The Anglican Church in Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia, formerly the Church of the Province of New Zealand, is a province of the Anglican Communion serving New Zealand, Fiji, Tonga, Samoa, and the Cook Islands. Since 1992 the church has consisted of three tikanga or cultural streams: Aotearoa, New Zealand, and Polynesia. The church's constitution says that, among other things, it is required to "maintain the right of every person to choose any particular cultural expression of the faith". As a result, the church's General Synod has agreed upon the development of the three-person primacy based on this three tikanga system; it has three primates, each representing a tikanga, who share authority.
The Anglican Church is an apostolic church, which claims to trace its bishops back to the apostles via holy orders. A New Zealand Prayer Book, He Karakia Mihinare o Aotearoa (ANZPB/HKMOA), containing traditional liturgies, rites, and blessings, is central to the church's worship.
The Anglican Church in Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia is not established as an official church of any sovereign state, unlike the Church of England from which it grew. However, Anglicans have taken a preeminent leadership role on New Zealand state occasions. In 2016, responding to a peer-reviewed study in the Journal of Anglican Studies published by Cambridge University Press, the church reported having 459,711 total members, of whom 220,659 were regularly active members. In The Church of England Yearbook 2024, the church reported 469,036 members. In 2017, Growth and Decline in the Anglican Communion: 1980 to the Present, published by Routledge, collected research reporting there were 632,100 Anglicans in New Zealand and Polynesia, including 6,600 in Fiji, 1,600 in Tonga, 340 in Samoa, and 90 in the Cook Islands. Anglicanism is the second largest single Christian religious affiliation in New Zealand, according to the 2023 census, which recorded 245,301 adherents in New Zealand. Roman Catholicism recorded 289,788.
Since the 1960s the New Zealand Anglican Church in general has approved the marriage by a priest in a church of someone whose earlier marriage was dissolved (even though the former spouse still lives), and has approved blessings for same-sex couples.
Names Until 1992, the church was formally called the "Church of the Province of New Zealand", and was also referred to as the "Church of England". It is now known as the "Anglican Church", reflecting its membership of the worldwide Anglican Communion. Members of the church typically identify as "Anglicans".
The Māori name for the New Zealand Anglican Church, – meaning "the missionary church" – reveals its origins in the work of the first missionaries to arrive in New Zealand.
History First New Zealand Anglicans
While heading the parliamentary campaign against the British slave trade for twenty years until the passage of the Slave Trade Act 1807, William Wilberforce championed the foundation of the Church Missionary Society (CMS) in 1799, with other members of the Clapham Sect including John Venn, determined to improve the treatment of indigenous people by the British. pp 20-116
The CMS mission to New Zealand was begun by Samuel Marsden, the Anglican chaplain in New South Wales. He had met the Ngāpuhi chiefs Te Pahi and Ruatara when they travelled outside New Zealand, and they invited him to visit their country. Ruatara provided protection for the first mission station, at Rangihoua in the Bay of Islands.
For the first years of the mission, intertribal Musket Wars hampered the missionaries' movements and Māori interest in their message. Personal disputes between the early missionaries, and their involvement in trading muskets, also compromised their efforts.
The Māori language did not then have an indigenous writing system. Missionaries learned to speak Māori, and introduced the Latin alphabet. The CMS, including Thomas Kendall; Māori, including Tītore and Hongi Hika; and Cambridge University's Samuel Lee, developed the written language between 1817 and 1830. In 1833, while living in the Paihia mission house of Anglican priest and the now head of the New Zealand CMS mission (later to become the New Zealand Church Missionary Society) Rev Henry Williams, missioner William Colenso published the Māori translations of books of the Bible, the first books printed in New Zealand. His 1837 Māori New Testament was the first indigenous language translation of the Bible published in the southern hemisphere. Demand for the Māori New Testament, and the Prayer Book that followed, grew exponentially, as did Christian Māori leadership and public Christian services, with 33,000 Māori soon attending regularly. Literacy and understanding the Bible increased and social and economic benefits, decreased slavery and intertribal violence, and increased peace and respect for all people in Māori society, including women.
Missionaries and the Treaty of Waitangi
Māori generally respected the British, partially due to their relationships with missionaries and also due to British status as a major maritime power, which had been made apparent to Māori travelling outside New Zealand. In England the church and state were interlinked and the Church of England had a special status guaranteed in law. Evangelicals, as loyal Anglicans, accepted this status and encouraged Māori to look to the British Crown for protection and recognition. As a result CMS missionaries, especially Henry Williams, played a leading part in encouraging Māori to sign the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840.
