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It's been 16 year, I think, since I was last at Waitangi. We Pakeha walked the short distance to the hotel to the Treaty House and waited in the sunshine while the Anglican Maori gathered from around New Zealand were welcomed onto the marae and into the meeting house by the kaitiaki of the house. We stood on the vast lawn and looked past the flagpole flying the three flags (New Zealand, The Union Jack and The United Tribes) Then in due course we were called on. The young people of our church had been meeting over the last few days and, augmented by a large number of young locals, they lined up on either side of the meeting house and sang a waiata as we approached. From the porch of Te Whare Runanga three warriors approached in challenge, each carrying a taiaha. There were two young men and one young woman. A woman wielding a taiaha and participating in such a challenge is an almost unheard of departure from tradition, especially in a context where Maori from every region of Aote...

Our church will gather tomorrow at the Waitangi Treaty house and be welcomed to the Bay of Islands by the Tangata Whenua. We will be from three tikanga: Pasifika, Maori and Pakeha and we will all meet on Sunday for prayer and then on Monday to discuss our common business. Before that happens though, we Pakeha have been meeting to sort out the stuff that pertains only to us. There is a story told about a native American chief in the 18th Century who was prodigiously talented at languages. In the space of a year he became proficient in English, Spanish, French and Italian. He was taken to England  and at a dinner at Oxford University he was asked, "so tell us chief, what is the grammar of your own language?" He thought deeply for a few moments and then said, "my language does not have any grammar." Just as our own grammar is invisible to us and the grammar of other languages blatantly obvious, so is our own culture invisible to us while that of others is pl...

The last two days have been spent in The Inter Diocesan Conference, a meeting of the seven Pakeha dioceses, teasing out our common ground before we meet with the Maori and Pasifika parts of our church in the General Synod. We have been meeting in a large windowless room with the air conditioning turned up way too high, so it's been a bit like meeting in a gymnasium in Dunedin, except that I think in Dunedin I would have been warmer. Yesterday morning we had a bit of a break from discussions to be welcomed by our hosts, the Diocese of Polynesia. We made a short bus trip through Nadi to St. Christopher's Church and were seated under a giant marquee and it wasn't a bit like meeting in a gymnasium in Dunedin, or anything else in Dunedin for that matter. We were formally welcomed in the Fijian way, with great dignity and energy, but with a very important difference. Usually, at such an important gathering, elders would have performed the welcoming ceremonies, but Archbishop W...