How late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Protestant children supported and interacted with foreign missions is still a relatively undeveloped field of scholarly research. Missionary societies actively recruited children's money, energy and sensibilities for the missionary cause. Sunday school pedagogy and rhetoric focused on cultivating a lifelong interest in missions. Children became a significant sector of support for ongoing missionary work. This article provides an introductory overview of how this process was played out in one particular British settler-society context: that of New Zealand. In turn it begins to tease out the ways in which notions of imperial citizenship were entwined in the religious pedagogy and rhetoric associated with the missionary movement. The intention is to provide an introductory case-study that builds a platform for a further comparative analysis of children, religious pedagogy and imperialism across British world settler societies such as New Zealand and Canada. (Contains 88 footnotes.)