Island Ministers Indigenous Leadership in Nineteenth Century Pacific Islands Christianity RAEBURN LANGE MACMILLAN BROWN CEN TRE FOR PACIFIC STUDIES Universi ty of Canterbury NEW ZEALAND and PANDANUS BOOKS Resear ch School of Pacifi c and Asian Studies THE AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSI TY Cover: A Kanak catechist addresses a crowd at the chapel of Notre-Dame de Salette, Yao, Isle of Pines, New Caledonia, in 1876 (from a wood engraving published in the IllustratedAustralian News and based on a photograph by Allan Hughan). Native Chapel, Yao Mission, Isle of Pines, New Caledonia, wood engraving, La Trobe Picture Collection, State Library of Victoria. Inside front and back cover: Maori ministers of the Anglican Diocese of Waiapu, North Island, New Zealand, about 1900. Photographer unknown. Margaret Orbell Collection, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand, F- 22632-1/2. © Raeburn Lange 2005 This book is copyright in all countries subscribing to the Berne convention. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Ty peset in Goudy l lpt on 13.5pt and printed by Pirion, Canberra National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Lange, Raeburn T. Island ministers : indigenous leadership in nineteenth century Pacific Islands Christianity. Bibliography. Includes index. ISBN 1 74076 176 6. 1. Clergy - Oceania. 2. Christianity - Oceania. 3. Oceania - Church history - 19th century. I. Title. 279.6 Editorial inquiries please contact Pandanus Books on 02 6125 3269 www.pandanusbooks.com.au Published by Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies, University of Canterbury, Christchurch 8020 New Zealand and Pandanus Books, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, The Australian National University, Canberra ACT 0200 Australia Pandanus Books are distributed by UNIREPS, University of New South Wales, Sydney NSW 2052 Telephone 02 9664 0999 Fax 02 9664 5420 Production: Ian Templeman, Justine Molony, David Pear and Emily Brissenden Contents Preface 8 Abbreviations 14 Maps 15 1. Prophets, Priests and Pastors in History: 25 The Antecedents of Christian Ministry in the Pacific 2. French Polynesia 37 3. Cook Islands 62 4. Samoa 78 5. Tonga 102 6. Wallis and Futuna 114 7. Fiji 127 8. New Zealand 149 9. Hawai'i 180 10. Niue 190 11. Tokelau 196 12. Tuvalu 200 13. Kiribati and Nauru 208 14. Marshall Islands 217 15. Mariana and Caroline Islands 222 16. New Caledonia and the Loyalty Islands 232 17. Vanuatu 247 18. Solomon Islands 282 19. New Guinea 290 20. Pacific Islanders in Christian Ministry 312 Endnotes 329 Bibliography 388 Index 421 Preface THE PACIFIC OCEAN covers a vast area of the Earth's surface and scattered across it are thousands of islands. Though some are very large, most are small, and the smallest are tiny. These 'Pacific Islands', sometimes conceptualised as a collective 'Oceania', are the ancestral home of many peoples. A chapter of their story is told in this book. European visitors drew lines on the map of Oceania, dividing the islands into Polynesia, Micronesia and Melanesia. These conventional terms are a way of clustering the multitude of Pacific ethnic and cultural groups. They do so very loosely and often misleadingly, but they are still convenient when description and narrative call for geographical differentiation. I have used the term 'Polynesia' in its pre,colonial sense: no less than the indigenous inhabitants of Tahiti, Samoa and so on, those of Hawai'i and New Zealand were Polynesians, and were very much part of the story I am telling in this book. I have therefore included these islands in my study, although their Polynesian identity has been obscured by the immigration from outside Oceania that occurred during the 19th century and which swamped the original Hawaiians and New Zealanders. Events in the 20th century have similarly removed the Melanesians of western New Guinea from the Pacific world, by incorporating them into an Asian state, Indonesia. Because they too participated in the events described in this study, however, I have included this part of Oceania also. I have used modern nomenclature ('French Polynesia', 'Kiribati', 'Vanuatu' and so on) for the chapter headings, but in the text the labels applied to island groups in the 19th century (for example, 'Society Islands', 'Gilbert Islands' and 'New Hebrides') are often used. Since the early part of the 20th century, the island populations of the Pacific have been overwhelmingly Christian in allegiance. Church buildings are to be found wherever there is human habitation and Christianity is an important feature of Pacific life almost everywhere. The religion of Christ was brought into the region by Protestant and Catholic missionaries in the 19th and 20th centuries (although there had been an earlier evangelisation by Spanish Catholics in a single location), and appears to have been more universally accepted and integrated here than in any other comparable region in modern times. Pacific people have incorporated Christian ideas, practices and structures into their cultures and communities, so in this book I write of Pacific Christianity as a Pacific religion. Preface 9 'Mission history' and 'church history' cannot be entirely disentangled, but this study is more church�oriented than mission�oriented. It is concerned with the story of churches rather than of missions. By 'churches' in this sense, I do not mean just the 'independent' bodies created by missionary 'decolonisation' in recent times, when 'missions' gave way to locally directed ecclesiastical structures. 