Field Notes: Te Karere Scarborough

Te Karere Scarborough (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Hauā) is Tumuaki/Co-Principal of Te Wānanga Ihorangi. A community educator and whānau advocate, he also serves as a priest in Te Pīhopatanga o Te Tai Tokerau. He talks here with John about his life, his passion for seeing whānau flourish, his journey with te reo Māori, and the remarkable fruit of his unfolding friendship with Jesus Christ—Ed.

Ko wai koe? No hea koe?

He uri ahau nō Te Tai Tokerau whānui; he uri ahau no Ngāti Hauā anō hoki. Ko ahau te whakatutukinga o ō rātou moemoeā. Ka tū ahau i runga i ō rātou mana hei kaikawe, hei kaitiaki o ngā taonga tuku iho—born and bred in Tāmaki Makaurau, a city boy through and through. But the bones of my ancestors mostly rest in the north—anywhere between Orewa, Whangārei, Dargaville and Kaikohe, that’s all me. Like, you know: there’s six or seven different hapū that we really have strong connections to. I also have connections to Taranaki on my mother’s side, which is a side that we’re still discovering. And on my father’s side connections to Tainui and Ngāti Hauā. So yeah, really beautiful whakapapa, if I do say so myself—and really proud of the different lines and ancestors that I represent here. But I’m a city boy, man, honestly. I was brought up in the city, and rather than going pig hunting, I was breaking into school pools in the middle of the summer. My wife Chloe of 18 years, she’s from Tāmaki. Her whakapapa is Scottish and Ngāi Tai ki Tāmaki from one of the iwi out in Maraetai—back in the day, they were one of powerhouses actually, out east side. We have three kids: Paora, who is 16—just got his first tā moko the other day; and then we’ve got our middle child who is 11 years old, her name’s Hinewai; and then Māhina, our baby, is 8. Yeah, so: Ko wai ahau? Ko ahau ērā mea katoa.

Tell me about your early years, and about the beginnings of your faith journey.

I was brought up in a house that had a real mix of Christian and Māori spirituality, is the way that I would put it. My mum’s marae is Catholic. My biological father, who’s Pākehā, his whānau was Catholic too, although he was the black sheep of his whānau. And so, I think for him Christianity represented very strict parenting and hidings that he got from the housemaster at St. Peter’s when he was growing up. He was a staunch atheist, my biological father, until the day he died, which was an interesting thing for us to navigate as my spirituality developed and became my own.

My father, who’s of Ngāti Hauā descent—so, my matua whāngai, my stepfather—he was shaped by Ngāti Hauā—they have strong Christian connections and spirituality there—but he was also heavily influenced by the Pai Mārire religion. I remember, growing up my mum had this Pākehā Catholic friend who, she wasn’t a nun, but I think she lived a life of abstinence, she was a bit of a prayer warrior (I didn’t really know any of that at the time). She loved hanging out with us. Her name was Gayle Dodunski; she was from Inglewood in Taranaki. When I was growing up, she felt like the most gullible person I’d ever met, and I loved playing pranks on her. It turns out she was actually very clever, and she was just very kind and gave me the space to feel I was the prankster. As a teenager I’d come home pretty wasted in the weekends, and I would see my mum and my father, aunties and uncles, our takatāpui friends and Gayle Dodunski in the living room, singing old Catholic hymns—you know, it was just this thing that was around. I remember my strongest relationship to Catholicism, outside of being at my marae up north, was Midnight Mass [on Christmas Eve] at Te Unga Waka Marae in Epsom. The rule was if I went to Midnight Mass I got to open a present after we got home. And so I loved being there as a kid, in my blanket. So, that’s how I describe my upbringing.

