The first agents of British mission societies left for distant posts with little guidance on how they should teach the gospel or organize local congregations once they began to emerge. Only four of the thirty missionaries (plus five wives and three children) sent to Tahiti by the LMS in 1797 were ordained ministers. Later the sending churches required most missionaries to attend a seminary, but directors continued to insist that a simple faith and skills with one’s hands were the best preparation for work among the ‘savage’ folk of Africa and the Pacific. In the beginning, missionaries had to invent procedures and standards as they went along, a process that occasioned no end of squabbling. At first on their own initiative, but increasingly in response to directors, they reproduced in the mission fields attenuated versions of the familiar ecclesiastical structures from home, adding to them oversight and district committees as needed. Still, this left a lot of room for improvisation.
While individual proclivities and local conditions created tremendous variation, early African missions followed a markedly different path of development from those in the Pacific. In Africa most missionaries established settlements to which they recruited potential converts who lived apart from the larger population. The mission villages varied greatly in function, size, and relationship to the surrounding societies across the continent. In eastern Africa the largest mission settlements housed ex-slaves cut off from distant homelands. Many mission villages in southern Africa, in contrast, served local populations, offering refuge at times of war and the chance of employment and education at times of peace. Mission communities generally shared ‘the sense that this was a place in which the European mind rather than African custom controlled the details of life—patterns of work and marriage, the shape of houses, the public practice of religion’. In the early years settlements often appeared as the only practical way to introduce Christianity by combining the requirements of security with a concentration of resources and enhanced control over the residents. Over time, most missionaries would come to see the settlements as a liability, an impediment to the greater task of reaching the masses. By this point, ironically enough, Africans reared in the settlements had assumed the leading role in the remarkable expansion of Christianity in the colonial period.
The pattern of mission expansion in the Pacific islands was very different. While missions eventually established head stations with boarding schools, seminaries, medical posts, workshops, and sometimes plantations, these rarely achieved the size of even the smallest African mission communities. Almost all evangelistic outreach occurred in the villages where converts continued to live side-by-side with traditionalists. In part, the absence of autonomous mission communities was the result of the limited land base on most islands, but mostly it reflected the rapid growth of mass interest in Christian instruction. To meet the demand, missionaries necessarily relinquished considerable control in two areas: first, over the direct communication of the religion to islanders and, secondly, over the shaping of Christian teachings and values in their new cultural environment.
Allied chiefs and missionaries found mutual advantage in quickly training islander evangelists to promote Christianity. Pomare II, Taufa‘ahau, Ka’ahumanu, and other high chiefs saw islander teachers as a critical political tool to legitimize and expand their power base. While political stability was not unimportant to the missionaries, their more immediate concern was to prepare the population as quickly as possible for baptism—in their minds, literally to rescue them from eternal damnation. The scale of both the political and religious projects required the engagement of large numbers of islanders as teachers and deacons. This was especially the case in politically decentralized societies like Samoa and New Zealand, where each village insisted on having its own teacher and resisted outside control over church congregations. The eleven English missionaries who had settled in Samoa by 1839 found themselves supervising 138 teachers. Similar ratios obtained in New Zealand in the 1850s, where at least 800 mostly unpaid ‘native agents’ worked for the two Protestant missions. Even in the kingdoms, where people were familiar with centralized places of worship, the sheer numbers ofislanders seeking instruction necessitated large numbers ofteachers. In the early 1830s, for instance, the Hawai’ian mission supported some 1,100 schools serving as many as 50,000 mostly adult students.
