Field Notes: Archbishop Emeritus Sir David Moxon

Sir David Moxon was born in Papaioea, Palmerston North in 1951, and is married to Lady Tureiti Moxon (Ngāti Pāhauwera, Ngāti Kahungunu, Kai Tahu). Ordained priest in 1979, he served as Vicar at Gate Pā, Tauranga, before becoming Director of Theological Education by Extension for the Anglican Church in Aotearoa New Zealand and Polynesia. He was a member of the commission which produced A New Zealand Prayer Book, He Karakia Mihinare o Aotearoa.

He was ordained Bishop of Waikato Diocese in 1993, and in 2008 was made one of the three Primates of the Anglican Church in Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia, serving as Archbishop of the New Zealand Diocese, Tikanga Pākehā. From 2013 to 2017, he served as the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Representative to the Holy See and Director of the Anglican Centre in Rome. As well as playing a key role in fostering Anglican-Roman Catholic relations, he addressed himself to key challenges including ecumenical education, modern slavery, human trafficking, and care of refugees. In Aotearoa he has been very involved in advocating for Te Tiriti o Waitangi, playing a key role in the Anglican Church apology to Ngāti Tapu and Ngātimarawaho of Tauranga Moana for the actions of the missionaries who eventually lost credibility with these iwi when, under persistent pressure they yielded the Te Papa peninsula to the Crown. His wife, Lady Tureiti, is Managing Director of Te Kōhao Health in Hamilton and Chair of the National Urban Māori Authority. Lady Tureiti has been at the forefront of advancing Māori health equity and advocating for Te Tiriti-led approaches in health governance.

Sir David, who wrote one of the forewords to Alistair Reese’s much-read book on the Treaty of Waitangi, He Tatau Pounamu, spoke to the 2026 Venn Summer Conference during the visit to Rangiaowhia. We were delighted, then, to have this further opportunity to talk at length with him. A man of deep prayer, his ethos of service and life of wise, Christ-led leadership have been tested time and again, bearing good fruit in many, many places. We spoke to David just before he travelled overseas in his latest international role as Prelate of the Order of St John—Ed.

Tell me about your early life. Tell me about your beginnings.

Thank you. Well, I was born in Papaioea, Palmerston North. When I was born in Palmerston North Hospital, 1951, very few people except, say, the Māori community, used the word Papaioea for that lovely place—but now we use both words happily. And so that’s where I began, under the shadow of the Tararua Ranges there. And I grew up there, went to school there—primary, secondary school. I learned to appreciate it enormously because it’s a relatively flat city, so you’re obliged to bicycle to school, even intermediate or secondary school—in my case, Freyberg High School. That was 25 minutes away. And the wind of the Manawatū plains, the Rangitīkei plains, was against you as you biked to school—so you got compulsory free aerobic gym; by the time you started to bicycle home again, the wind had changed its mind and you were against the wind again, 25 minutes compulsory free aerobic gym right there. Everybody who lives in Palmerston North will tell you the same!

Can you say a little more about the family you were born into?

Yes, Mum and Dad were strong Anglicans, churchgoers, as were both my grandparents on both sides: St. Peter’s Anglican Church for my mother’s people, All Saints Palmerston North for my father’s people. My parents were married at All Saints Palmerston North; I was baptised there at nine months of age. And my siblings, Peter, Susie and Jude, they were all raised the same way. We went to parish Scout troop, or Guides. We had all that kind of good, solid Anglican Christian upbringing. And right the way back as far as we can see, there were Anglican Christian communities back to, I would say, beyond 10 generations, when we traced it all. So, that all came down to us there and expressed itself.

Dad and Mum took in Thai students from Massey University to stay with us for holidays. They were Colombo Plan students: food tech students, vets. We grew up, really, with Thai-speaking friends in our house. That shaped me a great deal: I reckon it prepared me for Volunteer Service Abroad in Fiji when I went after school in 1970. It was my parents’ attitude to international students, to the church, to their community: Dad was very strong in Rotary, Mum was very strong in the Birthright Organisation, helping single parents and their families; she was a social worker for them. So they had this strong, community-facing, faith-based, multicultural feel to it all.

