John Campbell: the growing rage and extremity of Brian Tamaki and Destiny

What exactly is the message of Brian Tamaki's Destiny Church? John Campbell highlights some consistent themes: far-right prejudices, manifest anger and hatred. Meanwhile, for some former members, the church leaves a lasting taste of sadness and fear.

Inside Destiny: Faith, flag, family - Watch on TVNZ+

In February, sitting at my desk looking out over the ceaseless, metallic tide of Auckland’s Nelson Street, I was contacted by two people about Destiny Church.

Some days, I hear from so many people that I’m not sure how to respond to it all. (Some days, I can’t.)

But these two penetrated my overflowing inbox, my obstinacy, and the constant and increasingly wild inundations of journalism in these swirling times.

I think what spoke to me was the hurt and damage they described. Their desperate sense of a church so far from the God of John 4:16 – “God is love, and all who live in love live in God, and God lives in them.”

I went to meet one of them. They introduced me to other people. The other people introduced me to other people. And their stories echoed and matched.

And that was that. I worked almost full-time on the story for the next three months. By the end of April, we’d released Under His Command, a five-part series on TVNZ+.

Today we release a second series, which owes its existence entirely to the first. Every new person is there because they’d watched the first and thought there was more to be said about Destiny Church, about ManUp, and about “Apostle” Brian Tamaki.

But most of all, it owes its existence to one woman in the first series. She called herself Te Ahi Wairua, which isn’t her real name, but translates as "the spiritual fire", so it feels like it should be.

It was Te Ahi who used words I could never improve upon to describe how she saw life inside Brian Tamaki’s Destiny Church: “a place of lostness”.

And it was Te Ahi who inspired Destiny people who watched her to approach me with their stories.

“I was actually quite blown away at how strong the young girl was sharing her story,” Jack (not his real name) told me. “And I believe that my story could make a bigger impact as well, in showing people what really happens behind those doors in Destiny Church. And yeah, the more light that we can shine on it, the better. I don't want anybody to be going to Destiny Church thinking that it's a great place to be when most of us know that it's not.”

By “us”, Jack meant the exiles, former members, the sometimes estranged whānau of current members, people for whom Destiny Church is, as Te Ahi put it, “a place of lost souls. Lost souls thinking that this man is the way out”.

The man, of course, is Brian Tamaki.

Person after person wanted to tell me about his church. Their version of Jack’s assertion “it’s not” a great place to be. Person after person wanted to describe what it’s like to belonging to a church that makes you feel “lost”.

But first, they had to decide whether they could trust me.

I’ve never worked quite like this before. Oh, we often arrive somewhere in the flush and panic and uncertainty and grief of breaking news. Sometimes it feels horrible or wrong to be there, standing on the edges, but it also makes human connection easier. Kanohi ki te kanohi.

With Destiny, I couldn’t just turn up. (Well, I did, but I was asked to leave. And then they called the police.) And Brian Tamaki refused to talk to me.

Instead, this was slow, human work. So many phone calls, to current and former Destiny people who, for the most part, weren’t sure whether to talk to me. “The devil,” one of them said I’d been described as.

So I tiptoed in. Whole days on the phone, speaking softly to people scared of me, but even more scared of anyone in Destiny finding out they’d spoken.

One potentially at-risk woman, after days of talking, simply disappeared. She didn’t answer. Didn’t text back. Nothing. It was so concerning that we organised a discreet welfare check.

Another time, I received a late-night call from someone I’d been talking to during the day. She was terrified of her Destiny husband finding out we’d spoken. When I saw I’d missed her call, I immediately phoned her back. But her call to me had been a butt dial. And as she answered, I heard a male voice in the background asking who was calling her at this time of night.

It felt hard to get to get to the truth without endangering people, but it also felt new and necessary to get there.

I’ve told stories about Brian “show me the money” Tamaki before this year. Mostly, they’ve concentrated on his business model. I had no desire to return to that space.

Plus, as my friend and colleague David Farrier points out, there are many people in the business of selling God. Some have elevated sanctity to a global conglomeration. The Catholic Church, bless them, owns an estimated 70 million hectares of land – an area larger than France.

But the Destiny story spoke to something particular. Brian Tamaki, as Dr Leonie Pihama would later tell me, is preaching an increasingly extreme and incendiary right-wing agenda.

And, as Dr Pihama pointed out, he’s doing this to a predominantly Māori and Pasifika congregation, whose embrace of far-right bigotries is sharply at odds with the history of these communities.

“When I see those young people, in particular, fronting up to the Pride Parade and doing that haka, it has nothing to do with the cultural understandings that I know come with doing haka. It is about manipulation. It's about harm. It's about hatred and it's about violence.”

