HISTORIC CHURCHES

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 75, Issue 290, 8 December 1932, Page 5

HISTORIC CHURCHES

ONCE FOR THE MAORI. AND THEN WAR CAME. The present generation has forgogttcn that there was a time when the Maori was a zealous churchbuilder and that European congregations to this day profit thereby. The following tootnote to history is written by a contributor to the New Zealand Railways Magazine:— “A peculiar interest attaches to some of the old-fashioned chun.-hes dating back to the first Bishop Selwyu’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 bv Maori labour, and until the wars and the confiscation <»f 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 rhe pretty Ch u reh of

England in Te Awamutu; another is Rangiaowhia Church, three miles away. Yet another is the •celebrated Volkner Church, in the middle of Opotoki town, once the worshipping place of the Whakatohea 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 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 New Zealand came under the British flag. But it has been renovated, and in one way or another it does not possess the antique charm that tne two old solidly-timbered Waikato churches centioned hold for the eve.’’