MAORI CHURCHES

Bay of Plenty Times, Volume LX, Issue 11000, 27 December 1932, Page 3

MAORI CHURCHES

HISTORICAL ASSOCIATIONS. “A peculiar interest attaches to some of the old-fashioned churches dating back to the first Bishop Selv Vs time that one sees here and there in the Waikato and elsewhere," states the writer of an article in the New Zealand Railways Magazine. “They were built with funds subscribed chiefly by the Maoris and largely by Maori labour, and until the wars and the confiscation of native land their congregations were Maori. Now, never a Maori is seen within their doors, for the pakeha, after the conquest, took church as well as the land; and now they are the local parish churches. “One of these is the pretty Church of England in Te Awamutu; another the Rangiaowhia Church, three miles away. Yet another is the celebrated Volkner Church, in the middle of Opotiki town, once the worshipping place of the Whakatohea tribe. The only church I know that has withstood all changing times since the ’fifties of last century is the massive native-built church at Otaki, described in a recent number of the Railways Magazine. “The most venerable of all our New Zealand churches is the little English church in famous Kororareka, the 'modern township of Russell. It is very little short of a century in age; it was there before Siew Zealand came under the Brush flag. But it has been renovated, md in one way or another it does sot possess the antique charm that ihe two old solidly-timjbered Wailato churches mentioned hold for .he eye.”