The recurring theme of the people I spoke to, in story after story, was confusion about how they’d ended up here. Storming public libraries. Vilifying LGBTQI+ people. Explicit xenophobia. Weaponising hate as a branding tool.

Where does the God they love fit into all of that?

I’d raised that in the first series. And in response Brian Tamaki,claimed a kind of ownership of that space, giving a sermon in which he quoted me, (the "he" in the following is me).

“He said in the introduction to his hit piece, 'where is the happy clappy church of the 90s?’ He’s talking about Destiny Church. That was what you used, John. And if you’re watching, which you probably are, you and your team, where is the happy clappy Destiny Church of the 90s? It’s now turned into an aggressive, you know, almost like, he’s saying, aggressive, violent, all this sort of stuff. Well, John, you are right.”

Right. That was unexpected. Although, maybe it shouldn’t have been. As I keep observing, anger is now his marketing tool. Brand Brian.

He continued, speaking down the camera, as if directly to me.

“Because in the Bible, if you’ve ever read it, I think you might get converted after all of this, it says there, that the kingdom of God is ‘forcefully advancing’, that’s a scripture, Jesus said this, and he said the ‘take it by force’, now you will misinterpret that for sure, and think that, oh he’s making the church violent, no, we are fighting a battle and a war, against spirits in high places, demonic demons, they do possess people, John. Put that on TV.”

I did.

But what were Destiny people signing up to? Back before the anger? A war? With whom? LGBTQI+ family members, friends, colleagues, neighbours? A war with themselves?

A woman who grew up in Destiny described realising she was takatāpui (LGBTQI+) in a church where that was an “abomination”.

I asked her, “Did you ever feel like an abomination?"

“Yeah.”

There are moments in interviews, (rarer now in the age of the pre-cooked message), when people bravely stand out in the open, with nowhere to hide. There is nothing but them and the truth.

“Yeah. I did, because everything that I am was everything that we were being told to not be.”

I sometimes felt like our interviews, and even the phone calls that weren’t interviews, were a kind of therapy. I was first receiver of a previously unarticulated grief, or sadness, or fear.

In my cosseted and unworldly childhood, full of Boy’s Own stories, war comics, and the fabled heroism of the kind of men we didn’t grow up to be, there was a WWII story I loved more than any other. It was about three jolly good English Airforce chaps who escaped from a German prisoner of war camp, Stalag Luft III, by building a tunnel from beneath a wooden, gymnastics vaulting horse. (They really did!) As other jolly good chaps bounded over the wooden horse, our three heroes dug and dug and dug their way out.

There were days when it felt like the Destiny people I was speaking to were digging their way out, almost that laboriously.

“The thing I found hard to do was to leave,” Wayne Turipa told me. “It was the hardest thing I ever had to do – leave Destiny Church, because they were my family.”

Wayne lives in Southland now.

He found Destiny, in the 90s, in Rotorua. At first, and for years, it was really good for him.

Wayne had once been an angry man, so angry that the love of his life packed up and left him. To help deal with his anger – male anger – Wayne was one of the founding members of the group that became Destiny’s Man Up.

It worked for him. After ten years of not drinking, of learning to understand and manage his anger, of working to make anger a thing he could see and reject, Wayne changed so much his former partner heard about it.

She contacted him.

Have you really changed?

Yes, he replied.

She came to see him. He really had.

They’re together again. They’re raising a daughter. She’s bright and engaged and confident. She sparkles with possibility. Being with them was lovely. It was one of those blue, blue days that Southland does. The world felt good – and hopeful.

Wayne now views anger as a choice. You have to choose to not be angry. You have to.

He despairs of Man Up’s involvement in increasingly angry and confrontational activism.

“I can't help but think that if, if ManUp carries on the way it is, someone will really get hurt, not only spiritually, but physically.

“I don't really know what to say anymore.”

Wayne left Destiny because he couldn’t find God there any longer. Not directly.

“I started to notice,” he told me, “I didn't really have my own relationship with God.”

What did he mean by that?

“It was hard to get through the middleman. I just felt a call, a call to to have my own relationship with with God, rather than going through this middleman, you know.”

And the middleman was Brian Tamaki?

“Yeah. The middleman was Brian. And then I felt this, this sense of power and control going on too. There was a call to obedience to Brian. And what I felt at that time was, it was an obedience to Brian and not to God.”

Let there be dark.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with Brian, and the Word was Brian.

And the words erupted out of Brian. “Sulphur and fire.” (Genesis 19:24.) Like a volcano.

At some stage, when I’d spent so long watching his sermons they’d begun to calcify inside me, I realised Brian Tamaki was making me sad.

"A cheerful heart is good medicine, but a crushed spirit dries up the bones." (Proverbs 17:22.)

