It was the practice, in some of the remote settlements, for the masters to assemble their servants and dependants, and to read the service and sermons on the Lord’s Day.   -  Norris, W Annals of the Diocese of Adelaide (1852)

Balhannah parish has its beginnings in South Australia’s earliest colonial times.  Until his untimely death in 1843, the Colonial Chaplain and Incumbent of Holy Trinity North Tce, the Rev’d CB Howard, rode his nag, Luther, at irregular intervals, to minister to scattered Anglicans in the Adelaide Hills.  During April 1847, St James’s Blakiston opened for services; its priests undertook pastoral care for a surrounding district many square kilometres in area, which included the entire present Parish of Balhannah.

Unannounced in the daily press, a combined church/school opened in Balhannah some time during 1848, on land which the congregation acquired through a controversial state grant system available to all denominations from 1847.  Eccentric James Thomson had laid out the Balhannah township itself during 1839. James Johnston’s private township of Woodside was established c1849 and Anglicans there obtained a similar government grant of twenty acres on which to establish a church and accompanying glebe.  Shute the mason began erecting Old St Mark’s on a prominent hill during 1850; the church first flung wide its doors for divine service on 30 October 1851.

Anglicanism limped along very badly in the Onkaparinga Valley for decades.  Leading members did little to dispel the notion that their church enjoyed a privileged position in society, not unlike the Establishment in Mother England.  To the ruggedly independent Lutherans and the various branches of Methodism which made up the bulk of the population, such pretensions were anathama indeed.  Both Old St Mark’s Woodside and Old St Thomas’s Balhannah (which apparently did not enjoy a dedication, though) fell into increasing disrepair.  Balhannah’s congregation at last erected the present St Thomas’s Church, noted for its unusual features, first used for services on 10 September 1865; architect RR Page himself described the building as of ‘adaptive’ design.  Fussy GT Light created an ambitious plan for a new St Mark’s Woodside; substantial shortfalls in the building fund meant that a church considerably reduced in scale opened for public worship on 25 April 1885.  Not surprisingly, both Balhannah and Woodside took long periods to pay off their church construction debts.

Parishioners in the then even more economically straitened parochial wings of Germanic Hahndorf and Lobethal displayed greater prudence in church building plans.  After the Hahndorf College schoolroom had served for two years, a very unadorned St Paul’s Hahndorf opened for worship on 2 February 1886.  The local press praised Hahndorf’s Anglicans, who ‘undoubtedly got good value for the money expended’ on the first Anglican church building erected in South Australia’s German districts.  Lobethal’s congregation did not have to build at all - members bargained successfully for a redundant Lutheran Church which had been erected in 1876, and Bishop Thomas arrived on 3 August 1919 to dedicate the re-cycled Church of the Prince of Peace for Anglican worship.

Parish boundaries have proved bewildering down through the years.  Blakiston retained pastoral oversight for Balhannah and Woodside until 1866, when St Mark’s joined the Mt Pleasant parish.  During 1901, Woodside again formed part of the Blakiston parish until 1923, when a Balhannah parish came into existence, consisting of Balhannah, Lobethal and Woodside.  After belonging to the Mt Barker parish continuously since 1886, St Paul’s Hahndorf transferred to Balhannah in 1956.  Eight Rectors have cared for the present Balhannah parish under its current four-centre arrangement.  Overall, now, the congregations contain an excellent mix of rural and metropolitan members.  Rapidly becoming part of the outer Adelaide urban sprawl, the parish faces rigorous challenges to minister to the continually rising number of new residents who call themselves Anglicans, not to mention those who claim no church affiliation at all.