‘This was the day. It was the climax of months of preparation by many people and the fulfillment of years of work by others.’ Joyce Rosser, writing of the first baptisms at the Methodist Church in Tari, 1961.
‘The preaching has led to no hasty decisions of belief in God, but rather to a gradual infiltration of the practical nature of Christian life. We trust this will eventually result in an indigenous church, well grounded by scripture and personal experience of the Lord Jesus Christ.’ David Johnston 1961
In the Highlands region where the Methodist Mission was working in Tari, Mendi, Lai Valley and Nipa areas, some change was coming. It started in 1960 and 1961.
Many things were the same as they had always been. Senior men were in charge of the secrets and rituals of the Timb cult and other traditional belief systems. Women were not allowed to know these secrets. Young boys were initiated into the knowledge of the adult world of men. Children were afraid to go near some places that were marked with powerful links to the spirits. Sickness and accidents were blamed on enemies or the angry spirits of dead family members. People relied on the work of sorcerers to help them with problems. People were afraid of spirits and also afraid of the enemies of their clan group.
A new missionary in the Mendi, John Rees, described what he saw.
In these mountains, we see a Yeki tower, a kind of ladder. At the foot of it, they sacrifice pigs and pour the blood on the ground or on stones which they put in their houses to frighten away evil spirits. A spirit man or Yeki is said to come down the ladder and accept the sacrifice.
The anthropologist D’Arcy Ryan, who worked in the Mendi area in the 1950s, saw a pattern in the cycle of the Timb cult. He noticed that there was a lot of excitement and interest in the secrets and rituals of Timb when it was first introduced to a group of clans. There were exchanges of important goods and special ceremonies as the new group received all the powerful secret knowledge of the cult from another group. Great crowds of people gathered together for sing-sings and exchanges of wealth.
Ryan noticed that something changed after a few years. He wrote:
In succeeding repetitions, the first aura of secrecy wears off and the performance of the ritual becomes more slipshod. The people become bored and the whole thing begins to run down. After five or six years it is decided to wind up the first stage of Timb. In the wind-up ceremony there is no secrecy except for the section in which the seeds of the chief food plants are be-spelled and buried inside the house. It is a big function with many pigs killed accompanied by a full dress dance. This ends the first stage of Timb. Next comes Lunk for several years then Timb again, this time it is permanent until a new stone cult comes in to take its place.
This suggested that perhaps something else could take the place of the Timb ceremonies, if the local people found an alternative. Not ‘a new stone cult’, but Christian faith.
Pioneer missionary David Johnston wrote about the many years when he had been one of those who went out every Sunday to preach about God and Jesus. They each went to one of the ceremonial grounds near the houses of people of one of the clans and called for people to come and listen. Often it was hard work because few of the mission staff could speak the local language well. People used to ask ‘When can we see Jesus? Is Jesus coming to Mendi?’ They often asked practical questions about difficult family life, or ethical issues. David Johnston wrote:
‘Questions asked of the spiritual life are asked without embarrassment and are difficult to answer with a limited vocabulary. They often lead to lengthy discussions but the Holy Spirit gives understanding in spite of language difficulties.
The preaching has led to no hasty decisions of belief in God, but rather to a gradual infiltration of the practical nature of Christian life. We trust this will eventually result in an indigenous church, well grounded by scripture and personal experience of the Lord Jesus Christ.’
After ten years of preaching, there had been ‘no hasty decisions of belief in God’ but by 1960 and 1961 just a few Highland people were beginning to take the Christian message seriously. These first Christian converts were brave. They were choosing a different way, not their own tradition.
In Tari, the first group was baptised on 1 July 1961. Mission secretary Joyce Rosser wrote about that special day.
The morning dawned cloudy. Would the day clear and become warm, or would the Highlands fog close down and all the Huli people stay huddled around their smoky fires? Slowly the clouds lift and the sun shines through. The earth was warmed and a subdued calling and chattering grew accompanied by an undercurrent of excitement, tinged with awe.
This was the day. It was the climax of months of preparation by many people and the fulfilment of years of work by others. It was the answering of thousands of prayers ascending to heaven for the souls of Huli people. Streams of folk were coming along the road. The women with short pigeon-toed step, their grass skirts swinging with a soft swish, came in groups. Their string bags, suspended from their heads, contained precious possessions and more precious babies, and their children ran along beside them. The men came singly or in twos and threes walking briskly, their wigs neat with golden and magenta flowers, axes, pipes and rain capes tucked safely in their own large bags. The noisy crowd all now went into the church. They first squatted down on the floor, women on one side, men on the other, and then more and more people stepped over the seated ones to squeeze into the small spaces here or there. A baby cried and a string bag had to be swung off and round onto the mother‘s knees, so the baby could be suckled. Children wriggled and stood up and played a little. Slowly some semblance of order came out of chaos.
