“Te Hāhi Mihinare,” the traditional name for the Māori branch of the Anglican Church, is easily translated. It means “the missionary house,” reflecting the dominant role played by missionaries in the shaping of this religious body. These days the term has been dropped as demeaning by Māori Anglicans but it has a proud, if contested, history as one of the largest and longest enduring of modern Māori institutions and the largest religious institution.

The history of this Hāhi has great significance for Māori and for religion in New Zealand. Hirini Kaa’s fine volume demonstrates that its struggle for identity and independence was deeply significant in the shaping of modern Māori identity.

Outsiders may not realise how significant the Hāhi was in the Māori world, unaware of the role Apirana Ngata played in it from the 1920s to the 1950s and Professor Whatarangi Winiata in the 1990s. These names indicate how developments in the church may have an influence on future constitutional developments.

Kaa’s history of the Māori church is the first since the constitutional revolution which split the Anglican church into three tikanga in 1992, effectively giving Māori Anglicans a separate identity so long denied them. He has reinterpreted the nearly 200 years of its history to trace the struggles for mātauranga and rangatiratanga and the opposition they faced from those who believed the church must be multi-cultural and not administered on ethnic lines.

Kaa expresses his history within a Māori framework, so he initially sees the church as a very conservative tribal institution, largely following tribal divisions. His sources are Māori language texts, newspapers, minutes of church boards and correspondence. His focus reflects his roots in three generations of Ngāti Porou Anglican clergy, and also Ngāpuhi relationships, somewhat at the expense of other strands. Thus, there are many fine illustrations in the book but they largely reflect the Ngāti Porou place within the church.

As the author acknowledges, it was English Anglican missionaries to Africa who first propounded the notion of an independent “native” church which should be, “self-governing, self-supporting, self-propagating.”

Missionaries hoped that New Zealand would follow the same path but, in the upshot, the settler church asserted its control of the institution.

Kaa plays down the missionaries and their aspirations (although he does refer to the “Anglican Empire”) and emphasises Māori agency to struggle for their own independence.

Originally the Waiapu Diocese, centred on the East Coast and the Bay of Plenty, was conceived as a “native diocese” and “native clergy” were ordained to serve there alongside missionaries. That original conception was abandoned during the land wars and thereafter Māori Anglicans were controlled by Pākehā church structures.

Aspirations remained for a Māori bishop, inspired by figures like Bishop Azariah of India, and it had to be addressed when many parishioners transferred from Anglicanism to Rātana in the 1920s. The Pākehā solution was the creation of a Māori diocese with a Pākehā bishop. Kaa is not the first to tell the story of the revolt against this solution led by Āpirana Ngata and the compromise solution of a Māori bishop with no authority, but his use of Māori sources and his Māori focus throws further light on the story. He reads the next 70 years as a slow movement towards real independence, finally attained in the new Anglican constitution of 1992. Kaa deserves congratulations for the clear and historicising way in which he frames this recent story.

Separate chapters look at the development of Māori ministry and training and its place in the wider church scene. In a liturgical church and an oral culture, the language of prayer is significant, so a fascinating chapter focuses on the Rawiri, the prayer book.

This is not a history of the original Church Mission to the Māori; few missionaries are mentioned even in passing. There is little on the role played by some Pākehā clergy in ministry to Māori in subsequent years. There is no reference, surprisingly, to Wiremu Tāmihana te Waharoa who, from the 1840s, developed a vision of a distinctly Māori Christian movement which would be distinct from Pākehā. In many ways, his vision parallels what the Mihinare Church now aspires to but he supported the Kīngitanga and perhaps for this reason is absent.

The academic in me grumbles that Kaa has failed to refer to a number of significant theses and a manuscript history by Butterworth on the development of the Māori bishopric. Kaa also ignores recent research that discerns a distinctive Māori theology in the Mihinare church. If this was an oversight, I guess it was deliberate that Kaa ignores a book by W.G. Williams, The Child Grew, published in 1949 and subtitled “the Story of the Anglican Māori Mission”, which covers exactly his ground but is written by a descendant of the great missionary family.

I guess the reason is that this is not a history of Māori Anglicans but of the evolution of church organisation. There is virtually nothing here on the life of the Māori parishes, the Māori Anglican clergy, the war chaplaincies or the Māori schools. Kaa says nothing about the great historic churches at Ōtaki (Rangiātea) and Wanganui (Putiki) and Ngāti Raukawa clergy and traditions in the church are minimised. Some of these gaps can be filled out from new histories of the Waiapu, Nelson and Auckland dioceses which include chapters that vividly portray the communities of Māori Anglicans in their regions, but the story of Māori in the Wellington diocese (mostly Ngāti Raukawa) remains untold.

The signal achievement of this book is of a vision of the roots of a profound Māori religious movement that has been hidden in the shadow of the broader Anglican Church for too long. Hirini Kaa has brought its structural evolution into the light. But there is more of the story to tell. Many years ago I wrote the entry in the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography on Hākaria Pāhewa, vicar of Te Kaha from 1896 who firmly guided the peoples of the cape for nearly 50 years, travelling on horseback to every corner of the district defending Ngāti Porou traditions and imposing Anglican rituals. This was the character of Te Hāhi Mihinare, in some ways a backward institution and irrelevant to today since this rural Māori world has almost completely disappeared. Kaa offers another perspective of its evolution into a pan-tribal and pan-denominational church, a presence of a very different kind. But he doesn’t survey its current health and I suspect that it faces the same struggles of declining commitment and internal disputes as other parts of the Anglican Church.

Reviewed by Peter Lineham