I found what I would describe as a strong personal faith and a real life-turning in a church called C3 (it used to be called Christian City Church). I was heavily involved in a movement called Primal, which was a youth church where, you know, my pastor wasn’t too much older than me. And I had a couple of radical encounters with the Lord in ways that just didn’t fit what I understood life to be. As someone who is now firmly entrenched within the Māori Anglican Church, it seems funny even now to think about the amazing things that were happening at that time as a teenager in terms of my walk with the Lord. I had a radical transformation in one of the most cliché altar calls: there was loud music I would never listen to, people I wouldn’t usually hang out with; and the Lord, in spite of all of that stuff, spoke so deeply to me about being known and being loved. And I began this radical transformation from being a real ratbag, full of hurts and pain and loneliness and anger and all the stuff connected to my biological father. I was brought up in a good home really, although Onehunga in the 80s and 90s meant you were always one incident away from getting into lots of trouble: gangs were rife; we broke into cars and houses—wannabe gangster stuff. And so, God just transformed my life, and there was no looking back. Yeah.

About three or four months after coming to the Lord, I ended up in South America on a student exchange—I spent 14 months in the south of Chile. I think that was an important step in owning what faith looked like for me. I’ve always had a sense of myself, but it’s difficult not to be caught up in the collective (as a Māori now, as a Christian, what it looks like to lose yourself to the collective is something I know and I love—to be a part of that tapestry is something which drives me and gives me a lot of meaning). To be, you know, a 12-hour flight away from Onehunga stuck in the bottom of Chile with a family who can’t speak English, and to grapple with daily devotions and going to these random Catholic churches where I didn’t know what was going on. And to be this exotic foreigner who had a bit of interest from lots of different people and be like: No, actually, I don’t want to do that; I want to follow the Lord. My family over there was so crack-up, because they were religiously Catholic—as lots of South America is—so we went to church every Sunday. But you know: they owned a house on the lake, a house on the ocean, a big mansion that had horses… for our weekends we would go to Bariloche, which is just across the Alps in Argentina, and go snowboarding—that was the life. And the more that I got to know the Lord, the more that I would literally go walking in the bush with this random group of Catholics—these monks—supporting families who were living below the poverty line. We would go into the bush, and we would help to fix their thatches—you know, all of the stuff. They lived in real poverty, and I was living in real wealth, and my family just didn’t understand that. But the Lord had taken over something in me, and there was no going back, actually. So, when I came back from South America, I went from being the person who was almost getting kicked out of school to literally the leader of the Christian group. I was known as having the most foul mouth you’ve ever heard, and my friends were like: I haven’t heard him swear in six months, what is going on here? There was a transformation that happened before I left for Chile, but the embedding of who the Lord wanted me to become happened outside of my community context, and that was probably the best thing that could have happened to me.

What happened next?

I came home, and became a Primal pastor, actually. I was leading a church in Auckland in my last year of school and in my first half year of Uni. But when I left high school, the first thing I did was a te reo Māori bridging course, because I wanted to be a te reo Māori teacher. The key thing about the bridging course was not my academics—I was always clever enough to get where I needed to go—it was to do with my te reo Māori journey. I was brought up with my father (my stepfather—he was with us since I was five years old) speaking te reo Māori. But, you know, you don’t catch language through osmosis as much as people expect—it needs to be an intentional embedding of the language in everyday use. I would say my reo was familiar—but I wouldn’t be able to speak in te reo Māori, other than a really cool pepeha and a few sentences. I call it Shortland Street Māori: you know enough Māori to get away with participating on the marae and that, but actually you’re always one question away from feeling pretty exposed. Anyway, I do that bridging course for 9 months, and I’m about to enrol in the degree program to become a kura kaupapa Māori teacher, and a job at Parenting Place comes up [at the time, it was called Parents, Inc.]. That job was as an Attitude presenter: someone who would go around high schools to speak about drugs, sex, and rock and roll from a values-based perspective. As a youth pastor there was nothing there was nothing juicier than the idea of being paid to communicate. And so, I actually left my degree program—I got that job in October 2005, I think it was, and I ended up staying at Parenting Place for 16 years.

Together with Anameka Paenga, you’re now heading up Te Wānanga Ihorangi. Te reo Māori and whakapono—Christian faith—is the beating heart of that mahi. How did this work journey unfold?