What was special about this particular Sunday?
In front of the congregation were thirty-three candidates for baptism. They sat facing the red draped centre of worship where there was the cross with the Bible and the Huli words meaning ‘God is here’. There were 14 men and boys and 19 women and girls. Their ages ranged from 12 years to about 60. All were especially washed and groomed for baptismal service. School students wore shorts and shirts or frocks and the men and women wore their own Huli dress. Men had on their best wigs and feathers and the women new skirts and their newest hats and bags. All became quiet and composed even though hands and quivering feathers betrayed not a little nervousness. When the church was overflowing, people outside set themselves along the open window spaces on each side to view the service. It was difficult to count but there were at least 800 people present at the service.
The acting Chairman, the Rev CJ Keightley, assisted by Mr Hutton and Sister Edith James conducted the service. It was a much-simplified version of the adult baptismal service from the Australian Book of Offices. This had been translated into Huli and the candidates stood to take part in the responses. The congregation listened and looked on with great attention, especially those who will be in the next baptismal group. These had all made sure they were near the front and had an uninterrupted view. At one stage in the order of service there was a call for all members to stand and repeat together the Creed. The staff and candidates all stood and so did half the others while the other half shouted at each other as to whether they should or should not stand. By the time we heard what was going on, Mr Hutton and the candidates were halfway through the Creed, but by the end of the Creed, comparative quiet had been restored and all took their seats.
It took an hour and a half. That is a very long time for Huli folk and they are quite likely to get up and wend their way out over the seated people when they have had enough. But in this service, most of them stayed until the end.
The men came forward first and for the actual pouring on the water. Mr. Hutton poured the water of baptism from a gourd into the acting Chairman’s hand three times for each person, in the name of the Father, of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. This water could be seen, standing as it did in large clear drops on the tight fuzzy hair of the candidates and running off in a smooth cleansing stream. Congregation was quieter than one would have believed possible for a crowd of Huli people.
When all had been baptised, they were blessed with laying on of hands and they then stood to receive the right hand of fellowship and their baptismal cards. Women and girls then took their places, kneeling and taking part of the service in the same manner. A final benediction and it was over or perhaps we should say, rather, now life was just beginning in this Highland church. There were many smiles and signs of quiet pleasure as the new members gathered outside to talk and show their friends their precious cards.
The new members and the staff met together in the afternoon for the communion service. Much discussion, thought and prayer had gone into this service and the final act of worship was well worth all the preparation. The order of service had been simplified and translated into Huli language. In turn we knelt together before the communion table to eat the sweet potato and drink the water, symbols of the broken body and shed blood of our Lord Jesus Christ. Once again, we had the assurance of our Lord’s presence in our hearts. Thanks to God who gives us the victory.
In Tari, a second group of people were already preparing for their baptism. The services at Hoiebia were always well attended with several hundred interested people. Most of the services were led by the missionaries from overseas or the pastor-teachers from the island regions but already some of the older boys from the school were taking a turn at leading and preaching.
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In Mendi, Wasun and Sondowe prepared for their baptism. They started classes to learn more about God in November 1960.
For Wasun Koka, it had been a slow and careful journey toward Christian faith. A few years earlier he had been initiated as a young Mendi man. By 1960, around the time when he was choosing to follow Jesus, the senior men of his clan were also asking him to take part in the rituals of the Timb cycle. He talked to his friend David Johnston. How could he balance loyalty to his clan and also follow his new belief in God and Jesus? David Johnston told him, ‘I don’t understand enough about the Timb cult. Wasun, you must pray and ask God to guide you.’
Wasun decided to take a pig to kill for the traditional feast, but he did not join his brothers to pour the blood of his pig on the sacred stones. He watched them carry the jawbones of pigs wrapped in a bark coffin, and shouting the names of their enemies. He saw the men dressed in ugly masks, or covered with grey clay like a mourning widow, to frighten their enemies and warn them to expect revenge and payback. When his clan brothers invited him to help preserve the sacred stones, Wasun refused. He was thinking, ‘These customs are based on lies. The strong men are keeping secrets because they want power over poorer men and also over women. Revenge leads to more revenge and it never ends. There must be a better way.’
