There was a 5.2 magnitude earthquake off the coast of Invercargill last Saturday. But it was nothing compared to the seismic shift in our landscape on the Thursday before, when Kiingi Tuheitia was laid to rest and Kuini Nga wai hono i te po was crowned with a Bible and anointed by an Anglican archbishop.

The colliding plates that caused the quake were the immovable object of the coalition Government’s plans to debate revision of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, reset policies around Māori health, council wards, place names and a dozen other hard won priorities; meeting the irresistible force of tino rangatiratanga, newly energized by a series of hui led by the Kiingitanga movement. The tangihanga and coronation last week turned that force into a torrent, with a flow of some 100,000 visitors to Ngaruawahia.

Anglicans have grown accustomed to living on the sidelines of national events and are decreasingly involved in causing earthquakes. You’d have to go back to the Hikoi of Hope in 1998 for anything with similar impact. We’ve become an ever more privatized operation,

which is exactly what the coalition government prefers us to be. Our prime minister likes to keep his faith personal and free of politics. Our finance minister well trained in an Anglican private school, decided the Christchurch Cathedral rebuild didn’t deserve more funding because it was a private, religious space. (That would have been surprising news to Cantabrians who see it as a public, civic space at the heart of their city.)

That privatised, personalised, depoliticalised description was ripped away last week.

Archbishop Don Tamihere, like his predecessors before him, stood at the heart of the mourning and the celebrating, calling us all to account. Whakahuihui Vercoe, who reminded Queen Elizabeth at Waitangi in 1990 that she had failed to honour the treaty made with her great, great grandmother, would have been smiling last Thursday.

Archbishop Don called us not to a private faith but a ”politic of love...that is the only way we can build kotahitanga amongst us”. A politic focused on justice to overturn the pharaohs of empire and colonial power. A politic that builds an “ethic of restoration”, to use Moana Jackson’s phrase.

The expectations around the Kiingitanga movement have never been higher, not only for political leadership, but moral as well. The kotahitanga the king called for and the archbishop endorsed is for all New Zealanders. And the voice of the church is at the heart of that call. Last Thursday, Anglicans and in fact all the denominations from Ratana to Presbyterian, Methodist and Catholic and stood in that public politic space together in Ngaruawahia. 

We were gathered where we belong. In a place where the queen’s head wore a Bible not a crown. For a church whose constitution is grounded in Gospel and Treaty it was the only place to be.

Seismic shifts notwithstanding.