'Churches' are the Christian communities that date from the days of the first response to the new religion. The long history of these churches as indigenous social institutions has been obscured by the mission superstructures that dominated them forso long. In this book, my focus is not on the Western missionaries who originally introduced Christianity, but on the Pacific Islanders who almost universally took it up and made it their own, and specifically on those who became leaders in the Pacific churches. One of the most prominent institutions in most Pacific societies today is the Christian ministry. Almost everywhere the minister, pastor or priest occupies a place of high social status and considerable social importance - certainly a more prominent place in social and cultural life than in today's West. Like many aspects of Christianity and indeed many Western cultural, social and economic innovations, this institution was adapted by Pacific Islanders to Pacific conditions and incorporated into Pacific life. The history of this indigenous ministry is the subject of the chapters that follow. The word 'ministry' carries considerable theological weight: Christ's ministry to God and to the world was given to the church, the whole people of God. Ministry is thus the totality of the church's activities - its worship, witness and service. But historically, 'ministry' has come to refer more narrowly to a particular function in the church (a function that has seemed at times to constitute the whole ministry of the church): the work of those specifically designated as leaders. Today it is once again widely understood, in both Catholic and Protestant traditions, that these so�called 'ministers' have the task, theologically speaking, of enabling or equipping the other members of the church for the ministry that all Christians exercise. The theology of ministry is not the concern of this book, however, and I am using 'ministry' purely as a descriptive term that refers to functionsand offices of leadership in the church. In the Pacific context, pioneer evangelism and teaching were often the first kinds of ministry taken up by island Christians. Before long pastoral leadership ministries were needed, and indigenous people were soon engaged in teaching, leading worship and giving general direction and pastoral care to local congregations and communities. It is this activity as leaders and pastors that is the main concern of this book. In my account of the participation of Pacific Islanders in pastoral and other ministries I have focused on function rather than status, although in the development of Pacific Christianity questions of status soon became important. The people I have written about were not necessarily full�time, or paid, or ordained, and went under many names (teacher, pastor, catechist, priest and others). No one name can be used for all, or was ever used for all. In his seminal article, 'The South Pacific Style in the Christian Ministry', Charles Forman appropriately applied the word 'pastor' (which originally meant 'shepherd') to all manifestations of leadership in the 10 Island Ministers local churches. Forman explained that whatever else this 'pastor' did, shepherding the Christian flock was always a principal function. In another important article ('Pacific Islander Pastors and Missionaries') on Pacific Island 'pastors', however, historians Doug Munro and Andrew Thomley used the term to refer mainly to the 'teachers' and evangelists who pioneered new mission fields. One of their purposes in employing the word was to indicate that indigenous evangelists and ministers were subordinate to the white missionaries until church authority was localised after World War II - a connotation of 'pastor' that does indeed accurately represent much missionary thinking. It is appropriate to use 'pastor' to include indigenous evangelists and missionaries when referring to places such as the London Missionary Society's Samoan outposts in Tokelau, Tuvalu and Kiribati, where indigenous missionaries stayed on after the initial pioneering years, transforming their early evangelistic role into a primarily pastoral one. Usually, however, it is better to distinguish between pastoral and other (usually earlier) forms of ministry, and so I have reserved the word 'pastor' for people engaged in local church leadership rather than pioneer evangelism or other ministries. Although throughout Christian history there have always been ministries other than the leadership of local churches, pastoral ministry is my main concern in this book.