A short history of Christian music in Aotearoa

Christian music in New Zealand is older than recorded music here, and a lot more varied than people tend to assume. It covers hymns in te reo Māori, church choirs, worship bands, punk and metal acts with a faith angle, and singer-songwriters who started in church halls and ended up on the national charts. You don't need to share any of the beliefs behind it to find the story interesting. It's a slice of Aotearoa music history, and it overlaps with the wider scene more than you might expect.

Where it started: hymns and church singing

Missionaries arrived in the early nineteenth century with hymn books, and before long they were translating hymns into te reo Māori and printing them. Māori communities made those songs their own. Hīmene (hymns) became part of church life and of community gatherings, and a hymn is still one of the standard items in a kapa haka performance today. Many of the Māori hymns that are still sung were never straight translations; they were new songs shaped by the English originals and by Māori ways of singing together.

For most of the twentieth century, "Christian music" in New Zealand mostly meant what happened inside a church: choirs, organs, hymn books and, later, guitars and folk-style songs in youth services. That music was rarely recorded or played on the radio, but it trained a lot of singers. Plenty of New Zealanders learned to harmonise, read music or play in front of people for the first time on a Sunday.

The rise of contemporary Christian music

Overseas, especially in the United States, a genre called contemporary Christian music grew from the late 1960s onwards. It took the sound of pop and rock and paired it with lyrics about faith. By the 1980s and 1990s it had its own labels, magazines, radio stations and award shows.

New Zealand picked up on that sound, but the local scene was small. Christian bands here often felt stuck between two worlds: too "churchy" for mainstream venues and radio, and too loud or too rock for some congregations. That gap is a big part of why the next chapter happened.

The Parachute era

The best-known chapter in this history is the Parachute Music Festival. Its organisers had earlier helped start a festival called Mainstage in 1987, and Parachute grew out of that.

Here's the short version of how it went:

• 1992–1994: the first festivals ran at a Christian holiday camp in Waikanae, on the Kāpiti Coast. The first one drew roughly 1,200 people.
• 1995–2003: the festival moved to Totara Springs, near Matamata in the Waikato.
• 2004–2014: it moved again to Mystery Creek Events Centre near Hamilton, where it became one of the largest music festivals in the country.

At its peak the festival drew around 25,000 people a year, with the biggest crowd recorded in 2007. It ran over three days in late January, had several stages and well over a hundred acts, and was alcohol- and drug-free, which made it a big festival that families and under-18s could attend together.

International acts were a big draw. dc talk was the first international headliner, in 1995, and later line-ups included Newsboys, Delirious?, Switchfoot, Third Day and Hillsong United. Alongside them were a lot of New Zealand bands getting their first big crowds.

In 2014 the organisers announced the festival would not run again. AudioCulture's account notes that the final event lost money and that the festival faced growing competition from other summer events. The organisation behind it shifted its focus to supporting musicians of any faith, including studio spaces for artists.

The house band and the awards

The festival's resident group, Parachute Band, formed in 1995 to lead worship at the event and went on to record a string of albums of New Zealand-written worship songs. The band won several New Zealand Music Awards in the Best Gospel/Christian Album category and an international award from the US-based Gospel Music Association.

That awards category is a small history lesson of its own. The New Zealand Music Awards ran a gospel/Christian category through the 2000s, and in 2015 it was renamed Best Worship Album.

Crossing into the wider NZ scene

One of the more interesting parts of this story is how many artists moved between the Christian circuit and the mainstream.

• Brooke Fraser grew up in Lower Hutt and worked behind the scenes at Parachute while recording her debut album, What to Do with Daylight. That album went to number one in New Zealand and finished 2004 as the country's top album on the year-end chart. She later wrote and sang with Hillsong Worship, and co-wrote "What a Beautiful Name", which won a Grammy in 2018.
• Kimbra and Steriogram both played Parachute early in their careers, before finding wider success at home and overseas.
• Dave Dobbyn and Stan Walker, already well known to mainstream audiences, both appeared on Parachute line-ups.
• Rapture Ruckus, a hip-hop act, set a festival record for CD sales with a debut set in 2002 and later signed to a US label.

Not every booking was smooth. AudioCulture notes some controversy when the festival booked bands that weren't explicitly Christian, such as Nesian Mystik and Elemeno P. The debate about who "counts" as a Christian artist, and whether that label helps or limits musicians, has never fully gone away.

What the scene looks like now

Without one giant festival, faith-inspired music in Aotearoa is more spread out. You'll find it in church worship teams, in local and regional events, in songwriters who write about faith alongside everything else, and in artists who simply don't put a label on their music at all. Plenty of musicians who grew up playing in church now work right across the industry as session players, producers and sound engineers.

For a lot of young musicians, a church band is still the first place they get regular practice, a PA system to learn on and an audience that turns up every week. Whether or not you're religious, that's a genuinely useful training ground. If you're curious about the wider history of music here, our music hub has more.

Where to read more

If you want to go further, these are good places to start:

• AudioCulture, the online encyclopaedia of New Zealand music, has a detailed history of the Parachute festival and profiles of many artists who played it.
• NZ On Air funds New Zealand music and publishes information about the songs and artists it supports.
• Wikipedia's overview of the music of New Zealand is a decent map of the wider scene this story sits inside.

However you feel about faith, this is part of how New Zealand music grew up. It's worth knowing.