After Bishop Pompaillier resigned and the church of the Immaculate Conception was demolished, the Ponsonby people used the convent chapel for Sunday Mass for 17 years. But the population was growing, and there was need for a more permanent and settled arrangement. So in 1884 the first meeting was held to decide about building a church. By 1886 the land was bought, and at the end of that year the foundation stone was laid.

  The new wooden church was opened on 16 January 1887 on the corner of O'Neill Street and Ponsonby Road by Bishop Edmund Luck.  This marked the real beginning of Ponsonby as a parish.

Its first pastor was George Michael Lenihan, a 30-year-old Londoner, short, tubby, wearing a short beard, who was fond of music and cricket, and popular with people. He was later to succeed Luck as Bishop of Auckland. In the same year he began work as parish priest (or technically administrator, since Ponsonby was still the Bishop's parish). He received valuable reinforcements in the shape of the Little Sisters of the Poor, who began their work for the aged in that year.

In 1891 Lenihan moved to Parnell, and was succeeded in Ponsonby by George Gillan, a gifted administrator, later Vicar General of the diocese. It was Gillan who built the Sacred Heart parish school in the section behind the church. The school building became a hall in 1913, when the school was moved to Vermont Street.

The administrator from 1932 to 1957 was Michael Kennedy, a saintly Irishman, whose thin figure could be seen going about the parish on visitation, or taking Communion to the sick, in all weathers.

By the 1950's he was assisted by three curates, all of whom were kept very busy. There were hundreds of confessions every week, an active youth movement and several well attended sodalities; and most priests had eight to ten people for instruction for marriage or conversion every week. About 1950 the Mill Hill Fathers became an active presence in the parish, working from 4 Renall Street, where a city Maori missioner took up residence. And in 1953 St Anne's Hostel in Shelly Beach Road, was established, bringing a new work and a new order, the Missionary Sisters of the Society of Mary, into the parish.