Scan the pews on a Sunday morning – and almost certainly, you’ll see a worryingly high proportion of grey heads. Which just illustrates one of the greatest challenges the Anglican Church is facing: how does it renew itself? Almost certainly, Michael Tamihere will be part of the answer. Lloyd Ashton spoke to him.

At just 27, Michael Tamihere is one of the rising talents in the worldwide Anglican scene. Already, for example, he’s a member of one of its most important forums, the Anglican Consultative Council.

And he’s certainly one of the emerging stars of Te Pihopatanga, the Maori Anglican Church – he has some unique national responsibilities there.

For someone who didn’t begin to grapple seriously with things Anglican until 10 years ago, it’s been a meteoric rise. Because it was in 1999 that, at the age of 17, he was introduced to The Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the old wooden Gothic church in Khyber Pass, Grafton, that’s now home to Te Pihopatanga in Auckland city.

He was groping for answers – and he felt himself instantly drawn to that church by what he saw, heard and felt.

It’s intriguing to ponder what might have happened if Michael’s first adult experience of Anglicanism had been not at Holy Sep – but at Te Karaiti Te Pou Herenga Waka, the much newer marae church at Mangere, where he’ll be ordained priest in June.
Because by the time Michael was introduced to Te Karaiti, he was pretty much a committed Anglican.

So each time he went there, he was prepared to persuade himself that he was having a good time – admiring the carvings and the tukutuku panels behind the altar, for example.

But try as he might, he couldn’t shake this nagging sense of discomfort, this sense that he didn’t belong.

“Eventually,” he says, “I figured it out.It was the carpet. I just wasn’t used to that. The marae, the houses I’d always lived in – they all had wooden floors.”

Whereas Holy Sep’s wooden building had connected him to the places that had formed him, and where he’d been comfortable.
“It’s made me wonder,” he says, “how the old people must have felt, with the switch from dirt floors to wooden floors.”

• • •

True, Michael does have Anglican whakapapa.

He’s Ngati Porou, after all, and in the nineteenth century the Hahi Mihinare had a big impact on the Coast. His great-great grandfather, Aperahama Tataitoko Tamihere, had been ordained priest in the 1890s.

So you’d expect Michael to be baptised an Anglican – which he was, at Kakariki, his marae at Waiomatatini, near the mouth of the Waiapu River.

But you wouldn’t want to read too much into that Anglican history.

Because on the East Coast, the Hahi Mihinare is more or less intertwined with Ngati Poroutanga, and these days the church is often seen as just the routine hatch, match and despatch agency. More about rote than revelation.

And that kind of religion isn’t guaranteed to appeal to a young man who’s trying to make his way in the big smoke.
What’s more, there had been a number of specifically non-Anglican influences in Michael’s growing up.

His mother, Catherine Teller, for one – because she’s Jewish. She’s the granddaughter of David Teller, a Hungarian Jew who fled Europe in the 1930s, and she’s also related to Edward Teller, the inventor of the hydrogen bomb.

Secondary school, for another – which, in Michael’s case, was Te Kura Kaupapa Maori o Hoani Waititi, the total immersion Maori language high school in West Auckland.

At Hoani Waititi, they’re distinctly ambivalent about Christianity. People there are inclined to link the church with the colonisers who robbed Maori of their birthright.

There was specific influence, too, from other Christian denominations.

As a kid, Michael remembers being scooped up by his nannies and plonked down at the marae where they’d be holding Ringatu services – led, incidentally, by Anaru Takurua, who later became a kaumatua at St John’s College.

There was a strong pull towards the Apostolic Church, too. Don Tamihere, Michael’s older brother, had even headed off to the Apo Bible training school near Wellington.

We’ve already named a couple of the places where Michael was nurtured in his language and culture.

But the real reason he has those capabilities is because his mum, Catherine Teller, made sacrifices for him. Big sacrifices.
Michael is the third of Catherine and Don Tamihere’s (snr) sons, and he spent his earliest years at Te Puia Springs.

But when Michael was 5, his parents separated. At that stage Don, the eldest of the three boys, was at boarding school.

Andrew, the middle brother, stayed with his dad. And Catherine took Michael, the youngest, to live with her in Tokomaru Bay.

Michael spent his first couple of school years in the mainstream school there. Then Catherine and a bunch of other Toko mums decided they wanted something more for their Maori kids than that. They didn’t want them to grow up strangers to their own language and culture.