The kōrero was this: after being at Parenting Place for 14 years (in 2019) I go on sabbatical to Te Wānanga Takiura to learn te reo Māori, and the plan was that I’d come back and maybe take on an even more senior role. I went to study te reo Māori, and it was really transformational. For the first time I started hearing God speak to me in a way that you can only hear him speak to you when things aren’t as busy. I was having my own dramas with language trauma… it was really hard. But I’d go to class every day, and I’d hear waiata, and I’d learn te reo Māori, and I was getting more confident at speaking, and I was praying in te reo Māori. At the end of that year, God spoke to me in te reo Māori for the first time. I was like: Whatever’s going on here has already superseded any vision I had for myself at Parenting Place. In early October of that year, me and Lyndon Drake are talking about a friend of ours that he’s thinking about bringing into St. John’s [Theological College]. We are chatting about the wonderful future that’s ahead of this person; and I look at Lyndon and go: Would you ever consider me as someone that you’d get behind and sponsor into study? That was in early October. By late November, I had resigned from Parenting Place, I was about to accept a scholarship to St. John’s Theological College, and it was probably the scariest step I’ve made in 15 years, career-wise. But I felt compelled to move on what God was calling me to do.

For some people, they go to theological college, and it rocks their faith; but a lot of my faith had been built in a context where theology was actually quite shallow, and so, digging into the grey, not just the black and the white, was doing the opposite for me. I mean, it was really making me consider—when Jesus asked me: Who do you say I am?—what my answer was. I remember I was doing an essay on Galatians. We were talking about what may have been going on for the churches at the time: what Paul was saying; why he was so frustrated at all of these emerging communities; how difficult it was to have all the different strata of class and different cultures involved; this emerging new kind of Christian Church and the old Jewish ways—like, it’s all there in the mix. I’m doing this essay, and I’m like: okay, so you know, Paul’s going on about this Abrahamic whakapapa, we’re grafted into this. And I imagine: Paul was the most Jewish of all Jews; he cruised around, going to all these different synagogues and different churches. Paul’s talking about this new iteration of identity. He’s saying that anyone can now be grafted into the family tree of faith, and that they can participate in this historic lineage—all of the promises of God handed to Moses and all the way through the prophets—because of what Jesus has done: It is yours too. And I’m like, ok, what does it look like? What does this really mean? How would I communicate this to someone? Then I’m like okay, let’s imagine the most Māori of Māori… let’s say Tariana Turia and Pita Sharples are travelling around all the most famous marae—that’s like St. Paul going to synagogues. Let’s imagine Tariana Turia and Pita Sharples going to Tūrangawaewae at Ngāruawahia, and talking in front of the King and everyone, saying: You know what guys, for eons, we have talked about our whakapapa going back to the great waka voyaging traditions; people who whakapapa back to those traditions have inherited all of their mana, pūrākau, tapu … but now I’m telling you all: these Pākehā colonialists now have the ability to claim that whakapapa, all of that inheritance for themselves. They are now whāngai of your waka. Bro like … even thinking that felt like the most heretical, sacrilegious thing I could have ever imagined. But that is essentially what Paul is arguing all of us Gentiles can now do because of the work of Jesus. Unfathomable grace. It was just the most beyond gift that I could ever have thought about. It just hit me as an adult: I was face to face with Jesus and he was asking me: Who am I? And I’m saying: “You are the Lord”.

That was my first year of theology, 2020. You know, I honestly reckon I could have been an angry, burnt-out Māori, who’d spent too long in a Pākehā organisation. And that year of theology and, after that, studying te reo Māori, helped to turn me into something else. I mean, I’ve ended up pretty conservative as a Māori—the basic doctrines and creeds of Christianity I’m into: it’s a framework which many of my ancestors accepted, and now I fully accept it as who I am, as the foundation for the type of work that I want to help create: listening to God in te reo Māori, praying to God in te reo Māori, having faith formed in a way that doesn’t see the Māori world and the Christian world having to be polar opposite. A lot of social commentary now focuses on locating Māori identity in opposition to faith, or Pākehātanga, or whatever. I’m just on the hunt for an integrated self. When a baby is born they are their mother’s whakapapa, and their father’s whakapapa, but they are also something else. The act of creating life … creates a something else in the process. I am Māori, I’m Pākehā, I am a person of faith. I’m not just one of those threads, I am all of them at the same time … and my job is understanding and embracing the weave.