I think the attitude they had then was that you should keep the basic values to the fore: social responsibility, family first—faith, hope and love, if you like—as the main form of grain in the wood. They were very strong on that, and they lived it out themselves. They weren’t perfect at all. But there was this really strong sense of other people being just about as important as your own family, and you should try to include them or work alongside them in as many community-facing projects as you have time for. Through Dad’s Rotary, Mum’s Birthright work, we were certainly given a social conscience. But it was faith-based. It was: You do this for God, for God’s people, for God’s world, and it doesn’t make sense without God. So, that was a very strong thing. It was a quiet, steady, sure home.

I joined the All Saints choir as a boy. My father and grandfather were in the choir. And I think singing in the choir as a boy internalised quite a lot of the Scriptures through hymns and songs and anthems. I found myself singing them automatically in the shower, so to speak. The phrase we have now, looking back, is: Don’t go through the Bible, don’t go through the church activities; let the Bible and the church activities go through you. In other words, internalise your faith, internalise your personal experience of God in Christ. And that was very important.

How did your faith journey unfold when you left home?

I went away on VSA after my Freyberg High School time to Fiji. I was living in a new low-cost housing estate called Natokowanga, near Lautoka, and I did a year’s social service volunteer work, mostly the Duke of Edinburgh’s Awards scheme, introducing it to the schools on the western side of the island. As an 18 year old, living alongside Hindu and Muslim Fijian Indians, as well as Fijian Methodists, made me start to question my faith, because I thought the Hindu, the Muslim people I met were as value-based or as humane, as loving, as the Fijian Methodists. Because I was the first and only European living in this low-cost housing estate, I was heavily influenced by, I suppose you’d say, the presence of Islam and Hinduism and Christianity together. When I got back from Fiji, into university at Massey (I was studying social science, education, psychology), I started to lose what I thought was my faith. For intellectual reasons, I couldn’t see that Christianity was unique. I do now! But I had lost my grip. And I entered into a period of atheism and agnosticism.

The following year, when I went to Canterbury University and College House hostel, I even further embraced the belief that God is a projection of us: We make God in our image—that was the view I held. And it meant I no longer said I was Christian. I would say I was in a kind of agnostic desert: no wellsprings, no meaning, it’s all relative, we make God up, it’s a fantasy, it’s a projection. And the social science of those days was quite strong on that view—they did not take supernatural reality into account at all. You know the old joke on a wall in an Oxford University philosophy department, it said: “God is dead… Marx is dead… I’m not feeling too good myself”. It’s that collapse of narrative, meta-narrative, of fundamental ontology; there’s no grain in the wood—it amounts to nothing ultimately, and it’s all about molecules in the end. So, I swallowed that, or at least took it seriously enough to distance myself. I still, strangely enough, went to chapel occasionally for social reasons in the hostel—it was an Anglican hostel. But I used to cross-examine the Christians, to persecute them with hard questions. But like Saul, shall we say, little did I know I was up for a similar conversion to his, Saul into Paul.

I left Canterbury with a BA in Social Science and Education, and came back to Massey to do postgraduate work and tutor in the Education Department. I was living at home with my parents, and I had a really unexpected epiphany, a really unexpected revelation of God. It was just amazing. Very long story short, I was working in the Borthwick’s Freezing Works in Fielding to raise money for university. I came home one night from Borthwick’s, having been on the mutton chain all day. It was late summer, and I was watering the garden outside my parents’ home. The sun was going down; I could smell the jasmine. And unexpectedly, and without any preparation whatsoever, I suddenly felt this overwhelming sense of the presence of the Creator. Just, you know, the God of Genesis, walking in the garden in the cool of the day, as it were—just amazing. It wasn’t a result of a sermon. It was not because I was reading a book. It was not because someone was putting pressure on me at all. I was just suddenly overwhelmed by a sense of presence, and it was so tangible and so unprepped. Some people would say you could create that for somebody by organising the circumstances: there was none of that. I suddenly saw one of my parents turn the light on in the kitchen. And I turned and looked at the light, and it suddenly spoke to me of God in Christ, the light of the world. So it wasn’t pantheism, it was definitely a Christian revelation. And I just remember saying: Yes.

