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A Family Affair by George G Carter Part Two 1973 CONTENTS PART FIVE & SIX V Towards Partnership Chapter 1 The Solomons 1922-72 a. Policy b. Education c. Health d. Industrial Training e. Volunteers Chapter 2 Ministry in the Solomons Chapter 3 Foundations of Nationhood (Fiji, Tonga and Samoa) Chapter 4 New Frontier. The Highlands Chapter 5 The United Church and the New World Chapter 6 In Other Fields VI The Next Half Century Bibliography Appendix II People who link the N.Z. Church with Churches overseas. Wesley Historical Society (NZ) Publication #28(3&4) Page 1 A Family Affair by George G Carter Part Two 1973 V Towards Partnership CHAPTER 1: THE SOLOMONS 1922-1972 A. POLICY Every now and then through the years, the Overseas Missions Board has been challenged by the church with the question, “What is your policy?” Usually the response has been to point to the "achievements" and say. Of course we have a policy, look at what it is producing. For pragmatic Methodists this is usually enough, for we are not a people who are overly concerned with theory, and we are very apt to respond to the situation, devising theories and methods as we go on. It seems clear however that there have been certain lines of policy, which we have in fact followed over the year. In the 1920-22 period when we prepared to take over the Solomons, we formed clear judgements about what we should be doing. Our first concern was to have a field for evangelisation. The Solomons attracted because the whole of Bougainville and Buka was regarded as an untouched field, though the Roman Catholics had been at work in some areas for a generation, and Methodist pioneers had begun work in Siwai, South Bougainville in 1916. Control over Tonga and Samoa were also sought because these were churches from which staff might be drawn. The possibility of local Solomon Island evangelists was not overlooked, but it was not regarded as the complete answer. The second concern was to build a strong, viable Christian community, and this was expressed in three main directions; a strong medical mission work; strengthening of the schools and educational system, and an enthusiasm for 'industrial missions', a rather vague concept which could be wrapped in high sounding terms but was not very clear in direction. Each of these lines of approach were in accord with the attitudes of the Rev. J. F. Goldie, and were thus acceptable to him. While they were formed on the basis of the consultations held with him by Sinclair and Court, and it is probably true to say that they would succeed or fail only in so far as he supported them, they were nevertheless policies which the New Zealand Church as a whole could support. In the field of medical work this is most clear, for the church at grass roots level sent the doctor back after the depression years, and put the whole work on a sound financial basis. Popular support was also evident for the other policies. The New Zealand Board was of course very new, and though they had some fine men and women on the Board, they would have been very brave to have gone counter to the wishes of the pioneer chairman. Not only was he the man on the spot, who in the Wesley Historical Society (NZ) Publication #28(3&4) Page 2 A Family Affair by George G Carter Part Two 1973 last resort would determine whether a policy would be carried out, but he had tremendous standing in the Solomons, Australia and New Zealand. His public image of 'near saint' had been assiduously cultivated to the point where to challenge his judgement publicly would have been to shatter the whole image of foreign mission work in the Solomons that had been built up. The Australian Board had made an effort to bring Goldie under more effective control earlier, and had failed.1 In passing him to the New Zealand Conference they did so with no regrets. J. W. Burton told A. N. Scotter in 1927 that had the Solomons remained part of the Australian Church, "they would have got rid of Goldie or compelled him to give up plantation work and outside interests."2 Burton himself might have caused the Board to do this, for he was a very strong man, and a strict disciplinarian. But it is doubtful if anyone else could have done so, and doubtful also what the end result would have been. It is very likely that had Goldie been recalled by the church, then he would have simply moved out of the house at Munda, to place down the lagoon and continued to be the "uncrowned king of the western Solomons". He would almost certainly have taken the larger part of the Roviana people with him and there would have been a split. In that respect at least, Silas Eto who in the 1960's led a large number of people out of the Methodist Mission into the Christian Fellowship Church, was true to Goldie and his ways. In the light of all this, the New Zealand Board had no real hope of making a radical change in the policy of the Solomons. The other concern of the New Zealand Church which comes through most strongly after 1927, was for the establishment of a local indigenous church. They wanted to see the Scriptures translated, a native ministry built up and the development of a stronger sacramental life. In this they were really supported by the majority of the missionaries on the field, as the so called "insurrection synod" of 1929 (when Goldie was away in New Zealand) showed very clearly. But little or nothing came of this. The present writer recalls an article in an international missionary journal written in the 1950's, which said that no Indian should be ordained to the ministry of the Word and Sacraments, unless he was at least a third generation Christian. This attitude would have been supported by Goldie. In any case he, and some of his colleagues saw no need for haste. He was astute enough to play the Board off against missionaries, and missionaries off against one another, and was a past master in the art of delaying tactics. While this was never communicated to the church as a whole, and the missionary propaganda of the time continued to be quite adulatory, there must have been some very bitter thoughts at Board level. When the Rev. A. N. Scotter, by no means a man to make rash judgements could say, "It is hard to make definite charges of failure (against Goldie) but one has the feeling that all is not as well as it should be", things were bad.3 What would have been the outcome if normal patterns of social and economic growth had persisted is hard to say. The Board pushed the young Gina forward as a candidate Wesley Historical Society (NZ) Publication #28(3&4) Page 3 A Family Affair by George G Carter Part Two 1973 for the ministry, when Goldie was only talking about it, and they would probably have become more and more insistent on a number of matters as the years went by. But outside forces were too strong for them. The world wide depression which brought the missionary society to the point of bankruptcy, the long slow haul back to some sort of financial stability and the intrusion of a world war, meant that for twenty years, the fine theories had to be put aside in the struggle for existence. Though tremendous work was being done by individual workers, and by the mission as a whole the root cause of disagreement with Goldie ... the building of a church, self governing, self propagating and self supporting was not advanced very much. The medical and education work were continued with considerable success and the industrial mission concept was quietly buried beneath a tombstone of rusty sawmilling machinery and a shroud of rice bags. Hindsight is very easy. We know now that in 1945 when the war was over and the missionaries returned, we had entered a new world. But the church at home and the church in the islands could only see the need for restoration. They all thought that they could clear away the debris of war and take up life where they had laid it down in 1942. Perhaps only John R. Metcalfe, that fiery Yorkshireman who had stayed behind the Japanese lines and suffered, realised that they could not go back. Even he had no clear concept of the extent of the change that had taken place, and his volcanic outbursts, often ill directed and rarely tactful did not get the attention they deserved. So Goldie was allowed to return, before anyone else, and seize again his tight hold on the Roviana people, and the missionaries went back, with many high ideals, to the backbreaking work of just creating a very simple kind of order out of a very great chaos. They did this, and in terms of physical, mental and spiritual involvement, the task was more demanding than even the original pioneering had been. They had a certain number of tools at their disposal that the early missionaries did not, but those mechanical things created their own set of problems, and time was against them. In five or six years they tried to restore what had taken forty years to build. The New Zealand Church, which had gathered together a rehabilitation fund of more than $200,000, could see that there was a need for some development, not just restoration, but they thought of overtaking the last years rather than meeting a totally new situation.