HISTORIC CHURCHES

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LIX, Issue 17957, 8 December 1932, Page 9

HISTORIC CHURCHES

ONCE FOR THE MAORI AND THEN WAR CAME The present generation has forgotten that there was a time when the. Maori was a zealous churc-lrbuilder and that European congregations to this day profit thereby. The following footnote to history is written by a contributor to the Railways Magazine:— “A peculiar interest attaches to some of the old-fashioned churches dating back to the first Bishop Eelwyn’s time that one sees here and there in the Waikato and elsewhere. They were built with funds subscribed chiefly by the Maoris, and largely by Maori labor, 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 To Awamutu; another is Rangiaowhia Church, three miles away. Yet another is the celebrated Volkncr Church, in the middle of Opotiki town, nni-e the worshipping place of the Whakatohoa tribe. The only church I know that has remained wholly Maori through all the changing times since the ’fifties of last century is the massive native-built church at Otaki. “‘The most venerable of all our New Zealand churches is the little English Church in famous Ivororareka, the modern township of Russell. It is very little short of a century in age; it was there before New Zealand came under the British flag.”