Pacific Islanders have staged a reconciliation ceremony to atone for their ancestors’ behavior in killing and eating a famous British missionary 170 years ago.
The Reverend John Williams was a Non-Conformist minister whose labors resulted in the conversion of many Pacific Islanders to Christianity; for many years it was popular to condemn missionaries for destroying the traditional habits and culture of the Pacific Islanders. This assessment is shared by relatively few of the Islanders themselves, who mostly remain satisfied with the Christian faith their ancestors accepted. It is notable that the Eromangans are apologizing to John Williams rather than asking the London Missionary Society to apologize to them.
Before his untimely demise, Williams had not only learned the major languages of the area. He led an effort to translate the New Testament into the Rarotongan language and had an edition printed. To date, missionaries have been responsible for translating all or parts of the Bible into an estimated 2500 languages. In many cases, including the Rarotongan New Testament, the missionary translations are the first book ever produced or printed in a local language, and the missionaries have introduced the concept of a written language to the local people.
These missionary efforts, which continue today, have done more to preserve the local languages and cultures of indigenous people than any other force in the modern world. Some missionaries may have been agents, consciously or otherwise, of imperial powers extending their sway; most often, missionaries tried as best they could to help local populations maintain their social cohesion and identity as they struggled with the consequences — disease, economic and social disruption, culture shock — of contact with the wider world.
But the best testimony for the work of men like Williams (and the women: in 1900 more than half of the missionaries working overseas for at least one large American mission agency were women) is that Christianity today is at its most vibrant in the areas where missionaries brought the faith over the last 200 years. In sub-Saharan Africa, China, Korea and India, rapidly growing Christian communities are changing the face of global Christianity and indeed of global culture.
The Great Encounter, a centuries long process often dominated by European and western interests as a result of which humanity has involved in a single global system, was a time of great adventure, great accomplishment and great crime. In the 21st century the world continues to reflect on the processes which created the global economic and cultural networks in which we now live. As that revaluation continues, I believe the missionary movements (and not just the Christian ones) of the past three centuries will loom larger and brighter in the world’s memory than they do now. Most of those who built our world by venturing out and linking the world’s peoples and cultures together did so as soldiers, traders, adventurers and conquerors. The missionaries went to help.
They did not always succeed, and the results of their labors were sometimes disappointing, but the spirit that sent these brave women and men across the world is one we should honor and emulate now. We owe them much more than we know.