Recently I’ve been looking for natural metaphors that might help me think about this more, one that has come to mind is the Kūaka (Godwit). It isn’t born here in Aotearoa; its eggs hatch in Alaska. It migrates across the world, but spends 6 months or so here in Spring and Summer. Māori used to believe the Kūaka would leave for Hawaiki—to accompany ngā mate when they’d passed away. As a Christian, as someone with Pākehā heritage, it serves as a natural example of something that was created overseas finding a home here. It is easy to lean into my Māori heritage and find a place here… that’s how I understood myself growing up. It has been more difficult embracing my Pākehā side, and—via extension—a bit of my faith story. But Māori never understood the Kūaka as a foreign entity… just some thoughts anyway.

So we come to Te Wānanga Ihorangi, and your mahi there. Describe this for us.

As a Māori entrenched in my communities, there is always more work to be done to help our people. As I’ve aged, it has been more around: What specifically am I called to do? Where is my context? Or, where will I put my shovel into the ground as my site for transformational work? Working with whānau who are in serious deprivation is a place that you can start; being more on the positive education side is a place you can start; working in prisons is a place that you can start; working in schools is a place that you can start. For me, though, I love Te Wānanga Ihorangi. One of the reasons me and Anameka [Paenga] created it, is that this would be our choice, that this is our style of transformation. We can see the transformational power of language and tikanga in someone’s spiritual and physical world. And: we’re all in; we’re all in.

This year has been amazing, because things have gone better than we imagined in lots of the areas of work we’ve kicked off. But you know, some of our students have had a really rough time, because as they learn te reo Māori—like, every word you learn, on the one hand is: Oh, this is awesome; I now know this word! And then on the other hand is: Why am I the only person for three generations who has learned this word? And so, every step can feel like a double-edged sword. But I know irrespective of how hard the journey is, if you are able to make it through to the other end, there is a sense of peace that you can’t manufacture, especially within our cultural climate. The ongoing reclamation of Māori identity—Where do I belong? Am I Māori enough?—all of those insecurities I think are most notably answered when you are able to fulfil tikanga on an everyday level and speak te reo Māori. We see Te Wānanga Ihorangi as a place where these questions might more easily be answered.

One more thing: there is a really quick decentring of church within the Māori world. Now, you might not always hear that, but it’s strong, and it’s happening quick, especially for people under 40. One of the questions that a lot of our graduates face—80% of them this year come from a Christian background—is what does the ongoing sharing of the gospel look like in my communities? And how do I share a faith without it just being labelled as colonial, or different, or whatever? And the answer to that question is: when you are leading tikanga stuff and language revitalisation out of your Christian love, as a part of your Christian ministry—that is the answer. Here’s my example: people, especially in Pentecostal contexts (and I was one of these), used to look at people who wore collars and be like: You guys don’t know anything about what’s happening on the ground. The truth is, often those people who wear collars help whānau every single week who don’t have a clue around tikanga, who don’t have a clue about how to run a tangi, don’t have a clue around what it looks like when the body arrives at the house, leading karakia at night. Māori Christian leadership is doing that kind of mahi. And those whānau never forget when that priest turned up and led their whānau in that way. Specifically, it’s the combination of love through the medium of tikanga Māori and te reo Māori that has a special power, which I think our graduates can step into.

You’ve talked about God’s “unfathomable grace” in Jesus. Is there a sense that Christ has been a friend to you?

