Church of the Good Shepherd, Lake Tekapo — church building
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Church of the Good Shepherd, Lake Tekapo

  • 2 min read
  • 44.003° S 170.482° E

Interesting facts

  • The foundation stone was laid on 15 January 1935 by Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester, a son of King George V.
  • The idea of a clear window behind the altar came from the local vicar, the Rev. W. E. D. Davies, who wanted the church to frame creation itself.
  • It was the first church ever built in the Mackenzie Basin, a district of vast sheep stations and very few people.
  • The Murray family of Braemar Station gave the land, and neighbouring land was gifted too so that the church would stay alone on the shore.
  • It was the first complete church that the Christchurch architect R. S. D. Harman designed on his own.
  • The carver Frederick Gurnsey made the Good Shepherd figure on the altar and a font of Oamaru stone decorated with alpine plants and animals.
  • Inside is a Book of Remembrance listing the original Mackenzie sheep runs, their owners and the people who worked them.
  • The bell, cast in Christchurch, was given in memory of a young local woman who died in 1935 aged 21, and of her grandfather.
  • Under the slate roof, the ceiling timbers are of native rimu, contrasting with rough cream plaster walls.

Why it is worth it

The Church of the Good Shepherd is a very small building with a very large view. It stands on the stony shore of Lake Tekapo in New Zealand's Mackenzie Basin, and its whole design is built around a single gesture: behind the altar, where most churches would place stained glass or an image, there is a plain window looking straight out over the turquoise water to the Southern Alps. The landscape is the altarpiece. The lake owes its milky blue-green colour to glacial flour, rock ground to a fine powder by the ice upstream and held in suspension so that it scatters light.

The church was put up in 1935, the foundation stone laid in January and the dedication held that August, as a memorial to the runholders and shepherds who first settled this high, dry sheep country. The architect R. S. D. Harman worked from sketches by a local artist, Esther Hope, and took as his model the little stone church built a few years earlier at Franz Josef on the West Coast. The structure is concrete, faced with local boulders, and the builders were asked to leave the lichen on the stones so that the church would look as if it had grown out of the moraine rather than been placed on it. The original oak shingles gave way to slate in 1957. Heritage New Zealand lists the building in its highest category.

Part of the charm is the scale: a low nave of rough grey stone set among tussock, with lupins flowering around the basin in early summer. A short walk east along the shore stands a bronze statue of a collie, raised by local people in 1968 in thanks to the working sheepdogs without which the Mackenzie runs could not have been farmed — a fitting companion to a church dedicated to a shepherd. The church has become one of the most photographed buildings in the country, and photography inside is no longer permitted, which makes the view through the altar window something to be looked at rather than captured. After dark the basin belongs to the Aoraki Mackenzie International Dark Sky Reserve, and the silhouette of the church under the Milky Way is a picture in its own right.

Getting there

The church is on Pioneer Drive at the edge of Lake Tekapo village, a few minutes' walk from the township. The nearest sizeable town is Timaru, about 76 km away in a straight line, and the nearest airport is the small Timaru Airport (TIU), about 68 km away. Most visitors arrive by road from Christchurch International Airport (CHC): the drive is around 227 km and takes about three hours, roughly the same as from Queenstown, while Aoraki/Mount Cook is just over an hour further on.

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On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in Canterbury 6The Most Beautiful Places in New Zealand 37The Most Beautiful Churches 186The Most Beautiful Sacred Places 623

From the encyclopaedia

The Church of the Good Shepherd on the shores of Lake Tekapo on the South Island of New Zealand is a small Anglican church used by various denominations. Built in 1935 as a memorial church to commemorate early settlers, it is one of the most photographed buildings in the country. It has a Category I heritage registration by Heritage New Zealand.

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-44.00334, 170.48236per Wikidata