The trust that owns almost everything at Gloriavale, the closed religious community on the West Coast, will be struck off the Charities Register tomorrow after the Charities Registration Board found it guilty of serious wrongdoing. The Christian Church Community Trust, a registered charity since May 2008 with net assets of about $47 million, cannot reapply for charitable status for three years.
The board also disqualified former Overseeing Shepherd Howard Temple from holding an officer role in any registered charity for five years, the maximum period the law allows. The decisions were announced on Tuesday 22 September and follow a Department of Internal Affairs investigation, RNZ reported.
“After carefully considering submissions the board has decided to deregister the trust for three years on the grounds of serious wrongdoing,” the board said.
Board chair Jane Wrightson did not soften the finding. “The behaviour was both grossly negligent and constitutes gross mismanagement,” she said.
The case against the trust rests less on new evidence than on what the courts and tribunals have already found. The board drew heavily on the Employment Court cases that ruled nine former members were employees rather than volunteers, and on findings from the Teachers Disciplinary Tribunal. Those rulings described children working in trust-owned businesses from the age of six, work carried out in harsh and at times dangerous conditions, failures to protect children and workers from harm, and the internal handling and non-reporting of sexual offending against a child at the trust-owned school.
According to the Otago Daily Times, the board said “the funding provided by the trust supported the Gloriavale community to operate in ways found to be unlawful and inconsistent with the wellbeing of trust beneficiaries.”
That is the heart of the decision. A charity exists to benefit the public or a defined group of beneficiaries. The board concluded that the money flowing through this trust had instead propped up a way of running the community that the courts had already found broke the law, and that the people supposed to benefit were among those harmed.
The process has taken a long time. The board issued a notice of intended decision to deregister the trust in April 2025, then held two days of hearings with trust representatives to hear their objections and considered further information during 2026. It weighed changes the trust had made since, including the appointment of independent trustees, stronger governance and improved safeguarding arrangements, but decided they did not outweigh the scale of what had gone wrong.
The Department of Internal Affairs said “the seriousness, scale and duration of the governance and oversight failures led to a finding that trustees had failed in their responsibilities,” the New Zealand Herald reported.
Charities Services director Charlotte Stanley framed the ruling as a matter of protecting the whole sector. “Maintaining public trust and confidence in registered charities is fundamental to the integrity of New Zealand’s charities system,” she said.
The trust is not a small side vehicle. 1News reported that it owns the community’s communal living spaces, its school facilities and three early childhood centres, and holds all the shares in eight community companies. Losing registered charity status generally means losing the tax exemptions that come with it, and a deregistered charity must deal with its remaining assets under its own rules and charities law.
Five trustees received disqualification notices, but only Temple was disqualified. The other four escaped that penalty, and 1News reported that one of them, Fervent Stedfast, was spared because of health concerns. Temple has separately faced the criminal courts, and 1News reported he pleaded guilty to 12 charges involving indecent assault over a period from 2002 to 2022.
Wrightson was careful to draw a line around what the decision does and does not do. “The Board regulates the Trust, not the community, and this decision does not determine the future operation of this religious community,” she said. In other words, nobody is being ordered off the land at Haupiri. What changes is the legal and financial footing of the organisation that holds the community’s property.
The trust and its trustees have the right to appeal the board’s decision. Gloriavale was approached for comment by 1News but had not responded.
The ruling lands less than three weeks after another state agency acted against the community. On 4 September the Secretary for Education cancelled the registration of Gloriavale Christian School after the Education Review Office found it still could not show it was a physically and emotionally safe place for students. That school, which teaches about 84 children in Years 1 to 8, remains open while a High Court judicial review is heard in October.
Taken together, the two decisions mark a shift in how the state deals with Gloriavale. For years the pressure came mainly from former members who left and took their cases to court, often at great personal cost. The Herald reported that 61 leavers have filed claims totalling about $40 million for lost wages and entitlements. Now the regulators who oversee schools and charities have both concluded, on the evidence those leavers helped bring into the open, that the institutions at the centre of the community cannot be trusted with the status the law gives them.
For the wider charities sector, the case is a reminder that registration is a privilege with conditions attached. Deregistration for serious wrongdoing is not a routine step, and a three-year stand-down combined with the maximum disqualification for a former leader sends a clear message about where the board draws the line on child safety and the treatment of workers.
Do you think the charities regulator has made the right call, and has it taken too long to get here? Share your view in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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