One of the big challenges for me has actually been to engage God as a friend, because the hierarchy and the sacredness and the tapu and the bigness of God the Father and Jesus as the Ariki have been things which put distance between me and God. It’s still something that I’m really trying to get my head around, actually. I remember when I was making these decisions around leaving Parenting Place, and I was with Rachel Kitchens, who was my spiritual director for a few years. We were going through an exercise, and she said: Well, where’s Jesus now for you? And I imagined Jesus was on a bench in a garden, something very similar to the monastery where Venn now sits. And she said: What would Jesus want you to do? And I said: He just wants me to go and sit by him. And I’m like crying at this point … and she says: Is Jesus saying anything to you? And I had this sense that he was asking me to trust him … like to follow him and leave my job into an unknown future. To walk away from Parenting Place at that time felt like the hardest thing: it was security for my whānau, it was the mana that I had garnered over years, it was everything that I thought I wanted. And it was like God was saying: Oh there is so much more in store for you. And for the first time in a long time, I just listened. And from that time of learning to listen to God again properly as an adult, only a few years later the idea of Te Wānanga Ihorangi came. It feels so overwhelming sometimes… such a creature as me… that I’d be able to participate… I’m just so grateful. I’m so grateful, man. Yeah, I don’t know—friendship with God to me just looks like sitting on a park bench and deciding to do the unthinkable together.

I mean, I look at my life now: I have the most wonderful church community; a wonderful relationship with my wife, with my kids; te reo Māori—you know, the dream of having a [reo Māori-] fluent household, like, it’s already who we are; a fluent workplace; supporting my communities. And in the past my challenge would have been to work as hard as I can to make that to make that happen. I’m no stranger to hard work. But the doors that have opened, and place that we have got Te Wānanga Ihorangi to as a team—it’s just providential, just in the slipstream, man; you can’t manufacture that, you can’t make that happen. It’s in the modest, quiet, ongoing pursuit of God that the richest things of my life have come. And so how could you act any other way other than just to be deeply grateful?

Just to close, I’d love to invite you to reflect on good friendship, and maybe what this means for us, here and now.

Maybe I’ll talk about that friend of my mum, Gayle Dodunski. She was brought up in Inglewood in Taranaki, moved to Auckland, and they started working at Starship [Hospital] together. She was a receptionist: old-school, skinny Pākehā, slightly high-pitched voice. The friendliest person you’ve ever met; she was awesome. Every birthday she would give me a can of coke, a letter, and some money. She actually ended up learning te reo Māori, because she wanted to be a Māori speaker for her friends. She moved back to Taranaki when I was in my late teens. Every birthday since I was young, I’d get a little handwritten note all in te reo Māori—I couldn’t even understand half of it, actually—a $10, and a can of Coke. And that continued into my mid 20s. Whenever she would come up, I’ll always try and have a conversation with her. She was shocked at the faith thing—that was a real connection point for us after I came to faith.

When she passed away, we were all wrecked in our whānau—really, really gutted about it. My parents went back to Taranaki and they actually lobbied with the whānau around whether they could have a couple of days Māori-style with the body at her house. And so my mum, aunties and uncles, those takatāpui whānau I mentioned earlier—14 to 15 of them—just gathered in her one-bedroom flat with her body in the lounge, and they sung waiata and opened up those old prayer books, and they really honoured her in that way. One of the stories that came out was that Gayle went on a mission and found out where my mum’s ancestors are from in Taranaki—she drove all over Taranaki, these random cemeteries, talking to random Māori: Have you heard of the Shelford name? We’re looking for this urupā. And she made that connection for my mum and me. So, when I think about friendship, I think about those coke cans and that $10, and how her consistency never wavered, never changed. And by the end, we were 15 Māori all in her little one-bedroom apartment, celebrating her life, saying we couldn’t have done it without her. So, maybe that’s just a final picture of what friendship could look like. She’s probably the best example of Tangata Tiriti I’ve personally experienced growing up. She was just a very quiet person who was able to deeply impact our lives. In a lot of ways when I think about who she was to me, she really brought the mana back to the Pākehā whānau that I was estranged from, just through her actions. It was consistent love: it was doing what you can, and love without expectation. And the result of that is: she’ll never be forgotten in our whānau. She’ll never, ever be forgotten, Gayle Dodunski.