St. Georges Anglican Church, Gate Pa, sits on the site of the Battle of Gate Pā-Pukehinahina. Each year we offer free lectures to help people understand our history and how it shapes our present. This year we are offering two lectures on the evenings of February 2nd and February 9th at 7pm. Each talk will last about 2 hours.
The first talk will be given by Archbishop Sir David Moxon on The Anglican Apology given in 2018 for the Disposal of the Mission Lands in Tauranga in 1867. Copies of the PowerPoint and the wording of the actual apology can be found on the parish website
In December 2018 the Anglican Church apologized to ngā iwi o Tauranga Moana, and Ngāi Tamarāwaho and Ngāti Tapu in particular, for the yielding of the Te Papa Mission Block to the New Zealand Government in 1867. This allowed the establishment of the Tauranga military settlement and covers all the land of the CBD up to Gate Pā. In the text of the apology it is acknowledged that in gifting the land, the Anglican church had ultimately failed in its moral obligations to mana whenua, "under intense and undue pressure from the Government of the day". In December 2019 the Anglican Church and the Otamataha Trust, representing Ngāi Tamarāwaho and Ngāti Tapu, signed an agreement on how that apology is to be acted out.
On Sunday 2nd February Archbishop Sir David Moxon, the lead Anglican negotiator throughout this process, will talk about the events that are being apologised for, how the apology came about, and the overall hope for the future.
Archbishop David is a retired Anglican archbishop. He was until June 2017, the Archbishop of Canterbury's Representative to the Holy See and Director of the Anglican Centre in Rome. He was previously the Bishop of Waikato in the Diocese of Waikato and Taranaki, the archbishop of the New Zealand dioceses and one of the three primates of the Anglican Church in Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia. Archbishop David has been represented the Anglican Church in the negotiations around the apology.