Once, viewing him in full flight, I half-remembered a poem from my inattentiveness at university, Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene.

Who knew back then (certainly not my lecturers) that four decades on, trying to describe a certain toxicity, I’d recall Spenser’s dragon:

Therewith she spewd out of her filthy maw

A floud of poyson horrible and blacke,

Full of great lumpes of flesh and gobbets raw,

Which stunck so vildly, that it forst him slacke.

I was forced slack.

It wasn’t that his wrath took me by surprise. I'd seen it before. But I hadn’t fully registered how far he’d dragged the carrion body of his evangelism towards Christianity’s extreme right.

On June 21, this was wilfully made explicit, when hundreds of Destiny protestors, led by Brian Tamaki, marched down Auckland’s Queen St.

Outside Britomart (the name, incidentally, of a shit-kicking female knight in the aforementioned Faerie Queene) they ripped up a series of flags, one after another, bearing (in ripping order) the words “Islam”, “Palestine”, “Khalistan”, “Sikh”, “Buddhism”, “Hindu”, “United Nations”, “World Health Organisation”, “World Economic Forum”, “No Religion”, and, inevitably, “Rainbow” and “Transgender”.

Amplified, live-streamed, speaking to the Destiny camera, Brian Tamaki provided a running commentary through much of it, calling out the hated names. It was like bingo night in a slasher movie.

“Rip it up, boys.”

And the “boys” did.

“Rip it up.”

Tamaki rails against drag queens reading stories to children. But this was a hate panto in the CBD.

And there was more. To end it, a poster-sized version of the cover of Jacina Ardern’s book, Different Kind of Power, was produced. Taiaha were repeatedly jabbed at her photo. One taiaha went through her throat. Then another.

It felt like Salem.

After her photo was ripped, then ripped again, Jacinda Ardern’s image was screwed up and thrown onto the rip pile, to join Islam, Hinduism, the UN, queer people, trans people, and those amongst us with “no religion” (the latter being, according to Census data, just over 50% of the population). Then, and we have the footage, one of the Destiny men crouched above it and feigned urination or masturbation.

This was on Queen St. On a Saturday afternoon.

“Love your enemies,” Jesus said (Matthew 5:44).

They had marched down Queen St in a loose kind of military formation.

“Left right, left right, left right, left.”

Periodically, they chanted, FAITH! FLAG! FAMILY!

Which is, Destiny’s supporters argue, freedom of speech and religious freedom. Their informed and adult choice.

But, and this was part of Leonie Pihama’s concern, a lot of the marchers that afternoon were young adults. And many of them were the product of a Destiny upbringing.

Three or four days later I was sent an image from the “Destiny Kids Auckland” Facebook page. It appears to have been shot during the same weekend and was posted on June 23.

It’s Destiny children, little ones, some seemingly as young as four, five or six years old.

“Left right, left right, left right, left.”

They’re being taught the same march, lifting their little legs up and down, swinging their arms like soldiers.

“FAITH! FLAG! FAMILY!” they chant.

Too young to say “no”, to know what any of it really means, or to understand who Brian Tamaki’s definition of “family” leaves out.

Here they are. Brian Tamaki’s little army.

“Train up a child in the way he should go, even when he is old he will not depart from it.” (Proverbs 22:6)

“Better to reign in Hell, than to serve in Heaven.” (John Milton, Paradise Lost.)

Brian Tamaki’s sermons are live-streamed and they’re available to watch later on the Destiny Church YouTube page. He’s grown into giving sermons. He knows the scriptures better than he once did, although his interpretations of them can tend towards serving whatever narrative he’s peddling, including tithing.

The camera follows him as he talks. The broadcast operation is tight and slick. They know what side their Brian is buttered on.

Sometimes, there’s a wide shot from behind the congregation. The backs of their heads are in the foreground of frame. When the “Apostle” gets most angry, or most stirring, the heads rise and reveal they have torsos beneath them. Some raise their fists. There’s a striking collective power in those galvanised moments. And then gravity and self-consciousness take hold. And something I can’t quite put my finger on. A fleeting “is Santa real?” moment. And they descend into just being heads again.

He circles themes. He’s at his best othering and retailing meanness and grievance. He’s the angry uncle. He’s the talkback radio caller you long for if you’re hosting a desperately quiet overnight shift. If it’s woke, he’ll slag it off.

Sometimes, his key talking points feel strange in a church.

“It was anal sex,” he said, during one sermon, returning to a subject he talks about almost as often as Jonah told the story of the whale. “Between two men, and then, later woman with woman. It was an abomination. God said, he’s never liked it. He’s never protected it. And he’s never endorsed it.”

He returns to the LGBTQI+ community again and again and again.

His mistrust of imported religions, not including Christianity, funnily enough, is sharp.