When they started to prepare for their baptism day, the minister John Rees asked Wasun and Sondowe to help him translate the words for a service of baptism. This was the first time there had been a baptism service in the Mendi language. Rees was very new so he didn’t understand the Mendi language well yet. It was hard work but they did their best.
When his clan and his family found out that Wasun wanted to be baptised and follow the beliefs of the mission people who had come from far away, they were very worried. They had often listened to the words of the missionaries, both brown and white men, but they did not understand or believe what they heard. The stories about God were interesting but strange and foreign. They asked each other, ‘Will the skin of Wasun and Sondowe become very pale? Will this mysterious baptism ritual be dangerous? Will they be taken away from their homes in a plane?’
Wasun’s mother walked a long way from her home to talk to him. She was afraid that something bad would happen to him. She was worried that he would become a stranger to his own family.
On 21 May 1961 a big crowd filled the church building at Unjamap with some watching through the windows. They saw the two men kneeling down at the front and saw the water poured on their heads. It seemed a strange ceremony to the people who were watching but nothing bad happened. The white man Rees led the service with the help of the teacher from Solomon Islands, John Angello.
Perhaps this mysterious ceremony might be safe for Wasun and Sondowe, the people thought, because they had been working for the white people or learning in their school for a number of years. It might be different for someone like Tundupi, who was a traditional older man. They would wait and see.
Two weeks after the first baptism in Mendi, the second one was held at Kamberep on 4 June 1961. This time, a senior man called Tundupi and a youth called Lapon were baptised. Tundupi was a traditional man who had been listening to the teaching and preaching of the pastors and the white missionaries when they had come to his home area. He remembered the first time he saw a white man. He had watched some white patrol officers come through his ground and was one of the men who was ready with bows and arrows to defend their community from these strange invaders. Now he told his pastor, Kemp Kabalua, that he wanted to follow the new way of Jesus and wanted to be baptised. This was very brave of him, because Christian faith was very different from his traditional beliefs, but he was sincere. He would become a strong leader among Mendi Christians.
The third baptism service in Mendi was at Yaken, to the south of Mendi town. This time the leader was another traditional man, Dus, with his family. His baptism was on 23 July 1961.
A pastor from New Britain, Joseph Tirlua, was living at Yaken but he did not speak the Mendi language very well. It was hard to explain about Christian faith. He was very happy when the young man, Sondowe, came to Yaken to preach one Sunday. At that time, Sondowe was a very new Christian and it was before he had even been baptised himself. But he was already wanting to talk to other local people about his new belief. Sondowe wrote his own story about going to Yaken early in 1961.
On Saturday morning, I was ready to go to Yaken. After crossing a river, I saw people fighting so I climbed a hill. From there I looked down on the valley, the rivers, people making gardens and some old longhouses. When I had drunk water from a creek, I walked onto the mission station.
Joseph, the teacher, and his wife were in their house. I said good afternoon and shook hands with them. They gave me tea and a blanket for the night. We woke early and had food and drink and I had a wash to get ready for church.
First of all, I prayed. Then the people listened when I talked to them. I told them the story of the beginning of the world and the story of Adam and Eve. After the service two men came and held my hands and said ‘What is your name?’ I said ‘My name is Sondowe’.
I told them more stories about God and they listened. Joseph came out of Sunday school and we all talked together. The men said ‘We don’t want to follow our own way.’ I told them that pigs and pearlshell are things for the ground. I said, ‘Do not think about these things. We believe in God and he is good. I said to them God is our saviour and Lord and he will look after us and he will be our father. I told them, God made the mountains and rivers, birds, pigs and dogs and everything. He made men and women.’ The men answered me, ‘This is true. We believe you.’ Later they came to us and said, ‘We want to be Christians. We are very happy.’
The Yaken man Dus was one of those who listened to Sondowe. It was important for one of their own people to tell the stories about God and Jesus in their own language. The pastor Joseph was very happy to hear Sondowe’s preaching. John Rees wrote to friends:
I wish that you could see Wasun, our medical elderly and first convert, sitting telling stories from the Bible to men who are passing by, or the radiance of Tundupi, an older man, as he listens to my faltering Mendi language.
In Mendi, the first large group of people were baptised at Tend on 10 December 1961. For the first time some Mendi women were baptised. Two of them were the school girls, Wesi and Angopa, who had been part of the mission school for years and had been attending the church and Sunday School for a long time.