Islanders played a key role not just in consolidating Christianity within the new kingdoms but also in the opening of new mission fields. By the mid- 1820s Tahitian converts had either deliberately or through accidental drift voyages taken the Word to the Cook Islands, Samoa, and distant Tonga. In 1822 an LMS delegation inspecting the Tahitian mission took nine converts to visit the newly established American Congregationalist mission in Hawai’i. Impressed by the persuasive role the converts played in promoting Christianity, the delegation leaders upon their return urged the creation of a native seminary to harness local religious excitement and direct it to new fields. They found a willing agent in John Williams, who had already arranged to establish converts from his base on Raiatea, near Tahiti, in the Cook Islands to the east. Over the next seventeen years Williams would do more than anyone to facilitate the use of what became known as the ‘Native Agency’. After successfully settling teachers and their families in the Cooks and Samoa, Williams was clubbed to death on the beach of Erromanga in 1839 in the act of bringing Polynesian evangelists to the Melanesian islands.
The extensive employment of native ‘teachers’ (the term ‘missionary’ was reserved for whites) occasioned heated debates in the Pacific and Africa. Sceptics fretted that converts, only barely out of ‘heathenism’, would spread confusion or even heresy. Ignoring their own failings, they questioned whether the teachers possessed the strength of character to maintain moral discipline without missionary oversight. Still, the advantages greatly outweighed these hesitations. Teachers were far cheaper to employ than Europeans as they were expected to assume a native lifestyle requiring few supplies and small wages, if any. Islanders adjusted far more readily than whites to village lifestyles and customs, or so it was thought. In turn, the missionaries assumed that native peoples would respond more readily to evangelists who looked and acted much like themselves. Finally, although not openly acknowledged, the teachers’ lives were reckoned more expendable than those of whites. Many died martyrs to the cause, especially after the push into Melanesia. In the first twenty-six years of the LMS mission to New Guinea, at least 130 out of 250 Polynesian teachers died, mostly from malaria, along with an unknown number of their wives and children. The evangelization of Melanesia was built upon the graves of the Polynesian pioneers.
The eagerness of so many Polynesian converts to serve as evangelists, in even extremely dangerous situations, suggests that the appearance of the Native Agency cannot be adequately explained merely with reference to the machinations of chiefs and missionaries. One must also consider personal motivations: dreams of adventure, social advancement, influence, and the promise of salvation. At a most general level, however, the rapid growth of indigenous evangelism reflected the transition of Christianity from a foreign cult to an indigenous religious movement. Decades later a similar popular movement burst from the missions in Africa, where the ‘sudden vast multiplication of... preachers and teachers had not been planned for or prepared for by missionaries. It had simply happened... ’. In both places missionaries found themselves playing catch-up with a movement over which they exercised only limited control.
The emergence of the Native Agency profoundly affected social arrangements in both native societies and the mission organizations. A large number of islanders now worked, albeit at the bottom, as staff of ecclesial organizations that had no parallel in their own traditions. They voluntarily submitted to the authority of small missionary elites for training, placement, and supervision. Missionaries in turn became more distanced from direct evangelization of the masses as they assumed the ever-increasing burden of training and managing their large native staffs. All of the Pacific missions quickly set up seminaries, a few of which, like the Missionary Seminary on Maui (1831), Malua Institute in Samoa (1844), and Tupou College in Tonga (1866), won reputations for high academic standards and attracted many students. Once out of the door of the college, teachers often worked largely independently of mission supervision and support. While this could leave them vulnerable at the missionary frontier, their association with Europeans and God often proved a potent source of mana. Many assumed positions of great influence at home and even more so in some of the distant mission fields, such as Tuvalu, where they worked with little or no direct white supervision. Inevitably, the native pastorate came to resent their subservient position in the missions. During the 1870s Samoans forced the missionary elite on the LMS district council to cede significant authority to village deacons, many of whom were chiefs, and to ordain most teachers as pastors with the right to administer baptisms and the Eucharist.
