As a child, my Christian faith was unshakeable. God was real. The Bible was the truth. I didn’t question.

By my mid-twenties, it had all crumbled. Not because faith is wrong, but because the version I’d been given couldn’t hold the complexity of my actual life — my choices, my pain, and the truth as a Māori person navigating a world that had been shaped to accommodate someone else’s story.

I carried a secret for 40 years. Not because anyone was forcing me, but because religious shame was so deeply internalised I couldn’t even name it to myself.

But the shame wasn’t only about what I’d done or not done. It went deeper than that. It went all the way to whakapapa.

The Question That Wouldn’t Leave Me

Here is the dilemma I could never quite name, but always felt:

“How can I be Christian when I don’t whakapapa back to God’s people? I’m not Jewish.”

I knew my whakapapa. On my mother’s side, I trace back to Porourangi — the great ancestor from whom Ngāti Porou descend. On my father’s side, to Rangatira Momo, the ancestor of Te Momo. These are ancient, living, sovereign lines. These are my people.

But when I opened the Bible, I found a story that began with Abraham and flowed through a lineage I had no genealogical connection to. The God of scripture had made his covenant with a specific people. I was not one of those people.

And the Christianity I’d received? It hadn’t arrived as a gift. It had arrived with a flag. The Anglican ministry given to me as a child was deeply rooted in England’s political agenda — a tool used to reshape those they colonised, to create compliant subjects rather than liberated souls. I knew this. My bones knew this.

So I felt like an impostor. I was worshipping in a tradition that wasn’t mine, delivered by a power that had harmed my people, built on a genealogy I couldn’t trace.

That feeling is its own kind of trauma. It doesn’t look like the obvious wounds — not shame about your body, not fear of hell, not the memory of religious leaders who hurt you. It’s quieter than that. It’s the constant, low-level hum of wondering whether you belong.

When Religion Becomes a Weapon

Religious trauma happens when spirituality gets weaponised for control:

• Your body is sinful

• Your sexuality is shameful

• Your questions are dangerous

• Your Māori spirituality is demonic

• Your culture is primitive

• You are not of the covenant people

These aren’t spiritual truths. They are wounds masquerading as theology.

For Māori who were raised in colonial Christianity, the wound is compounded: you were handed a faith and simultaneously told — implicitly and sometimes explicitly — that the culture you came from made you less suited for it. You had to become more like the messenger to be eligible for the message.

That is violence. And naming it as violence is not rejecting God. It is being honest about what human beings did with God’s name.

The Dilemma: Three Options

When you see this clearly, you face what seems like three impossible options:

Option 1: Stay in the toxic faith as you received it, performing belief in a tradition you know was weaponised.

Option 2: Reject Christianity entirely and return exclusively to te ao Māori spiritual frameworks.

Option 3: Find a third way.

I couldn’t do Option 1. I’d seen too clearly. And I couldn’t do Option 2 either — because despite everything, my encounters with God were real. The faith in my bones wasn’t performative. It was mine.

So I had to find the third way. And that third way wasn’t a compromise — it turned out to be the original truth, buried under centuries of colonial distortion.

The Cave That Changed Everything

I didn’t find my way through by thinking it…I was driven through it.

When redundancy came, I lost the thing I’d been using to avoid the question: the financial stability, the corporate identity, the altar I’d built to security.

Taylor Welch talks about a process that began to make sense of what happened to me. He describes it as movements through which purpose-driven people pass, and the ‘Cave’ became my site of praxis:

• Crisis: You know change is needed. You take no action. You maintain the false altar.

• Consecration: You are forced to face it. The altar is removed. You find yourself in a cave — isolated, hidden, refining. This is costly. This is also where the real work happens.

• Confrontation/Clash: What was created in the cave begins to meet the world. People want what you have. But life is still awkward. You are still in survival mode. The remnants are being shaped.

• Multiplication: Things finally take off. The refined work finds its scale.

• Institutionalisation: The remnants are packaged and shared on a stage. The story becomes a legacy.

I was made redundant. I was isolated. I felt like I was in a cave — hiding, dark, uncertain, and it was in that cave that Te Poutama o te Ora emerged. The thinking I’d suppressed for decades came flooding out. The questions I’d been too busy to ask demanded answering.

And one of those questions was the oldest one: Am I really God’s?

What I Found in the Cave

I am still somewhere between the Consecration and Confrontation stages as I write this.

TPO is still being shaped. The books are still being written. Two part-time jobs add up to more than 53 hours a week. Religious study fills the remaining hours. Life is full and demanding, and not yet arrived.

But I know something now that I didn’t know before the redundancy. Or rather, I believe something I used to only argue about.

God did not leave me in that cave. He was in the cave with me, and the theology that had made me feel like an impostor was the theology of the colonial church, not the theology of the New Covenant.

Here is what I found:

The New Covenant through the blood of Jesus Christ is not an ethnic inheritance. It is not for Jews only. It is for all whakapapa. Paul writes in Galatians that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek — and that all who belong to Christ are Abraham’s seed, not through genealogy, but through promise.

In the logic of the New Covenant, belonging is not determined by birth into the right people. It is determined by the blood that covers every person.

My Porourangi whakapapa is not cancelled by my faith.

My Te Momo whakapapa is not superseded by the cross.

They are held alongside it. I belong to both, and they do not fight each other.

The impostorship was never real. It was a colonial lie.

God had me all that time. I had covered my own eyes. Matapihi Kirihou o Nga Karu.

Releasing the Shame, Keeping the Wisdom

Through the process of wairua autophagy — the nine-cycle framework at the heart of Te Poutama o te Ora — I’ve been learning to metabolise what was toxic and keep what is true.

That means:

• Naming the colonial church as a political instrument without rejecting the faith it distorted

• Honouring my Māori whakapapa without treating it as incompatible with covenantal belonging

• Acknowledging the impostor feeling as a trauma response, not a theological verdict

• Finding God in the cave, not as a reward for surviving it, but as the one who was present in it

• Understanding that my place in the covenant does not require me to stop being Māori

You are Not an Impostor

If you are Māori — or from any indigenous people — and you carry this quiet ache, this sense that the faith you hold is somehow borrowed, somehow not properly yours — I want to say something clearly:

The colonial church was not God. It was people using God’s name. What they gave you was a distorted package. The faith inside the package is real, and it was never only for Jewish people.

Your whakapapa is not a disqualification. It is not an obstacle. It is the line God has always known.

The covenant through Christ does not require you to become someone else. It invites you, as you are, from the whakapapa you carry, into a belonging that no colonial agenda was ever authorised to gatekeep.

The Autophagy of Dimension Programme

The full Autophagy of Dimension programme through Te Poutama o te Ora addresses wairua (spiritual) trauma across nine cycles over five months. It is designed for people navigating:

• Colonial religious trauma and the Whakapapa Dilemma

• Shame-based faith and fear-based theology

• The impostor experience in spiritual identity

• The integration of te ao Māori and Christian spirituality

You don’t have to choose between your whakapapa and your faith. You don’t have to perform a belief that doesn’t hold your full complexity.

Release the shame. Keep the wisdom. Come home to who you actually are.

Ready to begin?