Some of the adult women and girls had also been coming to church for a long time. They also came to the women’s group that met with the pastors’ wives. It was not easy for them to decide to become Christians but, even though their families or husbands did not like it, it was important for them. The first women to be baptised were Tekin, Webinong, Iplin, Iptinj, Molu and Siem. John Rees wrote about those women:
One of the women who was presenting herself for baptism, Tekin, brought glory to God by showing Christian grace when her husband bit her and beat her because she stood against him on a matter of evil spirits. A young girl Iptinj decided against marriage to a wealthy old man who already had a wife and thereby incurred the wrath of her father because he was not able to receive the much-prized pearl shells for her bride price. A man threatened to divorce his wife Iplin if she was baptised because he heard that we would send her away in an aeroplane.
It was important for the Mendi people to know that baptism was something for the spirit and the heart, and not in order to make them ‘white’ or like people from a different culture. The men and women from the villages were encouraged to dress in their best traditional clothes, with oil and paint if they liked, and not to buy unfamiliar clothes from the trade store. The women made new fine grass skirts of pale green and cream reeds. The school boys wore new white laplaps and the schoolgirls chose dresses.
The four men who were baptised that day were all men who had worked with the white missionaries, or with government agencies, or the visiting anthropologist. They had all heard the Christian message for some years, even though they did not believe in it at first. Now they were willing to join ‘God’s clan’, even though it could mean a loss of prestige in their traditional clan group. They were still part of their own community and at least one of them used a sorcerer for help when he was sick not long before his baptism.
On the morning of the baptism on 10 December 1961, the families of the people who were going to be baptised prepared earth ovens to cook pigs, chickens and plenty of sweet potato and other vegetables for a special feast. They were very excited about the feast, even the husband of one of the women; he had threatened to divorce her for being a Christian but now he joined the crowd preparing the feast.
A very big crowd of about five hundred people came to watch the baptism service. They couldn’t all fit inside the church building but watched quietly. Witnesses who were there that day wrote:
After the baptism we all joined in the sacrament of holy communion. We ate fragments of sweet potato in place of the bread and drank water from cups which were lengths of natural bamboo. These elements the people understood, the food they eat and the containers they use.
In the Mendi vernacular, these people now belong to God‘s family line. Forty-three people including husbands of baptised women remained behind to record decisions. It was surely a big day for the kingdom and definitely a big day in the eyes of the Mendi people, both Christians and non-Christians.
When the big crowd went to open the earth ovens for the feast after the service, and the families of the pastors from the coast brought out big dishes of food, too, there was a lot of confusion. Highland people, coastal people and overseas people all had different traditions for feasts and how to share the food. The Mendi custom was for a leading man to call each group in turn and give them their share. The families from the coast usually put all the food out on long mats and families sat around to share the food. On this day, the two customs were mixed up and no one was sure what to do. When all the food was placed on the mats, pastor Setepano Nabwakulea said a prayer of thanks for the food. When nobody called out family names, all the people ran and snatched up as much food as they could, put it into their string bags and ran away with it! Then everyone started to laugh as they all felt a bit silly. Soon everyone settled down and sat back down in family groups and ate the feast together.
Each of these baptisms was an important day in the life of the Christian church in both Tari and Mendi. A new community of Christian followers had begun.
John Rees, Missionary Review, August 1961
D’Arcy Ryan, Anthropology Notes 1959
David Johnston, Missionary Review, January 1962
Joyce Rosser, Missionary Review December 1961
Dorothy Rodway, Missionary Review May 1961
Margaret Reeson, Torn Between Two Worlds pp.58-59, pp.66-68
John Rees, Missionary Review April 1961
Margaret Higman, Missionary Review April 1962
John Rees, Missionary Review May 1961
Margaret Reeson, Torn Between Two Worlds, pp. 75-79
Joyce Rosser, John Hutton, David Johnston, John Rees, D’Arcy Ryan, Cliff Keightley, John Hutton, Gordon Dey, Wasun Koka, Sondowe, Tundupi, Dus, Setepano Nabwakulea, John Angello, Kemp Kabalua, Joseph Tirlua, women, Wesi, Angopa, Tekin, Webinong, Siem, Iplin, Iptinj, Molu, Sond, Enenol, Lune, Nawe, Tundupi, Lapon, Tinaik, King, Kongel, Kambeyoa, Mol, Pondopis Tipilem, Nemom, Tari, Mendi, Hoiebia, Unjamap, Tende, Yaken, Kamberep, Nipa, Lai Valley, government, Timb cult, initiation, sorcery, spirits, Yeki, sacred stones, sacrifice, exchange of wealth, baptism, traditional beliefs, revenge, language, feasts, Christian faith, traditional
Margaret Reeson 