From punk rocker to minister
Anglican minister Spanky Moore first arrived in Christchurch in a Chubb security van purchased for $700.
He was 18 and had left Nelson with his punk band, Clowndog, with grand dreams of ‘‘making it big’’.
In Christchurch, Moore found musical success but also discovered the Anglican faith.
He parlayed his skills as a frontman into radio, and was recruited as the ‘‘controversial’’ breakfast host on university radio station RDU98.5FM. Until ‘‘parliamentary advisers cottoned on’’, he aired a regular segment in which Don Brash gave listeners love advice.
Clowndog – with frontman Spanky on guitar, drummer Idiot Pants and Sherbert on bass – won the regional finals in the Smokefree Rockquest and went on to play support slots for Bic Runga and Salmonella Dub.
Moore’s band once beat Shapeshifter in a Christchurch band competition and was infamous for hurling raw meat into the audience.
‘‘We mostly threw sausages but all sorts of small-goods really. You know you’re from a different time when you tell students you threw meat. ‘Meat!’, they say now, horrified,’’ Moore said. ‘‘I once threw a half-defrosted chicken at a gig in St Albans park. It was a very bad idea. In midflight I realised it wasn’t defrosted, but I’d lofted this thing into the audience. I felt bad about it. Some guy picked it up and hurled it back, and it did a bit of damage to an amp.’’
Moore was ordained live on air in 2010. It was the last ordination in Christ Church Cathedral.
Leaving the RDU role in 2014 to become the senior ecumenical chaplain at the University of Canterbury, Moore said he had advised two bishops – ‘‘Bishop Victoria and Bishop Peter’’ – and helped many students navigate both the aftermath of the Christchurch earthquakes and the mosque shootings.
‘‘I was really involved in the response after March 15 and got close to Muslim friends. By and large, New Zealanders don’t understand faith very well and are not very educated in faith,’’ he said.
‘‘There was a high level of ignorance before March 15, not out of malice, just ignorance.’’
People dropped their guard because of his name, he said.
‘‘People knew I was a preacher and a broadcaster, but that made me accessible to different people and became me doing services at weddings and funerals for listeners.’’
He said the unique skills he acquired in music, student radio and ministry became ‘‘tangled together’’.
‘‘Maybe that could only have happened in Christchurch? The last 10 years has been an interesting ride, so much tragedy,’’ he said.
‘‘People always talk about the dark energy of the city and I get annoyed. It’s just a bit overcast.’’
Moore said ‘‘pretty much no-one’’ called him Joshua – ‘‘even in the Anglican newsletters I’m Spanky’’ – and he and his family were now needed in Nelson.
‘‘I got off the phone to my parents one night and I got a sense it was time to go home to be near them, almost like a calling. I was surprised by that.’’
In Nelson, Moore has been appointed to the Diocese of Nelson in the newly created role of pioneering ministry enabler.
He arrived in Christchurch in a Chubb security van as a punk musician. He left the city in a family car with wife Sara and three children.
Much has changed in Nelson since Moore’s ‘‘life-changing experience’’ at 16, when Fugazi played at the Nelson Arts Centre.
‘‘You have to assume it is a different city since Fugazi changed my life,’’ Moore said. ‘‘And yet some stuff hasn’t changed. Walking around Nelson this week I saw four or five mature gentlemen with dreadlocks and I thought ‘ah, this is the place I remember’.’’