S Michael's Windows and other arts works are discussed below thanks to the efforts of Gaylene Waldren. |
S Michael’s (church, hall, and office) is well sited on the main road through Kelburn.
People coming up from the city centre pass the University, and see the brick church nestled
behind the four large pohutukawa trees, an anchor holding us at the head of the village world
of Kelburn shops and community centre.
Kelburn as a residential community grew from the end of the Nineteenth Century. Names of the contemporary governors general mark the period in such street names as Plunket and Glasgow. The cable car rising from the heart of the city of Wellington brought a new generation on this unique mode of public transport.
As the new generation bought and built and grew, our mother parish of St Peter’s in central Wellington helped support the ministry of an assistant priest to develop an Anglican identity among the new families of the area.
By 1906, the first Anglican church building was up. The land cost £660, the building £375. This little wooden shed was seen as temporary and grand plans for a stone Gothic church to seat 500 were flourished.
Frederic Wallis the 3rd bishop of Wellington dedicated the first building on 29th September 1906, the feast of St Michael and All Angels - thus the patronage of the angels for the new building.
This feast - St Michael and All Angels - was a Reformation Anglican amalgamation of medieval
commemorations. Until then, the church calendar celebrated in turn each of the archangels St
Michael, St Gabriel, and St Raphael; they were now all bundled in for good measure with the
Holy Guardian Angels as well. In angelology, Michael is the warrior champion of God’s cause,
Gabriel carries the light of God’s
presence (as when he greeted
Our Lady at the annunciation of the coming of the Christ), and Raphael is the bearer of God’s
healing. Modern church calendars often name the three together to be celebrated on that one
day; but we tend to simplify the name to "St Michael’s."
Up beyond the church, Hadfield Hostel was opened soon after. This memorial to Octavius Hadfield the 2nd bishop of Wellington was intended to be the centre for the training of diocesan priests. With the convenient proximity to the new Victoria University College (a stimulus to learning, and a potential source of residents should the number of seminarians be few) Hadfield Hostel was to be itself a source of paying student residents to fund the priest tutor. The endowment was not sufficient, the number of candidates for the priesthood too few, and the call-up for military service in the Great War brought the collapse of the project and the loss of a stipend to support the priest in charge who was acting as parish priest. For a few more years, conscious of the sixty years’ commitment to the tangata whenua (indigenous Maori peoples) the diocese tried to sustain its life as an educational centre for Maori students. The solid building looks slightly French with its Mansard roof line, but now it has long been in private use.
The parish leadership wanted the priest tutor, the Revd Arthur Payne, a
cultured and competent Englishman, to remain among them, and, with a big gulp, committed
themselves to the financial struggle required to support the ministry. On 23rd
September 1917 Payne became the first parish priest of the new parish of Kelburn.
The wooden all-purpose church centre had to be replaced with something worthy. E R Wilson LRIBA of Invercargill was appointed architect. His preliminary designs are grand beyond belief. Second thoughts eliminated three quarters of the potential cost and size. The brick and stone tower would have been a nightmare - until the inevitable earthquake would have brought it tumbling through the whole structure.
Albeit less than the agreed full shape, lacking ancillary rooms and gathering space, the brick building that did emerge certainly had style, restrained Gothic. Under Payne, fittings of quality were commissioned and donated, and the series of stained glass windows begun.
Yet no sooner had the building loans been paid off than most of the church was shaken to pieces by earthquakes in 1942 and 1943. It took a full generation to pay for the brick building, and now another generation had grimly to set about rebuilding the demolished brick nave in wood.
But that was not the last of that problem. As the
new century turned (2000), the church community again faced the threat of earthquake. We
sought funding from the local people so that we might strengthen the brick and stone work of
the sanctuary and chancel. To our delighted gratitude the miracle was achieved, and from
generous locals and friends we received $91,000 to strengthen the building and attend to
delayed maintenance.
Kelburn is an attractive suburb, within walking distance of the city and around the University. Our Kelburn is like most Wellington suburbs - the fierce steep valleys and hillsides dictate our geographical limits; we feel close to each other, and not part of the communities out of sight beyond us into the next series of gullies. But we do have the pleasure of looking back down to the centre of our beautiful capital city, and beyond the city towers and lights to the harbour and the hills lifting up all around.
The parish history (St Michael and All Angels Kelburn, the story of a parish, by Joan Wood, published by the parish in 1987) details the facts and figures and names the main actors of S Michael's. Money dominates this tale, the constant drain on energies of small numbers of churchpeople keen to persist.
With a newly-strengthened brick chancel, a renewed five-bedroomed, two living roomed vicarage on a prime site, and with a community hall with smaller meeting rooms available for a variety of uses, the church community today is probably as little burdened by material troubles as we have ever been.
Only that, in our spiritual but not church-minded kiwi society, organised religion struggles to find a useful place for our witness and service. For us too the challenge of maintaining the public witness of a full-time parish priest in the community at large is a constant question. Yet we are still here after 100 years of Kelburn. The church doors stand open to the thousands who move along the main street, the priest may be found in the office marked ‘Open to you’ six days a week or met in the street or on a bus or the cablecar any day of the year. People come to the celebration of our Christian identity here each Sunday, to meet God in the Scriptures, the Eucharist, and each other, and to serve God in the world of daily reality.