St Johns College

The College of St John the Evangelist, Hoani Tapu te Kaikauwhau i te Rongopai is New Zealand's Anglican training centre. The college operates under the mission statement, "To ensure the provision of quality bicultural theological education in the context of Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia appropriate to a 21st century context."

St John's College was a project dear to the heart of New Zealand’s first Anglican Bishop, George Augustus Selwyn. Founded at Waimate North in 1842, the College came to Auckland with Selwyn in 1844. Its chapel, built in 1847 and subsequently enlarged, is known as one of the finest Selwyn Gothic churches.

Bishop Selwyn brought to New Zealand the belief that Gothic was the appropriate style for churches. In 1847, Frederick Thatcher designed for Selwyn’s St John’s College a chapel with an exposed structural frame, a steeply pitched roof and an unusual apsidal end. Though designed to be temporary, the church remains, one of the great achievements of early New Zealand architecture. The nave has been lengthened, but this and other minor changes have not harmed the spirit of Thatcher’s original building.

Other excellent buildings by the architect of the chapel, Frederick Thatcher, can also be seen at St John’s. From 1869 to 1880 John Kinder, known for his watercolors and photographs was Master here.