God Conversations Before the Missionaries Came – Jay Ruka

The history books tell us that Christianity arrived in New Zealand with the first Western missionaries in 1814. But that’s only half the story. Forty years earlier, God spoke to a man named Toiroa, giving him a vision of the Europeans’ arrival. The vision included the strange clothes they wore, their unusual mode of travel and the message they carried about a good god and a name that meant “Son who was killed.” Toiroa shared his vision with many other Maori, so when the foreigners came, they eagerly received the news! A massive indigenous revival followed. By the mid‑1840s, around 64,000 Māori were attending church. It was one of the most significant revivals in history.

Our guest on this episode, Māori leader and author Jay Ruka tells the incredible story. He also shares how a life‑changing encounter with God led him to reclaim his Māori identity and uncover a hidden chapter of New Zealand’s spiritual history – one filled with prophecy, revival, identity and the surprising ways God moves beyond the boundaries of the church.

Key points from the conversation:

• God was already speaking before the missionaries arrived. Māori prophets received visions and prophecies decades earlier!
• The impact of Jay’s God conversation, when God said; “I think you are Māori.” Jay tells how this revelation reframed his understanding of culture, identity, and how God sees us.
• The church suffers from “amnesia.” Tragically, much of New Zealand (Aotearoa’s) indigenous Christian history has been forgotten or overwritten by colonial narratives.
• Jay’s prophetic dream of the huia – a now extinct native bird – and a giant chicken. God’s message pointed to the loss of indigenous wisdom (the extinct huia) and the overgrowth of imported ideas (the giant chicken).
• The Maori worldview helps to recover biblical themes that Westerners have lost. for example, the integration of spiritual and physical reality, the biblical importance of land, the beauty of unity without sameness and the ways God speaks beyond Western frameworks.

This important conversation shows how God is speaking to every culture, not just through the church. Indigenous stories – from Māori prophets to the Magi – show that God reveals Himself wherever people are seeking.