Assuming that a treaty in English could not be understood, debated or agreed to by Māori, Hobson asked CMS head missioner Henry Williams, and his son Edward Marsh Williams, who was a scholar in Māori language and custom, to translate the document overnight on 4 February. Henry Williams was concerned with the actions of the New Zealand Company in Wellington and felt he had to agree with Hobson's request to ensure the treaty would be as favourable as possible to Māori. Williams avoided using any English words that had no expression in Māori "thereby preserving entire the spirit and tenor" of the treaty. He added a note to the copy Hobson sent to Gibbs stating, "I certify that the above is as literal a translation of the Treaty of Waitangi as the idiom of the language will allow." The gospel-based literacy of Māori meant some of the concepts communicated in the translation were from the Māori Bible, including (governorship) and (chiefly rule), and the idea of the treaty as a "covenant" was biblical.
In later years this missionary support for the treaty led to increasing disillusionment among Māori as the treaty was ignored by the colonial and settler governments. The emergence of Māori religious movements such as Pai Mārire and Ringatū reflected this rejection of missionary Christianity. When the missionary Carl Sylvius Völkner was suspected of spying by Māori in 1865, the fact that he was a member of the Anglican clergy afforded him no protection, and he was executed.
Settler church
After missionary work amongst Māori, the second major influence shaping Anglicanism in New Zealand came from the large number of Anglican settlers who arrived in the mid-19th century. Most were from England, with some from Ireland and Australia. The early CMS missionary beginnings and the large number of Anglican settlers resulted in Anglicanism becoming the largest religious denomination in New Zealand. In 1858, more than half of the colony's population was Anglican.
George Augustus Selwyn became Bishop of New Zealand (the only Anglican bishop to have this title) in 1841. He headed both the Māori and settler Anglican parts of the church. Evangelical missionaries were suspicious of his control over them and his emphasis on the authority of the church, while settlers were hostile towards his pro-Māori stance. He increasingly found himself caught between Māori and Pākehā issues of land and sovereignty.
The first Anglican parish in the then capital of Auckland was St Paul's, which was founded in 1841 within a year of the foundation of the city and is known as the 'Mother Church' of the city. The first St Paul's building was in Emily Place, just off Princes Street, where a plaque still marks the site of the beginning of the Christian church in Auckland. St Paul's was the seat of the Bishop of New Zealand, for Selwyn's entire 28 year tenure and served as Auckland's Cathedral for over 40 years.
Bishop Selwyn opened St Paul's Church over four services on 7 May 1843. He later wrote, "The services began with a native congregation at nine; some of whom having only heard of the opening on Saturday evening, paddled a distance of twelve miles by sea during the night, in order to be present. The greater number were in full European clothing, and took part in the Church service, in a manner which contrasts most strikingly with that of the silent and unkneeling congregations of the English settlers." St Paul's then held four Sunday services weekly, serving both Māori and European congregations, with two services conducted in te reo Māori and two in English. Bishop Selwyn had learned te reo Māori himself.
The CMS criticised Selwyn for being ineffective in training and ordaining clergy – especially Māori. It took him 11 years to ordain the first Māori Anglican minister, Rev Rota Waitoa (who studied under Selwyn for 10 years) at St Paul's on 22 May 1853, and 24 years to ordain a Māori priest. Selwyn went on to ordain seven more Māori clergy at St Paul's, but his high church ways were blamed for undermining the work of the CMS and damaging Māori enthusiasm for Christianity.
Selwyn generally advocated for Māori rights and was often a critic of the unjust and reckless land acquisition practices that led to the New Zealand Wars. However, his support of the Invasion of the Waikato as chaplain, damaged his and the church's relationship with Māori, which is still felt today. In 1865, Selwyn wrote of the Anglican Church's relationship with Māori, "oh! how things have changed! how much of the buoyancy of hope has been sobered down by experience! when, instead of a nation of believers welcoming me as their father, I find here and there a few scattered sheep, the remnant of a flock which has forsaken the shepherd".H. W. Tucker, Memoir of the life and episcopate of George Augustus Selwyn. London: Gardner, 1879, p. 206.
St Paul's was considered a garrison church, but when the first regimental colours unfurled in New Zealand were donated to the church after the New Zealand Wars, its second vicar, Rev John Frederick Lloyd (who was also a chaplain in the wars) turned them down so "no jealousies of race or feelings of hostility should ever be permitted to enter, but where men should remember only that they are one in Christ".
Church constitution While Anglicans carried some of the privileges of the Church of England to New Zealand, they struggled to devise a method of church organisation which took account of their new non-establishment status alongside other churches. In 1857, after 15 years of consultation, a constitution for the New Zealand church was finalised on the basis of voluntary compact. Links with the traditions of the mother-church in England were guaranteed in their worship, ministry and beliefs. At national and regional levels, bishops, and representatives from the clergy and laity met together but voted separately on church matters, ensuring that each group had an equal voice. The constitution resolved problems for the settler church but failed to deal adequately with the administrative and leadership needs of the Māori church.
Regional identity Selwyn's diocese was progressively divided into sub-districts, beginning in 1856 when Christchurch became a new diocese; Wellington, Nelson and Waiapu (East Coast) followed in 1858, and Dunedin separated from Christchurch in 1869.