John Rees’ Bible School began yesterday and John is thrilled as a kid about it. It is very exciting.
Margaret Higman, letter to parents May 1962
The men asked me, ‘Can we go and talk to our people about the things we have learned?’
John Rees, Missionary Review, August 1962
When John and Gwenda Rees and their young family first arrived in Mendi late in 1960, he was confronted with what seemed an impossible task. The government officers told him that they thought that there were about 40,000 people living in the Mendi and Lai Valleys. Now that most of the pioneer missionary team had left, he was the only Methodist minister in that area. Some of the men from the coast were experienced, like Setepano Nabwakulea, Libai Tiengwa, Tomas Tomar and Epineri Kopman, but all of them were working in a language that they did not know well. How could this small team do the work of sharing the good news of God and Jesus?
Rees wrote:
As the months went by, it became more and more clear that the method of Jesus must also be our method here – to train a group of men from among the people – to concentrate on a few and go deep rather than spread wide and thinly.
For over a year, Rees worked to learn the Mendi language better and spent time preparing the small number of people who had asked for baptism. He travelled around the region and visited all the pastor stations. Slowly, a few local men from the pastor stations were becoming interested in the Christian message. The pastors encouraged them and talked with them about what it meant to be a Christian.
Early in 1962, they decided to start a Bible School for local men who were new Christians. The people who attended the Quarterly Meeting were happy about this idea, but first they had to build somewhere for the men to study, sleep and cook. At that time, the only buildings at Tende were the minister’s house, a pastor’s house, one-room houses for the Australian teacher and the New Zealand builder, and the first classrooms for the Circuit Training Institute. The pastors on five stations were invited to send two men each to come to Tende to help build a Bible School.
The people were very interested in this. Men brought timber. Women came carrying big bundles of kunai grass for roofing thatch. Men organised their people to weave large panels of pipit blind for walls. Men like Sond, Enenol and Dus worked hard on the buildings. The work went ahead very quickly and in two months the buildings were ready for opening at Easter, in April 1962.
The new Bible School building was opened on Palm Sunday, 15 April 1962. This was a very busy day, with big crowds of people coming to church. There were so many people that they had the service outside because they didn’t have room in the small school classroom they were using as a church. That day, there were two visitors; the Chairman of the Highlands District Rev Cliff Keightley and Rev S.G. Andrews, General Secretary of the Methodist Overseas Missions Board from New Zealand. There was a service of Holy Communion, the baptism of the babies of six pastors and their wives, special singing by pastors from the Solomon Islands and New Guinea Islands, the opening of the Bible School and a feast. The service was in a mixture of English, Tok Pisin and Mendi language. An observer said that it was ‘a bit confused but interesting’. (The Pastors were their babies were Isaac and Emily, Joseph and Ia Laun, Saulo and Linda, Epineri and Lena, Samson and Sera.)
At the end of the church service, everyone walked down the hill to the new buildings for the Bible School. The men who had helped to build were very happy to be there and proud of their good work. Enenol handed the key to the new Bible School classroom to the visitor S.G Andrews and he opened the door. It was a very important moment. The men who hoped to come to the new school crowded into their new building with the pastors and the visitors.
The buildings were ready but would the men be willing to come? Rees knew that a few were very excited about it. Sond and Enenol had done a lot of the work on the buildings. Sond went to Nipa on his mission trip after the opening of the Bible School buildings. When he came back to Mendi, he was always smiling with happiness and said again and again how happy he was. Dus was very interested, too; his wife was baptised at Yaken in May 1962 with some of his children.
But what about the others? Rees asked coastal pastors from five places – Tende, Wombip, Kamberep, Semp and Yaken – to send two men each. He wondered whether they would be willing to leave their homes, gardens and families for a week at a time for something very new and unfamiliar. He knew that some men from Yaken said they wanted to be baptised, but were sent to jail for tribal fighting and then decided that they didn’t want to be baptised after all.