So, in a community centre in the town, they set up Te Kura Kaupapa Maori o Nga Taonga Tuturu ki Tokomaru, a total immersion Maori language primary school. And doing that took some grit.

“That school wasn’t recognised by the government for the first three years of its life,” says Michael. “The government would send letters to the mums and dads, threatening to charge them for every day they kept their kids out of school.

“These mothers took up weaving, and they’d just weave, weave and weave. And they’d sell that weaving in order to get enough money to run our school.”

That wasn’t the only stress they had to contend with, either. One year the nearby river rose and took out the toilet block. The kura was shifted to one of the marae in town while they sorted that one out.

When Michael was 12, Catherine brought him to West Auckland so he could carry on learning the total immersion way, at Hoani Waititi.

Of course, the wooden floors at Holy Sep weren’t enough by themselves to make joining the Anglican Church an open and shut case for Michael.

There was a host of other things that he responded to at Holy Sep – hearing the liturgy spoken in his own tongue, for example, by people he knew. That was important.

His elder brother Don was another. During his time at the Apostolic Bible School, Don had concluded that the Apos were always going to struggle to minister to Maori, because they didn’t want to embrace Maori culture.

So he’d begun dipping his toe in the waters at Holy Sep, where they don’t share that fundamental mistrust.

In fact, Don had taken his Anglican investigations significantly further. Not only was he a regular at Holy Sep, but he’d also been accepted for ordination training in the Anglican Church.

He was a student at St John’s College – and he was also working with Hirini Kaa to get Te Mara, the Maori youth ministry school, off the ground.

So it was easy for Michael to tag along with his older brother to church – easy too for him to become one of those lending a hand on Te Mara’s various projects.

“We’d do crazy things like stay up all night, planning, pulling things together. There were trips around the church too, and I’d go along on those. It was immersion by accident.”

By this time, Michael was in his first year at Auckland university, where he was studying history. And there was another Anglican tie-in there: Hirini Kaa – the same Hirini who was Te Mara’s first leader – was an MA student then, tutoring Maori papers in history.

• • •

Because of that Te Mara involvement, Michael found himself coming into the church not as most people do, at grassroots level, but from the top down.
Hirini and Don were advancing the Te Mara case – and the needs of rangatahi generally – in every forum they could think of. And because Michael was helping with their presentations, he’d go with them to all the top-level events.

To General Synod, for example, and to meetings of its standing committee; to diocesan synods; and to runanganui, the synod of Te Pihopatanga. Early in the piece, he got to know all the bishops too.

“That gave me a really good sense of how everything worked,” he says, “what the structures were, and how decisions were made.”

That knowledge was also to provide a more than useful template for his later work in the international church.

• • •

He’s got an old head on young shoulders, does Michael Tamihere. And it’s a wonder that he doesn’t have the grey hair to go with it.

Because at the age of just 17, just when he was starting university, he became a dad.

“I’d become a father,” he says, “and I was still a kid. I didn’t have a clue, really. It certainly made me grow up a lot quicker.
“I was lucky, too, because I knew other people who’d become teenage parents, and they struggled a lot more than I did. I owe that to my son’s family on both sides, who supported us through that.

“It was hard. I stayed with his mother for a year, then we separated. In some ways, maybe, I was repeating the cycle I’d been through.”

Those struggles were part of the reason why, just a few papers short of his BA, Michael took a detour.

When the opportunity came up to do paid research work with some young Maori historians (Hirini Kaa among them) he took it.
“I was supposed to do that only for the summer – but I ended up working there for two years. I worked on Te Rarawa’s treaty claim, and on research for Ngati Awa, Tuhoe, Ngati Paoa. I already had an affinity with that stuff, and I learned heaps.”
Doing that research work gave Michael something else, too – a healthy disrespect for academia.

“I’d often been forced to critique the work of people a helluva lot more learned than me. And I picked up on the fact that having a doctorate didn’t necessarily mean you were all that smart.

“I was used to reading reports from Dr So-and-So and thinking: ‘Well, you’ve got that wrong – and you haven’t done enough work there…’

Because he was paid by the hour, and could work more or less when he wanted to, he was free to become even more involved with Te Mara.

And as he did so, he noticed that his experiences in the church were affecting him more deeply than before.
Sometimes, these were good experiences.

