Anglican Commemoration
Bishop & Missionary to New Zealand & Melanesia
April 11 · d. 1878
also known as George Selwyn, Bishop Selwyn, George Augustus Selwyn of Lichfield
George Augustus Selwyn (1809–1878) was the first Anglican Bishop of New Zealand, and one of the great missionary bishops of the nineteenth century. A Cambridge oarsman consecrated at thirty-two, he learned the Māori tongue on the voyage out, tramped and sailed the length of his island diocese, defended the Māori against settler land-hunger, and carried the gospel north into Melanesia. He ended his life as Bishop of Lichfield, and Selwyn College, Cambridge, keeps his name.
George Augustus Selwyn was born in 1809 and raised to every advantage England could give a gifted boy: Eton, then Cambridge, where he pulled an oar in the very first race between Oxford and Cambridge. He might have had a comfortable life in the English church. Instead, in 1841, at the age of thirty-two, he was consecrated first Bishop of New Zealand and sent to the far side of the world, to a scattering of islands most Englishmen could barely place on a map.
There was a famous mistake in his commission. A clerk drawing up the boundaries of his new diocese wrote the northern limit as the thirty-fourth degree of north latitude, where it should have read south, and so, on paper, Selwyn's charge suddenly reached thousands of miles up into the islands of the Pacific. Another man would have pointed out the error and stayed home in his proper bounds. Selwyn took it as a summons. If the church had handed him Melanesia by a slip of the pen, he would go to Melanesia.
He began as he meant to go on. On the long voyage out he found a young Māori who had been to England, and from him learned the Māori language so well that on his first Sunday in New Zealand he preached to the people in their own tongue. He would not be a bishop who sat still and sent others. He walked the length of both islands on foot, forded the rivers, slept rough, and went by open boat among the reefs of the Pacific, visiting settlements no clergyman had reached, confirming, ordaining, and learning the speech and the ways of each people he came to. When settlers hungry for land pressed hard against the Māori and against the treaty that was meant to protect them, Selwyn stood with the Māori, and it cost him the goodwill of many of his own countrymen.
He built to last. He founded St John's College to train clergy on New Zealand soil, and he formed the Melanesian Mission to carry the gospel through the islands to the north, consecrating his friend John Coleridge Patteson as its first bishop, a man who would later be killed on a beach at Nukapu for the sake of that work. Selwyn insisted always that a young church must raise up its own native clergy and not merely import Englishmen, and though he was slow, by his own later admission, to ordain Māori priests, the principle he laid down outlived him.
In 1868, after twenty-seven years, the church at home called him back to be Bishop of Lichfield, and he obeyed, though it broke his heart to leave the islands. He labored on in the English midlands until his last illness in 1878. Dying, he was heard to say, over and over, "Thank God for pain! Thank God!", and when they tried to keep him eating to hold him a little longer, he told them gently, "don't, don't, you are only keeping me from happiness." At the very end he spoke the words the dying Māori Christian used to tell his friends that he could see heaven opening before him; they mean, in the Māori tongue, it is light. The boy who had been given everything had spent it all on people who at first had nothing of him, not even his language, and he died reckoning himself the richer for it. Selwyn College at Cambridge bears his name, and the churches he planted in New Zealand and the islands are his true memorial.
We spend a good deal of effort correcting other people's mistakes, and rightly. But there is a kind of soul that, handed an error, asks first whether God might have meant something by it. A clerk's slip of the pen gave George Selwyn a thousand islands he was never meant to have, and where most of us would have written back to fix the paperwork, Selwyn looked at the map and saw a call. It is worth sitting with that. How many of the doors we walk through were opened by someone's oversight, an accident of circumstance, a posting we did not choose? Selwyn's whole life turns on the conviction that there are no accidents wide enough to fall outside the providence of God, and that a summons does not stop being a summons because it reached us by the wrong road. He learned the language of the people he was sent to before he ever set foot among them, stood with them when it cost him his own countrymen's regard, and died thanking God for the pain that was carrying him home. Could we look at the misdrawn maps of our own lives, the boundaries we did not ask for, and ask not how to correct them but where they are sending us?
How we know. Selwyn is one of the best-documented churchmen of the Victorian mission. The standard Victorian life is H. W. Tucker's two-volume Memoir of the Life and Episcopate of George Augustus Selwyn (1879), which prints his letters and journals at length; a short contemporary sketch by Mrs. G. Herbert Curteis (1878) is the source for the deathbed sayings; the authoritative modern reassessment is the essay collection Bishop Selwyn in New Zealand, 1841–68, edited by Warren Limbrick (1983), who also wrote the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography article.