Andrew Porter observes that wherever Christianity encountered indigenous societies in the British Empire, there occurred ‘a constant process of mutual engagement and two-way translation’. The speed with which Christianity spread across the Pacific islands and the fact that islanders themselves were often its emissaries greatly limited the direct control white missionaries exercised over the ways the new religion was appropriated, absorbed, and redefined in local societies. Indeed, in many places the process of absorption began well before the appearance of missionaries, white or brown, as islanders encountered fragments of Christianity in the form of services conducted by naval captains, hymns sung by sailors, or rumours of the remarkable happenings in Tahiti. In the early years the appearance of the whites, in their great ships bearing awesome weapons, touched off intense speculation in the Cook Islands, Samoa, and Hawai’i, recalling ancient prophecies telling of the arrival of stranger kings bringing cataclysmic change. Not surprisingly, many islanders at first assumed that the Christian god was the ultimate source of the white man’s mana, as displayed in his evident wealth and power. Deliberately encouraging this misconception, John Williams convinced the Samoan high chief Malietoa to accept teachers on his visits of 1830 and 1832. Not much convincing seems to have been required because by this time many Samoans had heard about missionary teachings from Tahitian visitors and during their own travels to Tahiti, Tonga, and elsewhere. One of these Samoan travellers, Siovili, gained a large cult following by prophesying the imminent return of the dead and immense prosperity for those who accepted the white man’s god. For years after they began working in Samoa, the LMS and Methodist missions competed not only with Siovili and each other, but also with numerous local movements led by sailors who had been recruited and sometimes kidnapped by villagers to provide them with religious instruction. A few of these ‘sailor cults’ provided reasonable approximations of orthodoxy; but in other instances ‘religious worship tended towards the use of a copybook as ‘‘Bible’’, the singing of sea-shanty ‘‘hymns’’, and the delivery of ‘‘sermons’’ in any language the preacher happened to know’.
Millenarian movements emerged in many parts of Polynesia at various times in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but it was only in places where chiefly power was relatively fragmented—Samoa, western Fiji, and especially New Zealand—that they proved more than ephemeral. Even where Christianity was installed as a national religion, the early stages of conversion reflected a popular sense of momentous change. In many places zealots smashed representations of the ancestral gods, desecrated temples, and openly defied the old taboos. Crowds crushed into makeshift churches to sing praises to the new god. Most notably, they demanded to be taught the mysteries of reading and writing. The missionaries struggled to keep up with the enormous demand for spellers, vernacular translations of Christian texts, and the teachers who could provide the training to use them. The missions invested much of their resources into the work of translation, printing, and distribution. In the first year of operation the Wesleyan printing press in Tonga produced a staggering 17,000 books in the vernacular. By 1845 the LMS printing press in Samoa had cranked out almost 8 million ‘pages of useful reading matter’, to which the Foreign and British Bible Society would soon add a Samoan New Testament and eventually the full Bible. It is likely that many heeded the missionaries’ contention that one’s individual salvation depended upon a personal engagement with the Gospels, but the texts exuded their own powerful magic. Adrian Hastings’s comment on a similar wave of enthusiasm that swept through parts of Africa in a later period is cogent: ‘What was so exhilarating about the Scriptures was that they were so comprehensively supernaturalist, so supportive of belief in spirits of various sorts, and yet so manifestly useful in secular terms.’ Access to the Bible in the vernacular like nothing else allowed converts to engage with Christianity in their own terms. The village pastor’s sermon, blending biblical stories with moral and political exhortations into a powerful rhetorical whole, gave vivid presence to God’s mana.