“I might be at a youth event, and a powerful feeling would hit me, and I’d think – wow. Looking back, you might call that the moving of the Holy Spirit. But at that point, I wasn’t really naming it. I’d just think: ‘Mmm. That gave me the shivers.’”

Sometimes, though, those experiences were not so good. Something might be done – or not be done, as the case may be – that Michael found distressing.

And then it dawned on him why those experiences were having such an effect: he was, he realised, taking ownership of the church.

“I was thinking: ‘This is my church. This is my whakapapa. It’s becoming more and more a part of me.’

“One response to seeing bad stuff happening would have been to walk away. But I’d reached that point where the church had become intertwined with who I am: and you can’t walk away from that.

“It culminated in a point where, in the middle of 2003, I woke up one morning and thought: this is what I want to do with my life. I just had that absolute certainty, that I was being called into ordained ministry.”

His seniors in the church shared that conviction, too – and in 2004 he began his BTheol studies through Te Rau Kahikatea, at St John’s College.

For Michael, the academic routines were fairly easy to master. But there was the ministry formation to contend with, too.
That presented Michael with a challenge. If he was left to his own inclinations, he wouldn’t be out front. He wouldn’t say much. He’s not naturally outgoing.

But those are not necessarily the first attributes you look for in a preacher.

So Michael had to learn how to preach – what’s more, the longer he was at St John’s, the more he developed the belief that his preaching had to connect to people in the Maori church.

“I’d preached a couple of times at St John’s,” he says. “But that’s a different kind of preaching, a different kind of audience. You exist in this academic world, and you can talk in the same language, and maybe they can follow you.

“You take that out to Mangere, for instance, and people will be looking at you like: what the…?

“And fair enough too, eh? I can’t stand up at the front and say: ‘You guys don’t understand? That’s your problem.’”

At the end of 2007 Hirini Kaa told Michael that he was planning to head back to university to pursue a doctorate. And he wanted Michael to take over as Kaihautu at Te Mara. Director of the Maori youth ministry school, in other words.

Hirini explained that there was heaps of time to get ready for that, because he’d still be around for the next two years.
But six months into that getting-ready period, Hirini decided to advance the timetable a bit.

How would it be, Michael, if you took over at the start of 2009?
Gulp.

But Michael whistled up his courage – and on January 11 this year, at the closing service of Te Wai Pounamu summer school in Christchurch, before Archbishop Brown Turei and Bishop John Gray, Michael was commissioned (“collated” in Anglican jargon) as Archdeacon of Kahui Rangatahi, and Kaihautu of Te Mara.

That first month in the job, Michael’s feet barely touched the ground.

This year, for the first time, Te Mara staged kura raumati – summer camps – for rangatahi in each of the hui amorangi.
Around 300 kids took part in those summer camps, which were organised by the Manu Kokiri (youth enablers) in each of the hui amorangi.

Over that month, Michael rolled from one camp to the other, running Bible studies, workshops, doing whatever he could do to add value – and spending almost no time in his own bed in Auckland.

It was a tough slog. Tiring as.

Looking back, Michael wouldn’t exchange that month for quids.

“Just being around these kids… that was awesome. These are ones I’m going to be working with, these are the one we want to help.

“I could name most of those kids right now; tell you what they’re doing, and where they come from.

“There was one kid at the Upoko te Ika school… and his father is president of the local Black Power chapter. All sorts of kids, from all kinds of backgrounds. For a lot of them, these camps were an overwhelmingly positive week, away from drugs, alcohol, whatever.

“For me, they were the perfect introduction to the job… a month that allowed me to experience what I’ll be doing, and who it’s for.”

• • •

We’ve noted that January 11 in Christchurch – when Michael took over the reins at Te Mara – was quite an important day in his story.

Eighteen months earlier – on June 30, 2007 – to be precise, there’d been another one of those red-letter days.

Because that was the day, in Nuku’alofa, in Tonga, when he tied the knot with ’Ala Toetu’u.

Ala is at Auckland University, where she’s pursuing doctoral studies. He’d met her on a trip to a marae in Hokianga.

And there’s a nice Anglican tie-up in their marriage, too: because ’Ala comes from a Tongan family which has deep Anglican roots.

Her mum, Luisa Toetu’u, for example, is a Diocese of Polynesia rep on the General Synod standing committee. And her uncle, Tui Finau, is an archdeacon in that diocese.

For better or for worse, Michael and Ala vowed that day, till death us do part.

One way or another, it seems that Michael’s commitment to being Anglican is about as strong.