Aneityum

The evangelisation of Aneityum, the southernmost island in the New Hebrides (now called Vanuatu), seemed little more than a remote possibility in 1848, but within a decade there was a thriving Christian community there, and it became the home base for work on the other islands which made up the New Hebrides. Hence John Inglis dubbed it 'the Iona of the New Hebrides'. The story is full of triumphs and disasters, of breakthroughs and setbacks.

After a decade of growth, the fledgling Christian community suffered a terrible epidemic that killed off a third of the population; and triggered off or recommenced a sad trend of depopulation. Interaction with Australian and British authorities, Western traders, and the labour traffc complicate the story. In all this, the early Presbyterian missionaries sought to develop an indigenous Church and protect it - two aims that co-existed with some tension.

In many circles today, Christian missionary activity is regarded with suspicion, or even outright hostility. There have been numerous academic attempts to portray missionaries as cultural imperialists who possessed no appreciation of the people to whom they were supposed to be ministering. This book offers a more sympathetic appraisal of what actually took place by going back to the primary missionary sources. If there has been an uncritical hagiography in some missionary circles, it is equally true that there has been an overly critical secular misrepresentation of the missionary achievement. There are ambiguities in real life, and so the story is one of grace and heroism as well as tragedy and misdirection.

Peter Barnes is a Presbyterian pastor who lectured at the Presbyterian Bible College on Tangoa in Vanuatu in 1980-1983, and who now lectures in Church History at the Presbyterian Theological Centre in Sydney while ministering at Revesby. He has written many books, two of the most recent being John Calvin: Man of God's Word and Lamp unto my Feet.