Now, if you told me that two days before, I would have said, “You’re crazy. No, this kind of thing doesn’t happen.” It deeply embedded in me the truth that we are made in God’s image: it’s not the other way around. I didn’t create this. I wasn’t talked into it. I wasn’t susceptible either (except that, of course, our hearts are restless until they rest in God—that restlessness was there, I think). Now I look back, I think the faith of my childhood through my parents reasserted itself through God in that moment. That’s what got me. And so I decided to complete my master’s degree, finish as a tutor, and offer for ordination because of that—and I started going back to church.

So, you said Yes. And that meant yes all the way—to ordination!

It was the whole thing. I’m nowhere near the Paul league whatsoever; but it was like a Damascus road experience. One moment he’s not, one moment he is…. People argue successfully that Saul was being prepared. You could see he had witnessed Stephen’s death in martyrdom—that must have had a deep impression on him, even though he said nothing at the time. A lot of commentators say the blinding light on the Damascus Road had been sparked by a number of things through which God was moving him towards that moment. You notice the moment; but there are many providential preparations before it which you don’t notice at the time. And I think that was probably true of me. And I would underline the faith of my parents, because the first seven years [of childhood], and all that—that was reasserting itself.

Take us, then, through the years of your ordination training to your marriage to Lady Tureiti.

When I offered for ordination, I was accepted by Bishop Paul Reeves in Napier as a student ordinand. He sent me to Oxford to do the MA there in theology. I ended up living with a community of Anglican nuns who prayed every day, and that really shaped my prayer life. It was an amazing experience. A lot of other theological students go to church on Sundays, and of course they pray in some groups, and that’s very important. But these nuns actually prayed four times a day. I acquired the habit of a regular rhythm of daily prayer from them more than anyone else. I was so grateful for that.

When I came back, I was ordained by Paul Reeves in Napier Cathedral, became a curate, junior deacon and priest at Havelock North. And it was in Havelock North that I met Tureiti.  She was a YWCA Street Community youth worker. She also was raised an Anglican by both parents. Her uncle was Wī Te Tau Huata, a very famous Māori Anglican priest. She’d been to Anglican boarding school, Hukarere in Napier, and she’d been overseas with the youth movement—she was in Oxford at the same time briefly, but we never met. I met her at a youth Community meeting to talk about youth at risk on the street in Hawke’s Bay. She sat in front of me, and actually blocked my view as a matter of fact (today she says: I still block his views sometimes, when I really need to!). She turned around and we started talking, and that’s how it grew really—youth work, Anglican church, faith, identity, those things. Her marae is Mōhaka—the Ngāti Pāhauwera people of Ngāti Kahungunu—they had a strong marae base for karakia. They’ve got a big cross in their meeting house. And we still go back there regularly; she has put a mobile home there now—we go back there a lot. So that’s how it developed. It was Canon Huata, her uncle, who helped marry us at that marae.

What year was this?

We met in 1979, we married October 1980, and our first child was born in 1981. By then we’d moved to Tauranga where I became a vicar for six years.

How did that shape your wider families—Māori, Pākehā coming together—her family, your family?

Well, both families had had experience of good friendships with Māori or Pākehā before, but not intensively. They were obviously in contact with Pākehā and Māori friends. They had collaborated occasionally with Māori and Pākehā people, but there’d not been an intense domestic liaison, bridge. (Tureiti was quite amusing because when she was the youth worker in Napier, she wanted to get her Māori youth members in her youth club to get to know Pākehā people a bit more. She had a disco night, and in order to encourage mixing she had a Bring-a-Pākehā evening: if you brought a Pākehā, you got in free!). But you’re right, our wedding was a sign, I suppose, that the two cultures and peoples would need to cross-pollinate more. And we would say that our children now—our four children, and four and a half grandchildren—are clearly identifying with Māori names and Māori heritage because it’s very beautiful and deep—1000 years of it here. However, they are also a bridge into the Pākehā world, and happy in either space and can relate both ways—that’s important to us.

You went to Tauranga, to St George’s Pukehinahina Gate Pā. What happened for you there? Was there a mingling of your journey into te ao Māori and your role as a leader in the church?

