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Christ's College

When I left school I was 16, and went to work as a labourer in a firm that made pre-stressed concrete beams. The first job I worked on was the entrance gates for Christ's College. When I helped pour those 8 little pillars and made sure the curving roofs were smoothly trowelled,  I guess I was about as far from everything the college stood for as it was possible to be. Last week, approaching the end of my working life, I walked through those gates with my friend and colleague, Anne Van Gend, to conduct a Special Character Review of the college.

Christ's College was founded in the 1850s and has played a significant role in the life of the City of Christchurch, and indeed of New Zealand, with an alumni list bursting with the names of business, cultural, political, military, sporting and religious luminaries. The campus was hammered as badly as anywhere else by the earthquakes, but in the intervening 7 years has been restored and developed with the highest possible architectural and constructional standards. The school, with its mixture of carefully remade old buildings and sympathetic, contemporary replacements set around a large formal quadrangle is beautiful and busy.  The restoration of the school is not all about buildings: as in the rest of the city, the earthquakes changed people significantly, as individuals and as a society and the school reflects this.
 
As we arrived, groups of boys in their distinctive black and white uniforms moved purposefully and resolutely about the place, chatting and joking in the clear autumnal sun.
We were shown great hospitality in our 4 days there, and met with a wide range of staff, parents and students. We witnessed the chaplain, the remarkable, inimitable, irreplaceable Bosco Peters as he led worship in the 19th Century Gothic Revival chapel, conducted religious education lessons, and was constantly approached, as he walked around the school, by boys eager to discuss his last sermon or some other point of spiritual enquiry. We met articulate, assured young men with no lack of social graces or ability to reflect on and express their views. For some of them, their educational vocational, sporting and/or cultural ambitions seemed boundless.

The Executive Principal, Mr. Garth Wynne is comparatively new to the school but is charting a course of intelligent educational reform which promises to make Christ's College and exemplar and leader of positive education in New Zealand. We talked to a rowing coach who is cautiously optimistic about the Colleges chances in the Maadi Cup again this year, and to one of the drama teachers still enthusing about the last production. This is a busy place, which demands much of staff and students, and in some ways, it all seems a world apart. Which is an accusation sometimes levelled at the school by those who don't share that world, but which is actually its greatest strength.

The school's buildings, while embodying the many revisions since, hark back to its 19th Century origins; but the layout of grey stone around a formal grass square reaches back further, echoing the great medieval educational institutions of Britain. These themselves reflect the virtues of individual worth, the pursuit of truth, community awareness and social responsibility which are based in the Gospel of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and are amongst the finest legacies of Christendom. Our task in reviewing the school was to audit the ways in which these oldest and deepest of values are reflected in the life of this innovative and vital school. This "world apart" preserves much that is essential to the rest of us, and has the potential to gift it well beyond the school's gates.

I walked out through those gates on Wednesday afternoon aware of how at home I had felt at Christ's College, and of how excited I felt at the schools potential to embody truly Christian life and education. Things have shifted: somewhat in the school, widely in the city,  fundamentally in me.    
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MIchael Godfrey said…
I first encountered Christ's when, as a ten year old tourist in the city a decade or many ago I stood beside my aghast parents, as they ummed, ahhhed, and tut tutted at the contents of a notice posted deep in the labyrinthine vowels of the mysterious campus. I overheard their discourse as they expressed their horror: the notice announced the names of the boys who had failed University Entrancethat year. All others were namelessly noted to have passed. Many years later I was the noisy fellow in the stern of a rowing VIII as we, for two successive years held Christ's at Bay to win, first, the National Intermediate VIIIs, andvthe following year the Maadi itself. Perhaps the psyches damaged by UE shame had gained the spirits of their cohorts on the water.

Nevertheless you tell of a fine place today, and I can only hope and pray that the fine recipients and custodians of the traditions will go on to inspire greatness in their communities and wisdom in the troubled world they are moving on to embrace.
16 March 2018 at 21:41
Kate said…
I too have a 'working class' memory of Christ's. When I was 21 I used to test the fire alarms there once a week. There was a lovely Welsh ?janitor ?handyman about my age there who used to call me 'Sunshine'. I regret to this day not taking him up on his request for a date.
Sorry, that's a bit banal after your lovely post.
19 March 2018 at 20:47
Kelvin Wright said…
Ahhhb.... what If? Our lives are the end products of all those decisions made or not made. So now you could be living happily in some green valley building a reputation for your wonderful, principled, unconventional pictures of corgis and ponies. But then of course your children would not exist nor your grandchild and some other set of non existent people would. Perhaps a blissful life would mean you would not have developed your painting and we would all be the poorer for that.
20 March 2018 at 10:16
Kate said…
Thank you Kelvin. Yes. That’s how I generally look at it too. But I can still see him limping towards me (he had a gammie leg) with a lovely grin on his face, saying ‘ ‘allo Sunshine!’
Corgis? Ha ha.
22 March 2018 at 10:33
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