Our Bicultural Journey Based on Partnership

This is the time of the year when, more than any other, we have an opportunity to reconsider who we are as ‘people of Aotearoa New Zealand. 

In our own brief enough history as the Methodist Church of New Zealand, Te Tiriti is something we have slowly learned to understand and respect. It was only in the late 1940s that some semblance of equality began to be established within the Church in respect to Māori ministry. This was finally reinforced by the appointment of Rua Rakena as Tumuaki of the Māori Division (Taha Māori) in the early 1970s. But there was no reference to the Treaty in the Church’s law book until the 1990s - the result of the Connexion’s Bicultural Journey throughout the 1980s.   

What happened in the 1980s, however, was of a different order. The Methodist Church of New Zealand finally recognised it could not maintain its stance as the sole decision-maker regarding the principles that under-pinned its laws and regulations. It saw itself as part of the wider world of Protestant Christianity, that its theology owed its origins to the European Reformation, and through the centuries its story went back to the establishment of Christendom.

But in addition, in the 1980’s, we believed it was time to acknowledge and assert that we belong to a particular part of the world where two cultures live alongside each other. We began to question our understanding of bi-culturalism, and in the language of that time we chose to declare that within our own community of faith we are committed to a power-sharing partnership with the tangata whenua.

We used that phrase from the late 1980s. We did not make it part of a specific law or regulations. We placed the words at the beginning of the Statement of Mission that precedes the detailed guide to the ordering of our work. And now there is a challenge from outside the Church to the Treaty that we have accepted as part of our reason for being.

Underlying what is said in this article is the conviction that partnership is not a matter of mere numbers – with the exception, possibly of 1 + 1 = 2. Democracy is so often expressed in bare majorities. We are living in a country where the Government survives by a bare majority and is itself a disparate coalition of parties and policies, rather than a partnership.

Partnership, as expressed in our Statement of Mission, looks back to the moment when a sovereign people, the tangata whenua,chose to ally itself with the representatives of a country from the other side of the world, whose symbolic leader was a queen. The people of this land did not see the signing of the Treaty as a loss of manafor themselves. We cannot in 2025 think of Te Hāhi Weteriana o Aotearoa as an unequal partnership, and we cannot accept that either its principles or its spirit are to be decided by the ballot-box.