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Origins
New Zealand in the 1880s was a young country of rich potential, but the acute economic depression of those years was creating unemployment , poverty, social distress and violence. At least two people in New Zealand saw in the circumstances of the time ample scope for the work of The Salvation Army, news of whose evangelical methods in Britain was being featured in New Zealand newspapers per medium of the telegraphic link established just a few years previously. One was Miss Arabella Valpy, daughter of one of the richest and most influential of Dunedin’s pioneers. In April 1882 she wrote to General William Booth urging him to send out officers to ‘rescue perishing souls’ in depression-ridden Dunedin, and reinforced her plea with a bankdraft for two hundred pounds. John Brame, an evangelically minded printer in Auckland, who with his wife, ran a temperance boarding establishment, wrote to William Booth promising help if Officers could be sent out.
William Booth selected as his invading force for New Zealand two young men, Captain George Pollard aged twenty years, and Lieutenant Edward Wright aged nineteen.
They left England on January 11, 1883 and in Melbourne, Australia where the Army was already firmly established, Pollard and Wright picked up three new converts, Albert Burfoot and his wife and Johnny Bowerman, and arrived at Port Chalmers on March 27th 1883.
Wright and Bowerman were immediately sent to Auckland, and on Sunday, April 1st, Pollard and Burfoot held four meetings at the Temperance Hall in Moray Place, Dunedin, starting with kneedrill at 7.00am and concluding with a crowded Salvation Meeting in the evening, at which the first converts were registered. Preceding the afternoon meeting, an open air meeting was held alongside the Fountain, Cargill’s Monument, one of the Dunedin’s landmarks. This gathering is traditionally regarded as where the Army ‘opened fire’ in New Zealand. At the 1993 Golden Jubilee celebrations, the Mayor of Dunedin unveiled a tablet which can still be seen bearing the inscription: ‘Here The Salvation Army commenced its’ work on 1 April 1883’.
The Salvation Army’s invasion of New Zealand was a brilliant strategic success. By the end of 1883, after only nine months in the field, eleven corps (churches) (Dunedin, Auckland, Christchurch, Wellington, Timaru, South Dunedin, Sydenham, Oamaru, Invercargill, Port Chalmers and Waimate) had been firmly established; and more than thirty officers (most of them New Zealanders and several of them women) were giving leadership to several hundred soldiers who were carrying the ‘Blood and Fire’ flag of Booth’s Army to new fields of endeavour.
The work of The Salvation Army commenced in Fiji in November 1973 and in Tonga during January 1986.
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This programme helps to meet the educational needs of over 1000 children in poorer countries around the world through donor's sponsorship.
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