Otara

Sitting all by itself, at a crossroads in the South Eastern corner of Southland is this tiny church, the spiritual home, when I visited it, of a small,close knit congregation of truly lovely people. I don't know whether they still meet there. Their existence was precarious a couple of years ago, and will be more so now.

The rural church is disappearing. The tide of 21st Century secularisation is washing with as much vigour through the farm gates as it does through the streets of the cities, but out there, where no-one much is looking, there has been an additional pressure. Over the last 30 or so years there has been a revolution in New Zealand farming, away from mixed cropping, sheep and beef towards dairying. The transition is seen in the infrastructure of the countryside and in the change from small woolly inhabitants of paddocks to big black and white ones. A significant part of the transition is not seen, and that is the change in the social structure of rural New Zealand. Dairying involves a different relationship to the land than traditional pastoral and agricultural farming, and requires a different relationship to the clock. Many of the old family farms have been sold and the old families have gone. So, the institutions of rural New Zealand, including the churches, based as they were on established verities and priorities and relationships, have suffered huge and often terminal decreases in membership. All over Otago and Southland small country churches lie empty. The newer, evangelical churches sometimes rise and do well for a while, but few of them establish a lasting foothold. The rural church in New Zealand is in crisis, and I'm not sure what to do about that. I'm not sure anybody else does, either.

So the stolid little church sits resilient under the lowering cloud. Is that a light in the distance?

Technical: Canon EOS 300D, Canon EF-S 17-85 lens @17mm. 1/625 and f 9. Extensive post processing with Corel Paintshop Pro. I wanted to catch something of the loneliness of this doughty little building, and its solid, no nonsense architecture. I also hoped to suggest its place in the landscape and something of the threat to its existence. I cropped it so that the cross lies on the lower left thirds intersection and left in as much as I could of the gritty driveway as a visual balance to the heavy sky, between which elements the church is sandwiched.

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