunities and free spaces abound to start over again when you screw up. Just like the gospel says. Bishop John Bluck is a writer living in Northland. blucksbooks@gmail.com

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F R O M T H E FA R S I D E

Shutterstock.com/ LJB33

Imogen de la Bere delights in the glorious yet costly church building she calls her spiritual home.

O what on earth so dear?

s we are currently between priests, it’s my joy and privilege in the morning to unlock my parish church. Have I described it before? It’s a massy Victorian pile with a soaring interior, a symphony in white and burnt sienna. A monument to that glorious flash-in-the-pan that was the AngloCatholic movement, from the heady days when rich High Church aristocrats put their hands into their capacious pockets to fund gilded carving and sumptuous stained glass, silver altars, great bronze lamps, vessels studded with precious stones, and velvet vestments stiff with gold thread. Of course I love it, being of a theatrical bent (though I’ve often said that the great difference between theatre and Anglo-Catholic ritual is that in theatre, the closer you get to the action, the shoddier everything appears, while in church, it’s the opposite.) I walk into the great empty space and it makes my heart sing. I walk around it as I unlock the doors, preparing it for the seeking souls who may never come in. I observe the evidence of past wealth and present hardship – the dusty corners,

the makeshift storage, the damp stains, the books curling in the parish library. And then I mourn for the church in England. These lovely buildings have been passed down to us, and we are duty bound to care for them. It seems an act of moral weakness to reject the legacy of so many devoted forebears, and all the lovely things they gave to glorify God and adorn his house. But how are we to manage? The effort to keep the rain out consumes us, a dwindling band. If we tell the diocese we cannot afford to repair the broken coping, we face closure. How can we betray the devotion of the past and allow a lovely space full of praise and echoing with heavenly song to be turned into offices or apartments? I don’t know the answer, but I know the problem is the perennial headache of the Church of England. There is a fine body called the Churches Conservation Trust which takes over the management of historically important churches that can’t be kept open otherwise. Among the Trust’s ripping wheezes are tea parties, farmers’ markets, film shows

and champing - camping in churches. This latter is such an appealing idea, that, if it should catch on, it could in itself fan the embers of the nation’s spirituality. But if the ratio of our church’s passers-by to droppers-in is anything to judge by, the people of England are not keen to cross the threshold of a church. Indeed finding an open church can seem like a miracle – in a ten-mile radius of my office there isn’t a single church open during the day – unless you count the Royal Chapel at Windsor (included in your ticket to Windsor Castle, a snip at £20). The earthquakes in Christchurch taught the church in that city to free itself from physical bonds. A hard lesson, and not one the Church in England will be forced to learn any time soon. But all the evidence is that the “Fresh Expressions” churches, which are not tied to buildings, are where the growth is. O Lord, make us homeless so we find our home in you. Imogen de la Bere is a writer and director living in England. delaberi@googlemail.com

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