Kaitaia's vicar last week broadened the definition of 'unsustainable' to include spiritual and leadership considerations, but they don't hold water either. With a regular congregation of up to 20, St Mary's is not the smallest church in the North, and in no apparent danger of becoming redundant. Leadership, which does indeed seem to have been lacking over the last year or so, is hardly relevant to a parish that has never been actively involved in the life of the church. That is an issue for Pukenui to resolve, and hardly warrants selling the only church the community has.
If leadership is a genuine issue of concern for the parish it should be doing something to fix it. Selling the church is akin to euthanasing an eminently curable patient before even trying to heal it.
Vicar Dino Houtas made a fair point last week when he said he had believed that negotiating with the church leadership, albeit leadership that he clearly did not regard as effective (and is not Anglican), represented consulting with the community. Why those church leaders kept what was happening to themselves has not been explained, but then neither has the rationale for selling the church. The parish apparently has no debt so is not in desperate need of the money, and if it has become unsustainable in terms of leadership or providing for the community's spiritual needs, one would have thought that remedial measures would have been taken, as opposed to selling up and walking away.
For a start, the parish could have taken an interest in how St Mary's was functioning, if not to the point of providing a priest now and again. By all accounts it has never done that, or at least not for a very long time.
Meanwhile, not unexpectedly, the wider community has taken extreme umbrage over the move to sell the church. Rev Houtas could be excused for asking those who worshipped there to raise their hands at last week's public meeting, but, as in any small community, St Mary's is much more than a place to spend an hour every Sunday morning. It is more widely perceived as a valuable and much-loved venue for weddings and funerals, and has been described as playing an important role in the lives of some younger members of the community. No known effort has been made by the parish to investigate that.
It is not surprising that the community is fighting to keep something it built and paid for, and is hardly champing at the bit to take up the first right of refusal to buy it that was apparently offered months ago. (Last week's meeting was told that an offer of $100,000 had been rejected as too low, however). The consensus seems to be that Pukenui should not now have to buy something that it already owns, and pays to operate.
The community says it has been asking the parochial trust in Kaitaia to return the title to the church to its ownership for many years, without success. The council therefore seemingly has a legal right to sell the church, but its moral right to do so doesn't even make questionable. It has no moral right whatsoever. It can't even offer a credible explanation as to why the church must be sold.
A further question has now arisen in terms of the parochial trust's legal right to sell the building. It is not yet clear whether its title applies only to the land; if it does then the legal right to sell could presumably be exercised only if the building, which it does not own, is removed.
But there's more. The manner in which the church has been operating, at least in recent times, defies credibility. It was designed to be inter-denominational, but according to claims made at last week's public meeting it has been hijacked. In fact the local Anglicans don't have access to it at all. A member of that congregation said worship took place in private homes, often full to overflowing, because they weren't allowed to use the church. The parish was probably not aware of that. If he was aware of it Rev Houtas did not cite the exclusion of his flock as a motive for selling the church.
So here we have an Anglican-owned church that Anglicans cannot use, a church leadership that negotiates its sale without saying anything to those who do use it or the wider community, and a parochial trust board that wants to sell it but cannot convincingly explain why.
Perhaps dysfunctional would be a better word than unsustainable. And if dysfunctionality is accepted, it applies not only to St Mary's but to the Kaitaia parish and its parochial trust board. And let's be clear, the proposal to sell did not originate with the Auckland diocese. Minutes of that organisation's council clearly state that Kaitaia had sought permission to sell St Mary's, that permission being granted, with the council's blessing, on May 28 last year.
It is not too late to retrieve something from this situation, but some people are going to have to lift their game. Those who administer St Mary's could start by making it available to all who wish to worship there, in accordance with the intention of those who built it. The Kaitaia parish could support its role as a place of worship, and, if it does indeed have concerns regarding its leadership, could make a positive contribution to addressing and resolving those concerns.
And if the parish is to learn anything from this debacle, perhaps it will be that in future it will not only communicate more broadly and effectively, but will not propose such a radical step as selling a church without establishing a clear and rational reason for doing so. So far it has failed Pukenui on every count, and now has a great deal of work to do to regain the community's trust, and, not to put too fine a point on it, recover its credibility.