The day for the true beginning of the Bible School was 30 May 1962. Would anyone come? First one man came and said, ‘I am here but my clan brother doesn’t want to come.’ Then another man arrived. One by one they came until there were nine men ready to start. Their names were: Dus, Sond, Enenol, Tundupi, Pongia, Mela, Pondot, Lowa, Nonga.
Margaret told her parents on 31 May 1962:
John‘s Bible school began yesterday and John is thrilled as a kid about it. I don’t blame him. It is really exciting. The nine men have been issued with blankets, soap, razor blade, shirt and shorts and towel. Today I caught a glimpse of Dus clean shaven, in sparkling clean T-shirt and astonishingly creased and immaculate shorts with a towel flung nonchalantly over a shoulder. Another chap Pongia came up. He’d had a dry shave and little bits of beard still stuck stubbornly to his chin. I’ll be heartbroken if either Enenol or Sond shave off their beards. They are both magnificent.
They’ve had their first lesson in hygiene and the virtues of cleanliness. There was also an astonishing lesson when John Rees told them that the world is round. He wants to give them some basic social studies as well as other Bible study. We had our first literacy lesson yesterday and learned to read the Mendi word for God.
Rees began the first week in the new school. But he wondered if it was going to be too hard for these men. None of them had ever been to school and would have to learn everything by memory. He asked himself:
Would they lose their interest? The days of the first week went by and our fears were put to rest. The men were keen and anxious to learn. Stories were told with stick figure pictures. Theology and selected Bible verses taught in the same way were eagerly repeated in unison and individually until they were retained. Then branching out into Christian ethics and social studies again with stick figures. They were really intrigued when it came to practice church services with criticism to follow. Now they know that this is a help to all of us to more effectively proclaim the gospel and lead the people to God.
At the end of the first week, he was very encouraged. As the nine men tidied up their rooms and folded their blankets, ready to go home, they asked Rees ‘Can we go and talk to our people about the things we have learned?’ They also asked for spades. ‘We want to make food gardens here at Tende.’ He knew that a garden is a long-term project. If they wanted to plant gardens, the men planned to stay with the school. The men all went home for a week, to look after their families, animals and gardens. In their home places, they helped the pastors from the coastal regions with Bible classes and church services.
Rees reported that
‘The pastors sent delightful reports of the enthusiasm with which the people listen to these men who know their language, their thought patterns and their customs.’
When the men came back for another week of learning, Rees had prepared sets of picture books with important New Testament Bible stories shown in simple stick figure pictures. The men were very interested in these, and they started to learn how to understand the symbols. This was easier than learning to read but they also started literacy classes with the teacher. Rees also started to teach a group of school boys and one girl, hoping that they would also be able to help with church services and Bible classes. He knew that it was not easy for new Christians. Their traditional beliefs and cultural responsibilities were very strong. The importance of their clan relationships mattered very much and if a clan planned a fight or revenge, they were still part of that group.
Rees understood that some of his group might not stay. But for some of them, he said that
‘they have become living active working members of the church which is daily growing as the church of Jesus Christ in Mendi’.
Those who knew John Rees knew that he was a man who had many ideas and moved quickly to try new things. Sometimes, this worried his friends and disturbed people like the Board of Methodist Overseas Missions. They were afraid that he was moving too quickly to bring change. Rees thought that it was more important to move to try new things while the Highland people were interested.
After the new Bible School had finished the first two weeks of learning in June, Rees had another new idea. He wrote to his friends in Australia to ask for prayer.
Our June quarterly meeting has begun plans to hold teaching missions to twelve different areas of people where we have no mission station and where we have little or no contact with the people at the moment. There are many such groups of people throughout the circuit where there is no missionary at all, either Protestant or Catholic.
At that time, there were eight pastors from the coast, nine very new Christian men who had just started to learn at the Bible School, six older school students including Wasun and Sondowe, plus John Rees. A new Australian minister had just arrived in Mendi that month, Graham Smith. This was the team who, Rees hoped, would go on mission to twelve new places. It was a brave and hopeful plan.
Sources:
John Rees, Missionary Review August 1962
John Rees, letter to supporters 23 June 1962
Margaret Higman, letters to parents 15 April, 13 May, 31 May
Margaret Reeson 