Although a number of missionaries gained a deep knowledge and respect for Polynesian cultures, virtually all assumed that a full acceptance of Christianity entailed the complete rejection of the ‘heathenish’ past and adoption of a pious form of ‘civilization’ based upon British middle-class values. They engaged in a constant and often acrimonious debate over strategies for bringing this about, what local practices were compatible with Christianity, the expected pace of change, the standards for measuring the progress of individual converts, and the treatment of those who felt short of the standards. In general, islanders were required to attend church and religious classes for a set period and to demonstrate a grasp of the essential points of the faith before receiving baptism, although in some places in the early years a mere expression of interest seems to have been enough. Baptized Christians, and to some extent the full population in the kingdoms, were presented with an ever-lengthening list of proscriptions centred on the observation of the sabbath and the regulation of moral behaviour. Miscreants and backsliders were punished by fines and sometimes beatings from the chiefs and the denial of church privileges by the missionaries. The degree of compliance waxed and waned in the mission fields, not least because the chiefs themselves ignored the rules against such things as polygyny and warfare when they became inconvenient; but in general Polynesians quickly reoriented their societies around Sunday worship and the church. While often exhilarated by the evidence of God’s hand at work, the missionaries nevertheless remained sceptical that such conformance with mission rules reflected a true change of heart, the internalization of a sense of personal sin. This scepticism reached its most extreme expression in the Hawaiian mission, which so vigorously enforced its puritanical standards that after eighteen years with half the population attending church, only one congregant out of a hundred ‘had been granted the privilege of communion with Christ’. It was also manifested in the reluctance in all of the mission fields to ordain islanders as full ministers.
The missionaries had good reasons for doubt. Even in the Polynesian kingdoms, older religious understandings survived, often in Christian guises. The state Christianity of the kingdoms assumed a familiar form with its own taboos, temple system, and requirements for ‘sacrifice’ through contributions of food, labour, and eventually money. In Hawai’i commoners continued to make sacrifices to local deities at small shrines well into the Christian era. Everywhere people still made sense of their lives within a cosmology that had expanded to include the Christian god and his emissaries but which still accepted as reality ancestral spirits, sacred areas, witchcraft, magic, ancient genealogies, and founding mythologies. The outward forms of Christianity might obscure the survival of indigenous religious sensibilities for a time, but it could not destroy them.
No other organization had as wide or as deep an impact on Pacific societies in the years before Empire, and long after in many areas, as the missions. The cultural changes associated with Christianity affected the most intimate aspects of island societies: personal adornment, family organization, gender roles, leadership, orientations to time and space, and artistic production, to mention but a few. The missionaries imposed many prohibitions and set new standards of behaviour, but few if any would have been accepted without the active support first of the chiefs and later of islander evangelists who carried the mission regimens to more distant islands. The local forms of Christianity that emerged were hybrids combining Polynesian conceptions of hierarchy and spirituality with evangelical moralism. Visitors to Tonga in the latter decades of the nineteenth century were impressed (or dismayed) by commodious village churches, by the black-frocked native pastors exhorting their congregations during the long services to honour Jehovah and give generously to his mission, and by the melodious church choirs raising their voices to heaven. Greatly appreciated for their oratorical skills and for their educational achievements, pastors in places like Samoa and Tonga gradually occupied the spiritual centres of their communities. Local chiefs associated themselves with the pastor by serving as deacons and incorporating Christian prayers and other overt forms of the religion into their political activities. Congregations showered their pastors with lavish gifts, and the splendour of a pastor’s home, along with his girth, came to be associated with God’s blessing on the community as a whole. They had, in effect, taken ‘the place of the priests and prophets of [the old society] as mediators with the unseen world’.
The local churches, then, became key creative sites in the encounter between Western evangelical and indigenous cultures. The networks established by the missions as they expanded into new fields facilitated the diffusion of ideas, products, and practices between the islands. Some mission innovations proved remarkably population across the region. The baggy ‘Mother Hubbard’ dresses, for instance, initially introduced in Hawai’i to preserve Christian women’s ‘modesty’, rapidly became the favoured costume for Pacific women anywhere they could afford the cloth. Polynesian missionaries travelling to Melanesia after 1870 introduced new crops, forms of mat- weaving, and even the hula dance in some places. More significantly, the form of the Christian social order they sought to establish drew largely on the example of the church in Samoa or Tonga, much to the frustration of the supervising missionaries. Like the Polynesians, the Melanesians in time would make Christianity into an indigenous religion.