Tuesday 16 December 1850-2025 - Canterbury Anniversary

Tomorrow, 16 December 2025, is the 175th anniversary of the arrival of the First Four Ships in Lyttelton Harbour on 16 December 1850 - the first ships carrying an intentional wave of new settlers to what would be the city of Christchurch and the province of Canterbury in the post Treaty of Waitangi (1840) emerging Aotearoa New Zealand, a land of Maori and Pakeha. Last night our Transitional Cathedral Evensong celebrated this anniversary. The following is the text of the sermon I preached.

175^th Anniversary Canterbury Settlement 1850-2025, 14 Dec 2025

Readings: Jeremiah 29:7, 11-14, Philippians 4:4-14

Introduction: On16 December 1850, four ships sailed into what today we call Lyttelton Harbour and thus became the First Four Ships carrying new settlers for a well planned Church of England settlement: a settlement to be established over the hill from Lyttelton, with the name Christchurch, after the Oxford college at which a number of the English planning committee had been students.

These ships were filled with members of the Church of England who settled into life in Christchurch or spread out across the Canterbury plains and into the foothills of the Alps, developing churches, schools, a university, businesses and farms, according to the plan.

And everything went well as a replication of the best life England and the Church of England could offer English people. What took place was a transplanting of English idealism into a place perfectly suited for establishing an Anglican utopia.

Except that wasn’t exactly what happened.

There was a need to limit French settlement to Akaroa and nearby bays.

We were eyed up by the Scottish Presbyterians. But for Lake Ellesmere being in flood when a surveyor sought to find an easy flat route from the sea to where our city now lies, we might have been Dunedin.

As it was, Scottish Presbyterians, including most famously the Deans’ families were critical to the development of Christchurch and Canterbury.

As were Australians who jumped the Ditch for a cooler climate, for work preparing Lyttelton and Christchurch for the new settlers, and, for some Australians, for securing better farming prospects than available in those days in New South Wales and Victoria.

The first four ships were not filled with Anglicans – a Europe in uproar in 1848 which might have pressed people to purchase their places on the ships and their acreage in the new province gave way to a more settled context in 1850.

So contented Anglicans remained in England and there were spare spaces for non-Anglicans to travel out here.

10 of the 20 clergy who arrived on 16 December 1850 found the going too tough or the prospects for a better life easier to secure elsewhere in the new world.

Bishop Selwyn was keener on a separate diocese in the first instance for the older settlement in Nelson. Jackson the first bishop designate for the not yet agreed to Diocese of Christchurch came and went.

Initial planning in smoke filled committee rooms in England made costs of going into sheep farming – farming for lucrative wool – prohibitive. That was a misstep by our administrative forbears.

Only when a change was made to the pricing of land suitable for sheep in the early 1850s (due to facts quickly learned, that other forms of farming could not earn a living), did the financial future for Canterbury brighten.

Many decades before we learned the word “globalization”, astute commercial leaders and farmers in Canterbury knew that global trading in wool counted ahead of local market sales of crops for local consumption.

Perhaps the best ever attempt at establishing an Anglican utopia by English people outside of England failed - failed to become what it was hoped and planned to be.

But what was established has been a success in this way: those who sought a better life in Christchurch in 1850, through dint of hard work and willingness to adjust plans to fit with reality, found that better life.

But 175 years later, we also look back on the role of Kemp, Wakefield and Godley, instrumental figures in the planned settlement becoming an actual settlement, and wonder regretfully how things might have been different for Ngai Tahu.

Has the English settlement here made life better for Ngai Tahu? That is a question we should continue to ask ourselves.

Let’s never forget that land was purchased from Ngai Tahu at such low prices that there is no case, from any perspective, that justice was done – justice such as the Christian faith requires of its adherents.

Nevertheless,175 years after the First Four Ships arrived, it remains the case that people move to Christchurch seeking a better life and for the most part, a better life is found here.

Providing you can stand the frosts, bear the hot nor’ westers,  wrap up against the easterlies and southerlies, and work your way round a very subtle class system with faint and not so faint reminiscences of England’s class system.

Exposition: Jeremiah the prophet speaks to us through our first reading this evening about finding a better life.

