On Sunday afternoon in Christchurch, Archbishop Rowan shifted gear.

Where we’d seen him preaching and presiding at a full-blown Choral Eucharist at Christ’s College, in the afternoon we saw him simply sitting on the steps of the altar at St Christopher’s Avonhead, chatting with about 130 young folk.

And if his theme sounded ethereal – he spoke on holiness – he made that virtue seem real and tangible.

For starters, he said, holiness is not “an extra special goodness.”

“Holy people,” he said, “make you feel better than you are.

“Good people make you feel worse than you are.”

Neither is holiness other-worldliness.

No: the young people he’d met the night before at the rock concert – staged to honour the Student Army which had toiled so massively following the quakes – those young people, he suggested, were nearer the mark.

“The way that Jesus talks about holiness in the Last Supper is helpful,” he said. “Holiness there is seen as going into the heart of where it’s most difficult for human beings to be human.

“So Jesus goes outside the city to the place where people suffer and are humiliated.

“He goes to the place where people throw stuff out, including other people.

“Outside the camp – in the language of the old Testament – outside the settlement.

“And that’s the first thing to bear in mind about the Christian idea of holiness.

“It’s something to do with going where it’s most difficult in the name of the Jesus who went where it was most difficult.

“And he wants us to be holy like that.”

Archbishop Rowan then went on to take questions for 20 minutes...

What did he think of Fresh Expressions, for instance? 

Answer: he’d helped launch it.

What did he make of the idea that we are now in a “post-Christian and postmodern era?” 

Answer: "Christian-based power structures are no longer at the heart of life… but neither are we shopping in a cosmic supermarket."

Why did he, the ABC, want to become a person of faith?

Answer: As a teen, he’d taken part in a Russian Orthodox liturgy, that left him awestruck at God’s majesty – and a couple of years later he’d heard a Christian who’d spent 15 years in a prison camp behind the Iron Curtain, speak at a chapel service. “I saw then," he said, "that faith… isn’t a decorative bit of spiritual uplift.”

Tour of the Red Zone

After the morning’s Eucharist, Dr Williams had toured the Red Zone, accompanied by Bishop Victoria Matthews and Mayor Bob Parker, who gave a graphic and precise description of the forces unleashed by the February 22 quake.

“The ground dropped one metre, and shifted violently towards the Port Hills. We were treading on air.”

Mayor Parker added that planners wanted not just to rebuild Christchurch, but to re-imagine the city for the people.

Archbishop Rowan said he was stunned by the scale of destruction.

It put him in mind, he said, of a visit he’d made to Beirut after the last Lebanese civil war.

His bus trundled further east, where he met the parishioners of Holy Trinity Avonside – whose once-elegant neo-gothic stone church was destroyed in the February quake, but who continue their ministry to the neighbouring retirement home and to the community.

After lunch, Dr Williams moved to St Christopher’s Avonhead, where he preachedto a congregation of about 300 people, before having a quick cuppa and returning to the sanctuary to speak to the young people.