That’s a very good question. That’s exactly what happened. We went to Gate Pā Parish in Tauranga, which you may know is the site of the famous Battle of Gate Pā of 1864, a tragic, tragic battle where the local iwi were defending their land and others against an incoming colonial army. There were Anglican Christians on the Māori side who had been converted by the missionaries, and there were Anglican Christians on the colonial troops’ side as well. So you have this terribly poignant, tragic encounter.

By the time that battle occurred, the Māori Christians behind the Pā had developed a Christian ethic of almost Geneva Convention-type behaviour: not to chase someone leaving the field [of battle], not to harm women and children, not to shoot on non-combatants, in other words, to tend the wounded, look after the enemy if they’re thirsty or sick. And they used Paul’s letter to the Romans: if your enemy’s thirsty, give him a drink; if your enemy is hungry, feed them [see Romans 12:20]. That was their ethic, and they wrote it down for themselves as Christians behind the palisades.

What happened, as you may know, is that the British attacked, thinking they’d mopped up the Pā with the bombing. But the bombing hadn’t worked; and the officers, in their brightly coloured uniforms, were all shot as they attacked the Pā. One of them who lay dying called out in thirst and hunger and desperation. And a Māori woman, Heni Te Kirikaramu, crept behind the palisade into no man’s land where the bullets were flying around and gave him water to drink, said a prayer with him, and then went back. And that happened a number of times. That made the battle famous from a Christian history point of view. The Durham Light Infantry, who were part of the attack, to this day remember that act of compassion across no man’s land.

Well, that was the heritage we were living in. We lived on the site. The local army found a bomb in our back yard park reserve, from 1864! So, quite a poignant, intimate experience of race relations gone wrong—and a totally tragic and unconscionable conflict. So, we decided to try and be a bridge between the races at Gate Pā: we had some bicultural ceremonies; we introduced some Māori hymns; we suggested some Christian Māori art for the [baptismal] font, and we suggested a window commemorating the compassionate woman—which was eventually done after we left—and we put her portrait in the church, and so on. So, yeah, that was an opportunity to demonstrate reconciliation in gospel terms.

There’s so much that we could—ideally would—cover in terms of your ministry and life: your involvement in theological education, your work as part of the commission which produced A New Zealand Prayer Book, He Karakia Mihinare o Aotearoa, your episcopal and archepiscopal service, and your time as the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Representative to the Papacy in Rome. But I’d love here to draw out some themes that might be helpful encouraging and challenging for readers. Of your time in Rome, you quipped that you “hit the ground kneeling”. How have you learned to work prayerfully?

I would say it was the nuns who shaped me most of all. When you pray, you make room for grace. In other words, you are not the agent; you’ve made room for the agent, and the agent flows because that’s what the agent does—that’s the Holy Spirit, the agency of God, who brings the mind of Christ into our minds, and who connects us to the Father of lights and of all things. That lines up with the Māori saying, which is paralleled in Matthew [6:33]: Ko te amorangi ki mua, ko te hāpai ō ki muri, which means, Put what is sacred first, and everything else will find its way. In other words: kneel first before you stand, kneel first before you run, kneel first before you act or do or speak.

And that gets you into the right place and space with God in Christ. And that gets you into the love field of the Trinity: Jesus’ relationship with Abba Father, Jesus quickened and made present by the Spirit. You’re in that love field, that Trinitarian love field. When you’re in there, then you are more likely to be true to that love. Not perfectly, not all wise, all knowing—only God is that—but better than you might have been if you’d rushed in, or if you had done something to contrive it. You’ve got to shut-up, be still and know, and let the flow go through you. We don’t say, Listen, Lord, as your servant is speaking; [rather,] Speak, Lord, because your servant is listening [see 1 Samuel 3]. I mean, you do speak—but after you’ve listened. We petition, we make intercession, of course we do—we must! We call to Abba as you would do with any loving parental presence. But it begins by noticing God’s there and letting God’s love be God’s love and then making your request known to God. And then you’re more likely to be in tune with the will of God, however partial and human your discernment is.

I think part of what’s precious for me about being able to interview you is that you have served in leadership in so many settings. Many contemporary notions of leadership imagine a big self who gets bigger, as it were, and shapes the world to their will. We’re in a time when people are putting trust in strongman leaders again. How do you understand Christian leadership?