Israel is in exile in Babylon, in what today we call Iraq. It is not there because an Israelite Association for Settlement in Iraq was formed. It was there because Israel had been brutally conquered by Babylon and now many of its citizens were in forced exile.

Our reading hints that Israel was not only exiled because that is the way their history turned out but because that was God’s will – “I have sent you into exile.” In that difficult situation, God speaks to Israel through Jeremiah:

“But seek the welfare of the city, where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare” (29:7).

In more prosaic terms, God is asking Israel to make the most of its situation. To pray for all in the new city in which they now lived, because the well-being of the whole city will mean the welfare of the exiled Israelites domiciled there.

Jeremiah also offers God’s promise that:

“For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope” (29:11).

Tonight, we look back on what has been and acknowledge that what Christchurch and Canterbury is today, is what it is, because when the First Four Ships sailed into Lyttelton Harbour, there was a turning point, an historical moment, which changed Ngai Tahu and changed British settlers for ever, with benefits for all settlers since.

A new society has been forged – less than an Anglican utopia, less than any utopia, yet a society in which striving for the welfare of all continues and a society to which people are drawn.

New settlers come here from other parts of Aotearoa New Zealand and other parts of the world because belief is strong that here, welfare – a good life, well-being, a better life – is possible.

“A future with hope” is a plausible description of what Christchurch is becoming.

Paul, writes to a church at Philippi in Greece, which, incidentally, was a Roman colony – and he urges his readers to engage the life they lived with at least three attitudes: thankfulness, peace and contentment.

Tonight, in Christchurch, this reading invites us to look on our life here today in respect of these three themes.

Thankfulness: there is much to be thankful for here in this city and in this province. Three things stand out for me – you might share them as your thanksgiving standouts too.

1.      We have made important steps in righting wrongs of the past in respect of Pakeha and Ngai Tahu. Not all is yet sorted but we have begun to address that part of the past that we cannot be content with.

2.      We have made our way through the immense, intense challenges of earthquake damage. Where we are today was not conceivable in, say, March 2011, possibly not even on 22 February in, say, 2015. We have had to forge a new settlement and been pioneers again in doing so.

3.      We are becoming a city and a province welcoming new pilgrims to share our life in this place: welcoming people from many nations, not just the British Isles; from several faiths, not only the Church of England. We are forging a cosmopolitan settlement, inconceivable to the original Canterbury Association.

Peace: this city has largely lived a peaceful life, if we overlook the disturbing gusts of the strongest nor’ westers, and the brutal shakes of earthquakes past and recent.

But on 15 March 2019, our peace was shattered by the appalling mosques’ massacres. Any illusion that we might have had that a new cosmopolitan settlement of this region was emerging smoothly and seamlessly ended that day.

Peace cannot be taken for granted here. We must pray for peace, we must work for peace, and we must be vigilant about the “isms” that disrupt peace and harmony in our society: racism, fascism, misogynism and the like.

The first pilgrims from Britain, arriving here in 1850, found that the only way they could proximate to the vision of the Canterbury Association was through hard work.

As pilgrims on the journey through the 21^st century for Christchurch and Canterbury, we also must work hard: not only in building houses, roads, stadia, businesses and educational institutions, but also on relationships between people, on respect for human dignity and on a just society we are proud to belong to.

Thirdly, Contentment:  “I have learned to be content with whatever I have”, says the apostle Paul.

Christchurch is Christchurch (and not Auckland, Melbourne, New York, Shanghai, or Rio de Janiero) and Canterbury is Canterbury (and not Otago, California, Provence, the Gold Coast or Bali).

Other places have better beaches, finer fields for growing crops, quainter places for picture postcard perfect holidays, Disneylands and warmer nights for partying.

So what! We have much to be thankful for. Let us be content with this good and blessed land in which God has placed us.

Conclusion: In 1850 a distinctive path for a new settlement in this city and province began. At the end of it was presumed to be a utopia. Not long after we began walking the path we found the initial Anglican utopia vanished, and if we stop and pause, we can see the pain our ancestors’ settlement caused to those who had already settled here hundreds of years before 16 December 1950.

Our journey continues along the path. It has had severe recent disruptions. Yet we continue forward. May we seek the welfare of our city and province, making our requests known to God for our future flourishing, in prayers filled with thanksgiving for the blessings we have been privileged to enjoy these past 175 years.