Beginning the Journey Together.

That was the title on the order of service for yesterday’s powhiri and eucharist for the 2012 community at St John's College, and for its new Tikanga Pakeha Dean, The Rev Dr Helen-Ann Hartley.

And while it definitely wasn’t scripted, perhaps it wasn’t surprising that at three or four points during the service you heard this word: Visas. 

The Rev Dr Frank Smith (Dean of the Polynesian students) first mentioned it during his speech of welcome on behalf of the tangata whenua.

A couple of his new students weren’t able to be at the welcome, he said, because they’re still waiting for their visas to come through.

Immigration hassles, he said, were a cross Pacific people had long had to bear.

And then there was Fr Emmanuel Vallaidam who, till recently, had been priest in charge at St Luke’s Laucala Bay in Suva, and who this year is a student in the college’s Anglican Studies programme.

He was one of those chosen to respond for the manuhiri – and he said how his family had arrived just three days earlier, and he was entirely grateful to God for his family being able to be at St John's at all.

And then there was Dr Hartley herself.

She’d been granted a visa in the nick of time to fly out before snowstorms shut Heathrow – and she’ll be joined soon by her husband, Myles, who’s just had his visa granted.

The point, perhaps, is that visas go hand in hand with travel – and the people of St John’s College in 2012 have never been more cosmopolitan, more multicultural, or more drawn from Nga Hau e Wha.

Not just the students, either. That multicultural theme was there for all to see in the ministry party: we had a Maori bishop presiding (Kito Pikaahu); a Kenyan liturgist (Irene Ayallo) – with a Maori woman (Jenny Te Paa) and an Englishwoman (Helen-Ann Hartley) serving the chalice.

We even had a contribution from a Pakeha male, too – from Archbishop David Moxon, in fact, who preached the kauwhau.

But the days when it was odds-on that Pakeha males would be in charge of everything… they seem to have long gone, disappeared into the dim and dark past.

And it was Archbishop Moxon himself who, after the service was over, marvelled at that diversity, and teased out its threads:

Never before, he said, had the Pakeha students at St John’s College been led by a woman.

An Englishwoman, moreover – whose fellow deans are a Maori woman (Dr Jenny Te Paa) and Samoan man (Dr Frank Smith), and who are all accountable to a College Commissioner who is also a woman (Mrs Gail Thomson).

And when Archbishop David surveys the 2012 student body, he sees “a vast range of ages, stages in life and backgrounds.”

He says Anglicans seeking theological education these days have options – but he believes that St John’s, being a residential community, offers a unique experience in multicultural living.

“That is its strength. It offers an excellent way to prepare someone for the New Zealand church of tomorrow – which is only going to get more diverse, more multi-cultural and more gender-equal.

“St John’s College,” he said, “is a very good lab for what’s out there in the mission field.”

#

For his sermon, Archbishop David spoke from the Gospel reading for the day – Mark 7: 14-23 (“It is not what goes into a person that defiles them, but what comes out of a person…”) to encourage the students to become more deeply aware of their hearts – and he described, in a show-and-tell portion of his message, a spiritual exercise that he’d first adopted when he was embarking on his own theological training, and which he maintains to this day.

Later in the service, he and Gail Thomson led Dr Hartley through her installation vows.

She herself then spoke briefly – and paid homage to Maori protocol by speaking of her maunga,  Meall Fourvanie, the hill in the Scottish Highlands near where her mother was born; of her awa, the river Wear, which flows from Sunderland (where she grew up) around Durham Cathedral (her spiritual home) to the sea, and of her iwi, including a tupuna called McLeod who’d travelled to this land to settle, “and in whose footsteps I follow.”

She spoke of her journeying, from climbing Meall Fourvanie as a four year old, to arriving at St John’s College in Aotearoa in 2012.

And she concluded by quoting from Dag Hammarskjold, the former Secretary General of the United Nations: "For all that has been, thanks, for all that is to come: Yes!'"

After the powhiri and service the community gathered for a meal in the Waitoa Room and the Dining Hall.