Ō Tātou Taonga | StoriesGo to parent page
Whaihanga Mihinare | Anglican Creativity
Church buildings and building churches
3D Community Histories of Anglican Churches in Aotearoa New Zealand
It isn’t revelatory to say that churches are special buildings for those who build and gather inside them. Art and architectural history have frequently championed the designs of particularly notable churches—and churches which were sites of ‘important’ historic events are discussed and preserved in public memory by historians, too. Yet it isn’t just churches set apart by their uniqueness, grandeur or proximity to events of significance—the Nôtre Dames, Westminster Abbeys or Sagrada Familias of the world—which have strong emotional resonance for the people who worship there; churches are the backdrop to emotional and community histories for a broad cross-section of the population.
It is a cross-section that is shrinking, however—both in absolute terms and proportional terms—for Anglicans in Aotearoa. In this century alone, the reduction of the scale of Anglican communities here has been precipitous. In 2001, 3,737,277 people participated in the New Zealand Census, and 584,793 of them were Anglican (15.65%). By 2023, 4,993,923 people were captured by census—a 33.6% population increase in 22 years—but only 245,391 described themselves as Anglican (4.91% of the total population). Not only is this a decline of 58.06% in the number of people calling themselves Anglicans against an overall increase in population, but the median age of Anglicans has gone up and up. While the median age of all New Zealanders was fairly consistent between 2013 and 2023 at ~38 years, the median age of Anglicans has risen sharply from 55.5 in 2013 to 65.2 by 2023. In short: Anglicans are, on the whole, an aging group, and their descendants are increasingly not identifying themselves as members of the Anglican Church. In some instances, church attendance has dwindled so much that buildings are being desacralized and sold, their remaining congregants driving longer distances to previously unfamiliar spaces. Other churches hang on, but have fewer services (one per month, in many instances).
Read full text >
These demographic trends, however, don’t indicate that churches—the buildings and the communities who gather inside them—are no longer resonant, or that they aren’t changing and adapting to serve their communities and those around them. These trends also don’t mean that no one outside of those congregations is uninterested in the church experiences of those people who continue to attend services. They also don’t imply that, age-based observations aside, there is no longer significant diversity among those people who attend Anglican services. The reducing numbers of self-identifying Anglicans can, however, mean that the role of churches in communities past and present might be forgotten by the increasingly-large numbers of New Zealanders who no longer regularly attend services, and may be entirely hidden from those who never knew about the important roles churches have played or do play in local communities.
This project seeks to record and preserve community stories, embedded in church communities. In many cases, Anglican churches in Aotearoa were paid for by the funds raised from the communities among which they stand; in some instances, they were literally built by their congregants’ hands as well. They were not only funded by but built for specific communities. Though those communities will have changed over time, churches preserve their pasts and adapt their physical spaces to their present needs. Of course, churches were built on land where once there were no churches, where other stories about belonging, care, whakapapa, and moral behaviour were told and continue to be told, stories of mana whenua. Sometimes those churches’ stories joined with those older stories, creating an unbroken tale of community in those lands. Sometimes these churches and those who led, built and gathered inside them partially overwrote or tried to cover over kōrero tuku iho. They need not continue to do so into the present day, or the future.
Churches are sites of emotional expression. They serve as environments where weddings, funerals, and baptisms take place and have taken place, and those who make themselves present inside their walls engage during every service with stories of grief, of love, of joining together in community, of bonds broken, and harm done, in the form of Bible readings and reflections upon these stories in sermons. People in some church communities have caused immeasurable harm to others. People in some church communities have dedicated their lives to easing the pain and suffering of others. Stories about all these experiences can be projected into or associated with the church spaces which connected groups of people over the years.
The project which follows invites the communities which are formed in church buildings to tell stories about themselves, past and present. They talk about the construction of the church building or associated buildings, about renovations and adjustments, about furnishings and decorations, windows and pews, music-making facilities and other objects which live there. They tell stories about some of the people who made those churches community spaces, and the ways that connection to that church built social worlds and connections outside its walls too. They may talk about some of the events that took place inside churches or their halls, community centres, graveyards, or vicarages: weddings, baptisms, funerals, sewing circles, housies, fairs, dances, picnics and more. Alongside these community stories sit documents and records such as newspaper articles and old photographs. These profiles also include information about the land and its history before a church stood there, and look to the community’s hopes for the future. These stories sit within a 3D scan of the church itself, that you can navigate and orient yourself within, looking closely at the details of the buildings.
It’s important to note that there are a lot of churches in Aotearoa New Zealand. In the Anglican faith alone, there are currently just shy of 700 churches offering services, not to mention associated vicarages, community centres and other buildings which are used by the church community and its neighbours. This project isn’t going to cover every Anglican church in this country. But our goal is to build a collection of church histories which tell a variety of stories about the Anglican Church, the Hāhi Mihinare. We want to look at churches which sit in tiny towns, in rural centres and in large urban municipalities, churches which are very old and churches which are newer, churches where generations of the same families have attended and churches where the demographics of congregations have shifted and changed over time.
Please join us in exploring material, social and cultural histories of the Anglican Church of Aotearoa New Zealand.
