New Zealand's First Convert

Truth Or Falsehood

The first "official" convert to Christianity in New Zealand that we are aware of was a chief called Rangi.  He was tuberculous and dying.  The date was 1824; the location was the Bay of Islands.  The missionaries involved were Henry Williams and Richard Davis. 

There is record that he suffered quite severe symptoms in October 1824 and again in February 1825, but by July 1825 the disease took an even more serious turn and he suffered the rapid weight loss that gave tuberculosis its common name of "consumption". 

Despite his illness, on 7 August 1825 he made, in the language of Richard Davis, "an open confession of his faith in Christ in the presence of many of his Countrymen."  So, in the final stages of his illness, when his "bones stood through his skin", having had his faith "narrowly examined" and with the full consent of the other missionaries present, Rangi was baptised by Henry Williams and took the name Christian Rangi.  He died the next day. [Malcolm Falloon, "Christian Rangi: 'A Brand Plucked from the Burning"?,  Te Rongopai 1814: 'Takoto te pai!"  Bicentenary Reflections on Christian Beginnings and Developments in Aotearoa New Zealand. (Auckland: Anglican Church in Aotearoa, 2014),   p.130.]

Historian Malcolm Falloon quickly dismisses the paternalistic condescension of secularist historians by which Rangi's faith is rationalised into a naive act by a primitive, ignorant man.  He identifies four factors that played a role in Rangi's conversion and subsequent profession of faith.

Richard Davis--Missionary, Part II

Only Two Hundred Years Ago

Maori culture and civilization was a mixed bag.  The culture of cannibalism, utu (or revenge), and slavery benighted the Maori people.  However, missionaries who stayed the course, also observed positive aspects of Maori culture.

The missionaries wanted, above all, to expose the Maori tribes to the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  Gradually, as men and women repented of their sins and believed in the Son of God, examples of remarkable Christian faith began to emerge. 

But the scene documented by Davis below graphically underscores how the light, when it eventually began to shine, came as it were, through a debilitating darkness.  Amidst this darkness, the coming of the Gospel was like the light of Eärendil's star--a light which would shine when all other lights had gone out.

The Waitangi natives have returned from the Thames, where they had been to fight, and have killed the greater part of some poor people coming to Taiamai, under the protection of a chief who was absent when they met them.  They then transferred their fight to the place of the late Christian Rangi, to punish the misdemeanour of a young man.  They broke his arms, and beat him cruelly.  Then they butchered a poor slave girl in the most barbarous manner before the young man.  They first cut off one arm, and then the other.  They next cut deep gashes down her body, saying "I will have this part," "I will have that part to eat."  The merciless barbarians then cut off her legs while she was alive, and finally roasted and ate her.  They told the young man they had done this as a punishment for his crime.  My soul is filled with horror and dismay.  O Lord, in mercy interpose in behalf of these poor wretched heathen!  [John Coleman, ed., A Memoir of the Reverend Richard Davis (London: James Nisbet and Co., 1865), p.78.]

These events occurred early in 1826.  Davis had been living and working with his wife and family in the Bay of Islands for about eighteen months. 

Thank God those days have passed. 

Richard Davis--Missionary, Part I

Nothing But the Gospel Preached Will Suffice

In recent weeks we have been reading A Memoir of the Reverend Richard Davis (for 39 Years a Missionary in New Zealand) by the Reverend John Noble Coleman [London: James Nisbet and Co., 1865.]

The book, of course, is out of print. It consists of a summary of Richard Davis's correspondence back to the United Kingdom, together with journal entries.  Davis was one of the very early missionaries to New Zealand.  The Gospel was first officially preached by the Reverend Samuel Marsden on Christmas Day, 1814 at Hohi Bay in the north of the North Island.

Russell Clark's reconstruction of Samuel Marsden's Christmas Day service at Hohi (Oihi) Bay in the Bay of Islands in 1814 is how many New Zealanders have visualised the first Christmas service in this country.

Then followed what we may call the first missionary effort which failed spectacularly for reasons which Davis addresses in his letters and journal.  Davis was part of the second effort which was much more successful.  He arrived in 1824 and began work in Paihia, alongside William and Henry Williams.

It was difficult and dangerous work.  One of the dangers was famine.  It took years for the missionaries to organize to provide a sufficient supply of food for the missionary families and their dependants.  Richard Davis was at the forefront of meeting this challenge.  He had been sent to New Zealand in part because he was a careful and successful farm manager in the UK.  Part of his longer term responsibility was to break in a farm in the Bay of Islands area in order to grow sufficient crops, including livestock, to provide a steady supply of sustenance for the missionaries and their dependants.

A second continual danger was the threat to their own persons from the local (or marauding) Maori tribes.  Cannibalism at the time was a "normal" part of tribal life.  In part it was the Maori solution to the lack of adequate food.

In April 1925 he wrote of his conviction that in the end the Gospel of Christ would win over the indigenous Maori.  He was aware, however, that it may be at the cost of their lives.
He writes:

This mission is at present in a dark state, surrounding by enemies before and behind.  We have foes without and foes within.  The hand of the Lord is clearly to be seen in the formation and protection of this mission.  I am fully persuaded that the standrd of the Gospel is upraised here, and that all the host of hell cannot pull it down.  We may be obliged for a time to leave New Zealand.  We may be entombed in the bowels of these cannibals.  But the cause of Christ must prosper.  Satan's power cannot hinder it.

. . . . The civilisation of the natives has been attended to, and their temporal concerns have been greatly improved.  But the proper work of missions, the evangelization of the heathen, is the first duty to be discharged.  [Richard Davis, Memoirs, p. 68] 

He then expresses that his hope for an eventual positive response to the preaching of the Gospel to the Maori, which he was increasingly able to do in their own language, would come not from human activity to lift the standard of living of Maori.  Without the work of the Spirit of God Himself, through the preaching of the good news of Jesus Christ, feeding and clothing Maori would have only negative effects.

Must we prepare, nay, can we prepare, our hearts for the reception of the Spirit of Christ?  Certainly not.  So I am fully convinced, that all we an do in New Zealand to civilize the natives will produce no spiritual result.  [Here Davis alludes to the ineffectual and erroneous strategy of the earlier cohort of missionaries, now no longer working in the mission.]  They [the Maori] have been fed to the full, and now, like Jeshurun of old, they are waxed fat, and kick.  [Ibid.]

Nothing but the preaching of the Gospel of Christ will benefit the souls of the New Zealanders.  This, my dear sir, is my decided conviction.  And in this conviction I trust, through grace, to live and die.

 The same issues still roil through New Zealand.  We have seen successive governments attempt to save people by feeding and clothing them.  On almost every possible measure, it has been a dismal failure.

• Maori make up 51 percent of our prison population, but only 14.6 percent of the population. 
• New Zealand has one of the highest proportions of ecstasy and amphetamine abusers in the world a United Nations survey has found.
• Almost 30% of children in New Zealand live in sole parent families. For Maori, 72 percent of births were to married parents in 1968; by 2015 the proportion had fallen to just 21 percent.

We could go on. It is our firm conviction that Government social welfare programmes will only result in a significant proportion of recipients  "waxing fat, then kicking".  Davis was right.  The Gospel of Christ is the only sustainable source of life, fundamental to all others.