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→History: Link to Ratana church
===History===
The first Christian missionaries came to New Zealand at the start of the 19th Century. The [[Church Missionary Society]], an [[Anglican]] organisation, established a presence in New Zealand in 1814 with the permission and protection of [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ng%C4%81_Puhi Ngā Puhi] chief [[Ruatara]]. This expedition was led by [[Samuel Marsden]]. Later missionaries brought other religious denominations — [[Jean Baptiste Pompallier]] played an important role in establishing [[Roman Catholicism]], and [[Presbyterianism]] was brought to New Zealand largely by Scottish settlers. The Maori people also created their own forms of Christianity, with [[Ratana church|Ratanachurch]] and [[Ringatu]] being the largest.
Although there was some [[anti-Catholic]] feeling in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this declined after the 1920s. Sectarian groups such as the [[Orange Order]] continue to exist in New Zealand but are now virtually invisible, and New Zealand's first Catholic Prime Minister, [[Michael Joseph Savage]], took office in 1935.