He likes his Māori colonised. “I declare Te Pāti Māori a terrorist organisation.” He occasionally peddles racist tropes: “The Māoris (sic) are all sitting on the couch at home, getting paid the benefit.”

He likes his foreigners to stay at home.“Ninety-eight percent of the people coming in here are just people India don’t want. Pakistan don’t want. Bangladesh don’t want.”

And on he goes. For the most part, he doesn’t name people. There’s a caution here. He and six other defendants, all with various degrees of connection to Destiny Church, are facing defamation action for comments made about two of the the drag artists who were performing Rainbow Story Time at libraries.

Defamation cases are hard won in this country, and tend not to be US levels of lucrative, or even close.

And the plaintiffs, Daniel Lockett and Sunita Torrance, aka Erika and Coco Flash, will need to prove cause and effect, were the defendants responsible for the abuse they received? Did they lose income as a result?

But they found themselves in the middle of something ugly and hateful. And it broke them both.

Daniel Lockett is now living in London. And isn’t sure whether New Zealand will ever feel like home again.

“I blocked a lot of it out, because that's my defence mechanism,” he says. “It's a lot of what queer people do growing up. So I'm very good at blocking things out. But the things that were getting me the most were the threats of violence and the death threats. Like, I think that's when it hit a whole new point. How can us reading books to kids, there with their parents and guardians, how can that like lead to us being warranted dead?”

Which brings us, of course, to Destiny Church’s status as a charity, accorded tax deductible status under the Charities Act 2005.

The Labour Party is calling for Destiny to be struck off, a campaign being led by Te Te Atatū MP Phil Twyford in response (as we saw in series one) to the storming of a pride week event at the Te Atatū Peninsula Community Centre in February.

“The conduct that occurred on 15 February 2025 is not conduct that could in any way be consistent with any charitable purpose,” Twyford wrote to Charities Services.

Seven people connected to Destiny Church are facing various charges, including common assault. None of them, incidentally, are Brian Tamaki himself, although he boasted of having commanded people to do it.

“And I said to Tala, ‘great job what you’re doing but I want you to storm the library they’re in, and, and shut it down.’ And he said, ‘Yip, I’m onto it, Apostle.’"

Apostle. He gave himself the title.

And so the hate is actualised now. His sermons are becoming more declaratory, more incendiary, more attention seeking.

In June Brian Tamaki announced in a "press release" that he (and Destiny) were joining forces with “UK Firebrand Tommy Robinson” to "reunite the faith". Robinson is of course a high-profile British anti-Islam and far-right activist.

The statement went on to outline the action that these "guardians of God" demand.

The list is long, rabid, predictable and somewhat ironic, considering this is an organisation that insists on its right to freedom of speech. It includes the following (verbatim) demands:

• That Christianity be declared the official religion in our Commonwealth countries

• Ban public prayer from foreign religions

• Ban the building of mosques, temples, shrines

• Ban non-Christian teachings in schools and universities

• Ban religious diversity offices and promotional centres

• Crackdown on mass immigration of incompatible faiths

And this, in part, along with the sermons, the increasingly angry protests, and the loudly expressed hate of entire communities, is what our Charities Registration Board must consider.

Brian Tamaki himself has seemed almost determined to make the board's decision easier. Responding to the growing demand to have Destiny (in all its manifestations) struck off the Charities Register, he thundered during a sermon: “STUFF YOUR CHARITY!”

Those now bravely starting new lives outside the church are no strangers to difficult decisions. Is home still home when it’s toxic? When is it time to go?

I think of Wayne Turipa telling me it was the hardest thing he did, "because they were my family”.

And yet leave it he did, and he found love, he found peace, and he found a direct relationship with God.

“My wife and I, we have such an awesome relationship now.”

Which is both beautiful and, surely, not too much to ask from the person you put your faith in.

Who is Brian Tamaki representing, really? God? Whose God?

In February, he delivered a sermon broadly railing against the Government’s perceived tolerance of the LGBTQI+ community.

“Oh, man. If it it goes any further, I mean, why you might have to have a meteorite, it might have to burn down Parliament. I shouldn’t have said that. But, if you’re targeting my children, Mr Luxon, Seymour and Peters, and you did nothing about it, well, I’ll have to burn it down.”

God won’t send a meteorite. Brian Tamaki himself won’t burn anything down.

But who’s listening to him? Week after week after week after week.

What young child growing up with this, practising marching and chanting before they know what it means, is taking all of this in?

They tried to set fire to one of the flags and banners they were ripping up at the bottom of Queen St. But the flames didn’t take.

Still, they’re out there, Brian Tamaki’s army. They do as they’re told. And they're carrying matches.

Inside Destiny: Faith, flag, family - Watch on TVNZ+

Under his Command - see the full series here