Selwyn was born on 5 April 1809 at Hampstead, son of the lawyer William Selwyn, and educated at Eton and at St John's College, Cambridge, where he rowed in the inaugural Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race of 1829. Ordained deacon in 1833 and priest in 1834, he served as a curate at Windsor before being consecrated first Bishop of New Zealand at Lambeth on 17 October 1841, at the age of thirty-two. He reached Auckland in mid-1842. His letters patent contained a celebrated clerical error: as one standard account puts it, "His see should have been defined as lying between 34th and 50th degrees of south latitude. The clerk drafted the boundaries as lying between 34th degrees of north latitude and 50th degrees of south latitude, which include islands to the north of New Zealand." Selwyn knew of the error and chose not to correct it, using the enlarged jurisdiction to found the Melanesian Mission in 1849.
He learned Māori on the voyage out, founded the College of St John the Evangelist, and traveled his diocese ceaselessly by foot and boat. He was made Metropolitan of New Zealand and held the first General Synod in 1859, and in 1861 consecrated John Coleridge Patteson as first Bishop of Melanesia (Patteson was killed at Nukapu in 1871). His record on Māori questions is honest history, not hagiography: he defended Māori land rights and the Treaty of Waitangi against settler pressure, which cost him settler support, yet he was slow to raise up Māori clergy, ordaining his first Māori deacon, Rota Waitoa, only after eleven years; and his conduct as a chaplain during the invasion of the Waikato in the New Zealand Wars alienated Māori and settlers alike, so that, in the judgment of later historians, he "never recovered the trust he had earlier enjoyed."
In 1868 he was recalled to England as Bishop of Lichfield, formally resigning the New Zealand see in 1869, and he served at Lichfield until his death on 11 April 1878; he is buried in the cathedral there, where a memorial chapel with mosaics depicts scenes from his life. Selwyn College, Cambridge, founded in his memory and opened in 1882, was charged in its founding statutes "to encourage habits of simple living, and to develop the Christian character in its students." He stands among the leading figures of the mid-century missionary episcopate that grew from the colonial bishoprics had first opened in 1787, a contemporary of Robert Gray at Cape Town and the near-contemporary of the first African bishop, .
Selwyn is commemorated on 11 April, the day of his death, across the Anglican world, in the Church of England, the Episcopal Church, the Anglican Church in Aotearoa New Zealand and Polynesia, and the Anglican Church in North America; his liturgical color is white.
The collect appointed for him prays that his missionary labor might be multiplied:
Almighty and everlasting God, whose servant George Augustus Selwyn laid a firm foundation for the growth of your church in many nations: Raise up in this and every land evangelists and heralds of your kingdom, that your church may proclaim the unsearchable riches of our Lord Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
He is remembered in the many "Selwyn churches" of New Zealand built under his influence, and by the memorial effigy and mosaics in the Lady Chapel of Lichfield Cathedral. His largest memorial is Selwyn College, Cambridge, founded in his name to form clergy of simple life and Christian character. He belongs to the company of the great missionary bishops, alongside Samuel Ajayi Crowther on the Niger and Jackson Kemper on the American frontier, and back of them all Charles Inglis, the first colonial bishop of the Church of England.
Principal biography. H. W. Tucker's Memoir of the Life and Episcopate of George Augustus Selwyn (2 vols., 1879) is the standard Victorian life, quoting his letters and journals throughout, and is freely available on the Internet Archive; it is reprinted in the Cambridge Library Collection. Mrs. G. Herbert Curteis's shorter A Sketch of the Life of George Augustus Selwyn (1878) is a warm contemporary memoir, free at Project Canterbury.
Modern study. Warren Limbrick's edited Bishop Selwyn in New Zealand, 1841–68 (1983) is the authoritative modern reassessment, candid about his relations with the Church Missionary Society, St John's College, and the New Zealand Wars; Limbrick's article in the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography is the best short scholarly life. John H. Evans's Churchman Militant: George Augustus Selwyn (1964) is the standard twentieth-century biography.
Online resources. The Curteis memoir and other lives are at Project Canterbury, and the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography entry is at Te Ara.
Almighty and everlasting God, you called your servant George Augustus Selwyn to preach the Gospel to the Maori people: Raise up in this and every land evangelists and heralds of your kingdom, that your Church may proclaim the unsearchable riches of our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Readings for a Missionary
Isaiah 49:1–7Psalm 98Romans 10:11–18Luke 5:1–11