The Global Church Era · 1925-present · Aotearoa New Zealand, Pacific
Ratana Church & Pacific Adjustment Movements
An open theological question
Historians and Christians themselves are divided on whether this group's core beliefs fall inside the historic Christian creeds.
About This Movement
In November 1918 Tahupōtiki Wiremu Rātana had a vision in Aotearoa New Zealand, and a healing ministry began around him from that year. In 1925 the movement was established as an independent church, Te Haahi Rātana, and Rātana himself was known as the mangai, the mouthpiece — a role that appears in the church's own creed, prayers and hymns alongside the faithful angels. The movement was political as well as religious from early on: a delegation took a Treaty of Waitangi petition to London in 1924, an alliance with the Labour Party was formed after a meeting with Michael Joseph Savage in 1936, and by 1943 the movement held all four Māori parliamentary seats. Rātana died in 1939 and the church has continued under the tumuaki who followed him. Other Pacific movements of a similar shape belong beside it, among them Silas Eto's Christian Fellowship Church in the Solomon Islands, from 1960.
Sources
- The movement's own records: T. W. Ratana's recorded utterances; the church's creed, prayers, and service book (the mangai's place in the church's own liturgical texts); Ratana Pa records; Te Whetu Marama (primary) — The church was formally registered in 1925; the founding vision came earlier, on 8 November 1918. Some of these texts are in Māori.
- Political covenant documents: the 1936 Ratana-Savage meeting and alliance record; the four Maori seats by 1943; the 1924 Treaty petition delegation to London (primary) — This archive holds both the movement's faith and its political alliances together.
- J. M. Henderson, Ratana: The Man, the Church, the Political Movement (Reed, 1972); Keith Newman, Ratana Revisited: An Unfinished Legacy (Reed, 2006) (secondary) — Te Ara serves as the more accessible reference source here.
- The Pacific adjustment family: the movements' own records where published; the adjustment-movement scholarship on Pacific prophet-led churches (primary) — Each movement in this family is treated on its own terms rather than generalized as a whole. This is the thinnest part of the source base here, and that is acknowledged openly.
- CHC vol. 9 (reference) — Its coverage of the Pacific is limited to chapter level.