Taimalelagi Fagamalama Tuatagaloa-Leota opened a new chapter in her colourful life on Sunday afternoon.

Archdeacon Tai – as she’s known to hundreds of church folk – was ordained to the priesthood at Auckland’s Holy Trinity Cathedral.

Ordained, moreover, by Bishop Winston Halapua, the man who had brought her into the embrace of the Anglican Church in the first place, and by Bishops John Paterson and Kito Pikaahu.

Tai, who is Samoan, was the first lay archdeacon in the Diocese of Polynesia. She’s had an impressive career, both in the international affairs of the church, and in Pacific development.

From August 2001 to July 2006 she was the Anglican Observer at the United Nations, advocating on social, economic and justice issues, both in New York and Geneva, on behalf of the Communion. In particular, she worked for the rights of women, children and indigenous peoples, and for environmental issues.

Before that – from 1985 to 1993 – she was this church’s lay representative on another international Anglican body, the Anglican Consultative Council.

Tai has held a number of significant roles in the church at home, too. In 2000, for example, she was Co-President of the General Synod, she served for a number of years on the St John’s College Board of Oversight, and she's been active with the AAW, the Association of Anglican Women.

Tai also served three years as the Samoan-based Operations Manager for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP); and for four years before that she was a UNDP Programme Officer, responsible for development programmes in Samoa, Niue and Tokelau.

In recognition of her work she was awarded the Cross of St Augustine by the Archbishop of Canterbury; and she has also been made a Member of the Order of Samoa.

Tai was born in Samoa, and grew up in the Congregational Church of Samoa. Her late first husband supplied her first connection to things Anglican: he was a scholarship student at Southwell Prep School in Hamilton, and he’d been confirmed an Anglican while he was here.

As a young married couple they’d lived in Suva and worshipped at St Luke’s Laucala Bay, where Winston Halapua was serving as priest – and it was under his ministry that Tau committed herself as an Anglican.

Tai asked Bishop John Paterson to preach the sermon at her ordination – because he too has played a key role in Tai’s past. Bishop John had observed her work at the ACC and as a Diocese of Polynesia representative at the General Synod; and he was the one who nominated her to the Archbishop of Canterbury for the Observer to the United Nations post.

Bishop John took as his text on Sunday the epistle of the day: Ephesians 1: 3-14, and he spoke of the qualities that bishops seek to discern in candidates for the priesthood.

Tai, he said, “had ticked all the boxes.”

Later in the service, Bishop Winston licensed a number of people to various ministries. He commissioned the Rev Tai Tuatagaloa-Leota to ministry to Pasefika women in New Zealand – and to develop the diocese’s “links with the Anglican Communion.”

She won’t, it’s fair to say, be starting either of those tasks entirely from scratch.