The print media at work
Methodist Church President’s Sermon highlighted at Waitangi 2025
Note: Glenn McDonnell, a Stuff journalist, wrote this article that appeared in the Manawatu Standard, Friday February 7, the day after Waitangi Day. It is refreshing to see coverage for the challenge clearly given in Rev Aroha Rountree’s sermon at the dawn service on Waitangi Day. When media cover church topics, it is either the antics of sects led by self-appointed gurus or charitable deeds by individuals and groups doing work that should be led by government policies addressing the Common Good.
The following text is taken from Glenn’s article highlighting Aroha’s sermon:
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The tranquillity of the morning service was broken only by a few splatterings of applause. The loudest cheer was for Rev Aroha Rountree, the President of New Zealand Methodist Church.Her sermon questioned Luxon’s understanding of Te Tiriti o Waitangi and was scathing of the Treaty Principles Bill. She quoted Luxon’s speech to Waitangi last year, where he said ‘Part of the history of modern New Zealand has been our struggle to understand the intentions and expectations of those who signed the Treaty.’
Rountree said Maori clearly understood those intentions and expectations, as did the Christian churches. The churches, she said, had a duty to uphold Te Tiriti, as they had been so closely involved in its formation as missionaries in the 1800s.
Our tupuna do not struggle to understand the expectations of our tupuna, as our tupuna intended and expected for their partner, the Crown, to act in good faith in their dealings with Māori, she said. That good faith, she said, did not exist today.
Many of the prayers and karakia discussed the Māori-Crown relationship as something of a marriage. And if so, as Rountree, said, ‘Our spouse, the Crown, has filed for divorce while we were blissfully unaware’.
She said changes to Te Tiriti o Waitangi and its principles could only be made by mutual agreement from both sides of that relationship, and the Treaty Principles Bill did not have mutual agreement.
ACT leader David Seymour wasn’t over-impressed with the speech. ‘Everyone will be judged for what they say. Maybe if people wonder why church attendance is in freefall, and people turn away from Christianity, according to the latest census, it’s because people try and politicise things like that,’ he said after the ceremony.
But the crowds at the Treaty grounds applauded Rountree’s speech, as they watched her on a big screen beside the navy’s giant Waitangi flagpole.’
John Thornley