“The Anglican Diocese is facing a hard reality – the Cathedral is the revered “Mother Church” but is not the only church in the diocese to have sustained damage, in some cases irreparable or too costly to repair,” Bishop Victoria Matthews of the Anglican Diocese of Christchurch said.
She said it would be deconstructed with “the utmost care and respect” to a level of 2-3 metres for safety and to retrieve heritage items.
It is sad, but this is a liberal church that closely tracks Tec in “theology” and has at most about 2% of the population attending in a very secular society. A lovely building, but what do they need a cathedral for?
There are signiifcant outposts of evangelicalism in the church and diocese (including some of the best attended parishes in the country, which also suffered in the quake) but overall it’s hard to avoid the sense that theology got “deconstructed” before the buildings did. The NZ Anglican church has been more fixated on issues like WO and Maori ethnic matters (though very few Maori attend), rather than evangelizing the population at large.