Well, the best Christian research on the dynamics of leadership and the psychology of leadership and the practice of leadership is, in my view, Kouzes and Posner. You may have heard of them, but they’ve written a book based on empirical studies and Christian commentary on what makes leadership in the faith community most effective. They identify:

1. Model the way
2. Share a vision
3. Challenge the status quo
4. Empower others to act
5. Lead with the heart.

And not surprisingly, these come back to biblical principles. Such leaders are not about asserting a plan for lots of other people without asking them; they are Acts 15 leaders, in fact.

Acts 15, the first major little synod of the Christian church, begins with consultation, deep prayer and listening over at least a day or two. It was the question, as you know, of whether Greek males should be circumcised or not in the early Christian community, like the Jewish guys were, in order to be included in the new covenantal community. So, the debate was: Should the new Greek men who have become Christian be required to be circumcised as an outward and visible sign of their conversion, as a mark, if you will, of their witness, like all the early Jewish male Christians are? That debate in Acts 15 is very intense. It’s very personal. It was implicated in every bar mitzvah, in every child rearing, and every initiation rite of the early families. And it could have split the church. And what the leaders do (and this is what Kouzes and Posner in their commentary on Christian leadership reveal): Listen first. Pray deeply. Don’t rush. Don’t overreact. Don’t lose your temper. Try to understand what the other person is saying, because God has something to say through his body, through a temple made of living stones, building themselves up. So you are not to impose “Boy, have I got a plan for you and I know better than you.” It is much more: Hear what the Spirit is saying to the church.

These apostles in Acts 15 do this deep listening. And they come out with some beautiful wisdom that saved the Church from schism. And the beautiful wisdom was the Greek men will spiritually, prayerfully, identify their hearts for Jesus: circumcision of the heart, that is to say a symbolic dedication, circling their heart, for Jesus. It doesn’t need an outward of visible sign according to Jewish tradition, but in Greek tradition, it’s another form of circumcision, a circumcised heart, a dedicated covenant of heart. And what we will do to show how we hold together, even though we have different outward and visible signs; we will share agreed common meals which won’t offend kosher Jewish practice, and which won’t offend Greek practice—an agreed food-sharing method.

So to me, Acts 15 is the beginning of it all. And it means then the first prerequisite of a leader in the Christian faith community is humility before the Spirit of God working through the people: listening deeply, and then looking for the high common ground, then looking for what consensus is possible. We won’t agree on everything, but the outward invisible signs aren’t as important as the inward and spiritual truth. Are we sure of that? Is our core heartbeat pumping? Not: Is our fingernail polish different, or is our haircut different, or is our…. That’s not the point. Do you have ringlets, or you have a tonsure, or do you have a beard, or no beard? Some people let their beard grow as a sign of their faith. Some people shave as a sign of their faith. Doesn’t matter (ultimately, it’s a sign which helps the person). So you can imagine all those issues of food sacrificed to idols, slaves or no slaves, they were all approached in the New Testament by the same principle in the end, which is why we have a church. Now, if they divided over any one of those things, without people listening, we would have dribbled into the sand. That’s not the way of Christ, who was the deepest listener of all, is the deepest listener of all. “There’s no distance between the ear of God and the cry of the poor.” It’s a great saying.

And so, I would say humility first, then secondly, that means prayerfulness. What is the Spirit saying to the church? Don’t rush in. Test it against Scripture. Look to the heart of the matter. See them as made of the image of God, even though they look different. That image of God, and recognising the Spirit of Christ in others, is the key to Christian unity, notwithstanding today’s difficulties, which are many.

