Our Anglican church brand was made in England, and exported already assembled, like a Ford Anglia, but right from the start it began to change to fit the contours of a new culture. It took a while. We didn’t get our own prayer book with the imagery and languages of this land until 1989, and we still haven’t got a home grown [Anglican] hymn book. Good things take time. Good church things take an eternity.

But there have been some big changes to the English imported model. Lay people got a governing voice back in 1857, long before England,  with our first constitution. Women were regularly ordained as priests from 1977 and diocesan bishops from 1990. World firsts.

But even before those advances, Māori played a major role in establishing our church. They were the catechists and teachers and evangelists that spread the gospel through the length and breadth of the land. Taught by the missionaries at Paihia of course. Anglicans take the name Te Haahi Mihinare, the church of the missionaries ; but there were only a couple of hundred missionaries among some 90,000 Māori. Māori did most of the work.

From the start Anglicans have been a bicultural church. You couldn’t be involved in leadership for the first 50 years unless you spoke both languages. And now its multicultural, Pākehā, Māori, Pasifika, but it stands on the Treaty of Waitangi which missionaries helped to draft and translate and promote and since 1990, its own bicultural constitution.

The Māori word for that document is Te Pouhere, which means mooring post, to which all our canoes are tethered, whatever our culture. Each year on Te Pouhere Sunday  we celebrate the post  around which this church is built.

This bicultural constitution was finally passed in 1992. Given that bicultural beginning it was a long time acoming.

But come it did on an autumn afternoon in a lecture hall at Waikato University. And once the General Synod finally passed the bill, we all went off to meet in three separate tikanga for the first time ever. Tikanga Pakeha who had been running the show for 150 years, happily speaking for Māori, telling them they weren’t ready to produce priests and bishops of their own, or manage their own affairs yet, were suddenly only one of three parts of this church. We could only make decisions with the support of all three partners. We no longer ran the show on our terms. We weren’t in charge anymore.

The weight of that slowly sank in. I was in the room. We sat there like stunned mullets. And 25 years later we’re still recovering from the shock and learning to live and work as a three tikanga church. We’re still arguing about how to share the money and buildings.

Locally that bicultural partnership is often invisible, much of the time. On a national level we’re doing much better, even more so internationally. A Māori priest represented all of us in the committee that chose the new Archbishop of Canterbury.

Despite our uneven achievements, Anglicanism is a bicultural work in progress, and it’s driven a deeper agenda described in the readings for Te Pouhere Sunday.

There’s a new sheriff in town, St Paul tells us. “The old order has gone and the new order has already begun… God is reconciling us to  himself through Christ and enlisting us all in this service of reconciliation.”

The early missionaries knew all about that text and lived by its mandate. The world they dropped into was often violent. They met that with the role of peace making and the new language of love. Māori catechists and teachers took that message to every iwi. Up until the NZ Wars of the 1860’s, Māori led Christianity spread like wildfire. A new order had truly begun.

Those NZ Wars were hugely destructive of the missionary legacy, but the Māori Anglican Church continued to thrive, mostly under the radar, as Pākeha argued whether they were mature enough yet to have their own bishop. Finally, the answer was yes, in 1928. Good things take time, ridiculous amounts of time.

But the message of reconciliation begun by our missionaries did take hold and shape our country’s future. We took to heart, Māori and Pākehā alike, those words of Jesus in the gospel reading for Te Pouhere Sunday. “As God has loved me, so I have loved you. Dwell in my love..you are my friends..love one another.”

Our Anglican pioneers treasured those words. Our first bishop George Selwyn, speaking on Wiremu Tamihana’s marae in the Waikato in 1862, described himself as no longer the

Victorian English gentleman that arrived 20 years earlier.

“I am not a Pākehā, neither am I a Māori; I am a half caste. I have eaten your food, I have slept in your houses, we have talked together, prayed together, partaken of the Lord’s Supper together, and therefore I tell you I am a half caste..It is in my body, in my flesh, in my sinews, in my bones, in my marrow..”

There were plenty of Māori who spoke in the same way about the depth of their friendship. A year later, in the midst of the NZ Wars, a group of Kaipara chiefs wrote a letter, published in the local newspaper,  written in their own words, to our “beloved friends, the Pākehās”. “We do not share the feelings of those foolish tribes who are sending away their Pākehās.. we desire to live together… in the light.”

A new order has begun, the message of reconciliation is at work among us, our calling is to dwell in love for one another. To call each other friends as Jesus calls us friends.

That is the vocation we inherit as Anglicans, rooted and grounded in our  history and our founding documents, a Treaty for the nation and constitution for the church. No one has a  prouder story to tell, or a faith as well anchored as ours. Our canoes are securely tied to Te Pouhere, the mooring post.

At a time when the Treaty seems up for debate, when it’s suggested we don’t have to honour it, but simply take account of it, when te reo is seen as an optional extra, Anglicans have a special obligation to check their mooring ropes.

Sir Hirini Moko Mead died last week, one of our great Māori  statesmen and educators. He said over and over in his speeches, I know who I am and where I belong. He said it proudly and clearly.

As Anglicans with the history we carry, as members of Te Haahi Mihinare, the church of the missionaries, we can say what Hirini said with the same confidence. We have an unshakeable place to stand. If we know and make that history our own.