Australia’s Largest Christian News Site

A New Zealand gang leader’s radical conversion is turning hardened criminals toward Christ — and his own violent past is exactly what makes him the right man for the job.

Pastor Lucky Te Koha’s testimony deserves to go viral.

The former New Zealand felon went from institutional care and institutionalised gang culture to Christ.

A South Islander, Te Koha recently shared his God encounter with the ABC, stating,

“Broken people raise broken kids. Hurt people hurt people, but healed people can heal people.”

Talking about going against the stream, Te Koha told the ABC, “This is my salmon.”

Raised by the System, Claimed by the Streets

Te Koha’s journey was fraught with dysfunction and malformation.

Abandoned by his father, lost, and sexually abused by older peers, he was dumped into the foster home system.

In between state-supported care as a child, Te Koha was made to stay at Cherry Farm, a notoriously abusive state-run mental hospital for adults.

“The abuse in that place was next level,” he recalled, because it had no proper child safety protection procedures in place. Nor did the state seem to care about them.

He later found a home within the gang system. That “refuge” would eventually land Te Koha in prison.

As captured by the ABC, the former “patch-first” devotee testified,

“I’m not the man that left here eight and a half years ago that was angry, frustrated, violent with addictions and everything wrong.”

“I was living a life of high crime, and it was secret. People didn’t really know me. People didn’t know my story.”

He gave his life to Christ in 2017, and under the mentorship of Brian O’Connor, Senior Pastor of Kaikōura New Life Church, was ordained in 2019.

After three years being discipled and building the Kingdom Brotherhood template, Te Koha is now taking Christ into gang culture.

He founded the Kingdom Ministries outreach in 2021.

Featured in Authentic Magazine’s final print issue in 2023, Te Koha shared about going from a “man of crime, to a man of God.”

“My answer to everything was, simply, violence. My mindset was, ‘anything you want, take it.’”

“I also believed the more drugs I sold, the more successful I’d be,” he said.

“And, the more drugs I took, or ‘booze’ I drank, the better I’d feel.”

“In fact, all that led to was crime, court cases, police battles, boys’ homes, youth prison, prison and rehabs.”

After losing friends to suicide, Te Koha recounted “moving into an organised crime group full of hardened gangsters.”

He was dealing in misery.

“Our business was drugs, the sex industry and organised crime.”

The Moment Everything Changed

Moving to Kaikōura after turning 49, he said, was about finding a better way of life with his future wife, Hayley.

“I knew Brian and his family,” Te Koho said, “but I wasn’t aware he was a pastor. He was just a good, solid dude. I was a bit shocked when he asked me to church.”

All of it was “foreign to him.”

“If we fast forward just three months,” he told Authentic Magazine, “I’m radically saved.”

Harbouring a 40-year hatred of the police, God moved one Sunday and answered the trauma.

Only his third time in New Life Church, he recognised a police officer who had recently arrested him.

After beginning to feel “intense chest pain” during the service, the officer approached him and asked to pray for Te Koho.

Te Koha said he “didn’t even know what ‘praying for me’ meant.”

Four men gathered around to pray for him, and he remembered his “chest pain leaving.”

“I sensed God saying, ‘I softened you, giving you a new heart. From here on, you’ll feel for others.’”

He later found out that all four men were police officers.

“I’d never cared about anybody in my entire life — let alone felt compassion or empathy,” he explained.

“I only knew hate, rage and anger. But, standing there, I discovered what it was to feel empathy for the first time.”

His hatred for the police had fallen away.

“I know God delivered me. I sensed that in this house, these were my brothers.”

“Just three months from turning 50,” Te Koha testified, “I’d only ever felt I belonged in gangs, foster homes or prison.”

“Yet, that very moment, I’d come home. It truly was the first time I felt I belonged somewhere.”

“It’s a moment only God could’ve orchestrated.”

For context, he was known to Kaikōura police. One of the station walls even had a “large poster of Lucky” on it.

Talking to Authentic Magazine about his life a little more, Te Koho said his mum was a praying woman. She was a Christian who prayed for him daily, he said.

“I’m only here because she did. I’ve clinically died three times — if it weren’t for those prayers, I wouldn’t be here.”

Led by Te Koha, his Kingdom Brotherhood and Kingdom Ministries go where most wouldn’t.

Although he’s now independent of the Evangelical Pentecostal tutelage of New Life Kaikōura, the church continues to support Pastor Te Koha’s important work.