From a news story collecting survival tales of the quake:

A church pianist survived without a scratch as Canterbury's oldest stone church collapsed around her.

Lyttelton's 141-year-old Holy Trinity Anglican Church should have claimed a life after sustaining major damage during Monday's aftershock.

Reverend Neil Struthers said church pianist Wendy Souter was practising inside the building when the south wall collapsed.

Struthers' son, Sam Struthers, raced from the adjacent vicarage fearing the worst.

"The windows imploded, the wall [beside the piano] had fallen down and she was sitting there playing the piano," Sam Struthers said. "She's OK, but she was pretty shaken up. I just took her outside and held her for about 10 minutes."

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Obviously, a lot of Catholic, Anglican, and other kinds of churches were destroyed in NZ by this quake.