St Peter’s Anglican Church

John Coleridge Patteson - September 20

First Bishop of Melanesia & Martyr

John Coleridge Patteson was born in London in 1827 of well-to-do parents. He was educated at a private school in Devon and then at Eton, where he proved to be a good student and sportsman. He was also deeply religious. In 1845 he went to Oxford. There he was influenced by the Oxford Movement, though he never became a “party member”. Patteson studied briefly in Germany, where he became competent in Hebrew and Arabic and showed his outstanding flair for languages. Ordained deacon in 1853 and priest the following year, he offered himself to Bishop Selwyn for work in Melanesia. He arrived in New Zealand in 1855. Two years later he was put in charge of the Melanesian Mission, and on 24 February 1861 was consecrated as the first bishop of Melanesia. Like Selwyn, Patteson was another of a new style of bishop: missionary, at the forefront of the church’s work, boldly leading the church into new areas rather than ministering to a settled diocese. It was a conception of the episcopate that caused debate in England, where the action of a Church of England bishop operating beyond the boundaries of British rule seemed strange, if not illegal.
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