And then I think, just a simple thought really: What would the mind of Christ suggest based on what we know about Jesus? Here’s a good example: Christian leaders faced the question Is it okay to beat a child with a rod to the point where there’s a welt or a deep mark or blood?
And that became a question in this country. Some people quoted Proverbs saying, “Spare the rod and spoil the child” [Proverbs 13:24]. And the Christian leaders were asked, Does that mean you can whack them hard so they remember? Spare the rod and spoil a child—Proverbs! The Christian leader listens carefully to that point of view, listens carefully to the experience of Christian parents, Christian babies, Sunday schools; they pray, reflect, and then immerse themselves in Scripture… and what do we find? This was our reply of the time: the rod in Proverbs is the rod of a shepherd. It’s not an iron bar. It’s not a strap with nails in it. It’s not an electric prod or a bike chain (which is what some people were using to make a deep impression). The rod is the rod of the shepherd. Psalm 23: “The Lord is my shepherd”. And it says, “His rod and his staff, they comfort me”. Comfort means obviously strengthen. It does not mean beat so that you draw blood. It means guidance. It means guarding. It means encouraging. It doesn’t mean leaving a deep welt on their back. It couldn’t have meant that. That’s not the way shepherds operated in Israel. They walked in front and the sheep followed them because they trusted the love of the man with the staff. So apply that to child-beating today. I know it’s risky: What would Jesus do? But that’s ultimately the quest. And although it’s not necessarily straightforward, with modern science and different choices, but the principle has to be the same. So I would say that Kouzes and Posner get back to that kind of leadership.

Leaders have to admit they’re wrong sometimes, because you’re not God. You sometimes get a sense of direction which turns out not to be of God. You put out a fleece, you discern the Spirit, you try, you tack towards the truth.

What sustains the inner life of the leader, in your experience? As a leader, you have these demands on your time; even now, you’re serving in governance. It’s physically demanding. Even more than that, there’s something about leadership which means you’re at the spiritual pointy end of things. What sustains you?

It has to be prayer—and I think deep, contemplative prayer. I use a website called Sacred Space and it just takes you into quietness: “Be still and know that I am God”; and then it moves you into Scripture, which changes every day. You immerse yourself in the Scripture; you ask what its implications are for you; you take that into deep prayer about the agenda you’ve got, things you’re facing tomorrow, what you’re feeling about your own walk with God. It’s 10 minutes, and you come out of that a little bit different. Your problems haven’t changed or been whisked away, but your perception of them is different after that. And I reckon that’s made all the difference to me in what I think are intractable problems, some of which I helped create. That practice has been the key in the end.

And listening to others. I think leaders in their prayerfulness have to embody what they’re all about, try to walk the talk in prayer, very first, foremost. There’s got to be a deep quest for the high common ground, as I said earlier. There’s got to be faithfulness to Scripture, and there’s got to be a willingness to say: I did have that wrong, because I’m a human being. And: Where do we go from here?

After your time leading in the Anglican Church here, which was considerable, you were sent as an envoy to Rome. What was the most important lesson you learned in your time in Rome as the Representative of the Archbishop of Canterbury to the Papacy?

What I saw of Pope Francis. I had to meet with him, roughly speaking, four times a year, and we engaged in different conversations. He was a Jesuit: that’s to say, he was in a religious order which was interested in secondary and tertiary education before he was an Archbishop in Argentina, and before he was the Pope. And he brought all that educational, pastoral approach to the Papacy. He was very open to trial and error, and to not be afraid of a holy experiment. I got the impression from him that the biggest risk today for the Church is to do nothing. Because it’s safe, or because it’s where we feel secure, or because it might be a bit risky to act. He never said this, but this is my impression: the biggest risk today for the Christian faith is not to take a holy risk (prayerfully, well prepared, out of conversation and dialogue). Remaining the same is almost a denial of the work of the Holy Spirit, because the Spirit leads us into all truth. The Spirit’s always moving. The Spirit is not inert or stuck or frozen. And God is moving in a flow of grace everywhere, all the time, whether we recognise it or not. The task of the faith community is to notice signs of the Spirit and to go with that flow. And they might be justice, peace, care of creation, compassion, raising awareness, communicating the gospel in fresh expressions, going lateral with some liturgies, becoming adventurous with the implications of our faith. And it is better to do that than to wrap ourselves cosily with what we know, and sit there doing nothing all the time. So, that’s the main impression.

Francis did that himself. He, for example, you know, he washed the feet of a woman Muslim prisoner in Rome who had HIV. Now, no other Pope has ever done that. Very risky, very new. But he did that as an outward and visible sign of the inward and spiritual attitude of Jesus. That’s what inspired the Pope to do that. It was highly, highly questioned at the time, but to me that’s more of a prophetic opportunity than anything. And if it doesn’t work and it gets massive criticism, so be it. Humble yourself. Repent if you need to. But never quench the spirit.

Holy risk. That’s a good challenge, a good invitation. What advice do you have, then, for a young follower of Jesus?

I would say: Learn from your friends and companions in the faith community in the Christian body about deeper forms of prayer: going deeper with God, deeper with each other, and see what the Spirit says to you out of that. There’s no cunning plan, no quick fix, there’s no strategic template that will give you all the quick answers where you go from success to success. It’ll only happen because you are the place where God speaks—your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit. And by that, the Scriptures mean two things: They mean you, as he tinana, a body, as a visceral God-created entity, are a temple of the Holy Spirit. You are the place where God speaks. But it also must have meant a collection of Christians bodies, because we were described as living stones building up into a temple [see 1 Peter 2:5]. So that doesn’t just mean my viscerality, my presence, is the only way I am here, but this other body is in the room. And what you’re looking for is Christ in the centre of the room. The closer you get to Christ inside you and between you and in the centre, the closer you’ll get to wisdom and a sense of where to go. A good example is Urban Vision, because they do this with young adults—and they’ve been doing it for 20 years now. Justin Duckworth and others worked right away at that. And they are quite a good example of exactly this idea. They go into a suburb where the Christian presence has either faltered or not expressed itself fully and they just do what I said: make Community, make prayer, and out flows some grace like a fountain in the middle of the square. Not perfectly, not always 100% successful, but my goodness, it’s made a difference, a refreshing wellspring difference in a number of places where the Church, using an old model, has not.

Prayer again!

Yeah, it is. It is. I mean, sometimes you go to a seminar and you get a snazzy new idea. And, you know, I take them seriously—there’s something there, it’s based on experience, it’s based on trials people have made. But it can’t replace what the Spirit is saying to the Church here and now. If they’re from America, say, there may be some wisdom there—but they cannot possibly read what the Spirit is saying to the Church in Newtown, or Otara.

Let’s finish then with this whenua: when you think about te Hahi, whenua, te Tiriti o Waitangi, what’s your hope for Aotearoa in 2040?

That’s the anniversary of the treaty, you mean? Well, the Christian position at Waitangi in 1840, enunciated by Māori chiefs like Hone Heke as well as Henry Williams—both parties—was that the treaty was a covenant. They weren’t kidding: they were using a well-tested, biblically sound image, and that meant: good faith, good hope, good love. It meant something else was going on as well as a trade agreement with an empire, as well as a power sharing, You-do-this-and-I’ll-do-that-deal. It was also a matter of trust which could only be generated by people who are trying to be friends, trying to express a reliable, trustworthy commitment. Doing to others as you would have them do to you: that Christian ethic is implied. In the land wording, in the language text, in the treasures it mentions, it’s implied. And if you’re a Christian, you can see covenental values coming out of the words.

As well as what I would say is Article 4 (and Alistair [Reese] has taken this view and I agree with him): that the governor had a responsibility to protect faith-based people and the implications for our country stemming from a faith basis. That’s in Article 4. So I would hope that the anniversary of the treaty would have seen some evidence of covenantal behaviour even more than is seen now, and that some covenantal spirituality could be celebrated. Not again, perfect. This is not a perfect world; we’re always on a quest for a measure of justice. You never say (until the kingdom comes fully) it’s perfectly just or perfectly righteous. You would never dare say that. But you could see a pilgrimage towards justice and peace and righteousness.

The Land Back Movement had its very memorable and useful  seminar a couple of weeks ago in Auckland. I went to that: Land Back, organised by Common Grace, who again, I think are a new sign of the Spirit moving today into new places, thank God. How do Christian communities return land because of a treaty principle? There were four examples given at the seminar two weeks ago in Auckland. So: will we have seen more land back? Will we have seen more co-management, partnership, participation, protection, equity,  options, rangatiratanga, kāwanatanga—all those things—more evident? The Treaty Principles Bill has not survived, and I hope that never happens again. The churches came through uniformly, by and large, against the Treaty Principles Bill. We came through fully on the 1st anniversary of the treaty a little while ago. I hope and believe we will be fully present in 2040, because we are churches of the treaty, because it was our sermons, it was our guy who translated the treaty into Māori, it was our Māori Christian preachers who commended it on the day. And so I think it’s our best hope. It’s our sure Foundation. It’s the one place we can refer to to get a sense of national compass.