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Salvation in Melanesia


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of Fiji. Volume 1 (Suva: Government Press, 1946), 21–22.

      4. Reverend John Hunt, Private Journal, January 7, 1839–January 25, 1848. Unpublished manuscript in the State Library New South Wales, Sydney. Signatures DLMS 206, DLMS 207, DLMS 208; here quoted according to the date of the entry: July 22, 1839.

      5. Journal: “Report of the work of God in the Somosomo circuit for the year 1840.”

      6. Alan R. Tippett, The Christian (1835–67) (Auckland: The Institute Printing and Publishing, 1954), 5.

      7. Tippett, Christian, 4, 6–7. The size of the congregation increased considerably following the conversion of the chief, but not the membership. In the Methodist system, church attendance is not the same as membership.

      8. Ibid., 3.

      9. Ibid., 34.

      10. Wood, Overseas Missions, 81.

      11. Hunt, Journal, May 4, 1842.

      12. For example, Hunt, Journal, October 21, 1842.

      13. For example, Hunt, Journal, March 20, 1842. Tippett, Christian, twenty-four shows from the sources that the early native preachers were more fascinated by heaven and the desire for it, but he also acknowledged that hell preaching gained in the second generation of Christians.

      14. Hunt, Journal, October 23, 1842.

      15. Hunt, Journal, April 10, 1842.

      16. See the victory of the Christian party at Kaba in 1855, Wood, Mission, 120.

      17. Tippett, Christian, 12.

      18. Hunt, Journal, November 20, 1842. On the other hand Hunt acknowledged that people came to lotu (worship) through healings and he prayed for healings also as signs for God’s power.

      19. John Hunt in a letter from 1847 quoted by Tippett, Christian, 31.

      20. Hunt, Journal, Annual Report, Viwa 1845.

      21. After mass baptisms following the conversion of the chiefs, the missionaries urged that the baptism of the Spirit was not automatically given with the water but yet to come, Hunt, Journal, May 17, 1844.

      22. Hunt, Journal, May 11, 1842.

      23. John Hunt, Entire Sanctification: Its Nature, the Way of its Attainment, and Motives for its Pursuits in Letters to a Friend (London: Wesleyan Conference, no year, commenced 1842).

      24. James Calvert in his preface to Hunt, Entire Sanctification, VII; cf. Hunt, Journal, October 19, 1844.

      25. Entire Sanctification, 3–12.

      26. Ibid., 32–42.

      27. Tippett, Christian, 6. Cakobau was baptized in 1857 after giving up eighty wives.

      28. Tippett, Christian, 13.

      29. Ibid., 14.

      30. Ibid., 15.

      31. Hunt, Journal, “Review of the mercies of God and the effect they have had on my mind.”

      32. Hunt, Journal, February 16, 1843 reports how the missionaries Watsford and Jaggar professed the blessing of Entire Holiness in the class meetings. “Our class meeting might well be called a meeting for seeking Entire Holiness. Oh that it may keep this character.”

      33. In the early days the success of the classes was not unambiguous. Hunt reports in his journal that people “were saved from all sin” in the meetings, but “only one” knew that his sins are forgiven, “and that one is an old servant of ours.” Journal, August 10, 1844 and November 8, 1844.

      34. “Fijian Wesleyan Mission” and “Notes by Natives in Fijian Collected by Reverend A. J. Webb, 1873. State Library of New South Wales, sign. A 474–A 475.

      35. Some stories are reported by Tippett, Christian, 22–23.

      36. Wood, Overseas Missions II, 145.

      37. Hunt, Journal, undated.

      38. Evidences given by Tippett, Christian, 15.

      39. Hunt, Journal, December 25, 1842

      40. Hunt, Journal, October 19, 1845.

      41. Hunt quoted by Tippett, Christian, 30f.

      42. Already in 1746 the American revivalist Jonathan Edwards cautioned against the self-evidence of emotional religious experiences even though he accepted them as operations of God’s Spirit in his A Treatise Concerning the Religious Affections, http://www.ccel.org/ccel/edwards/affections.html (accessed September 1, 2019).

      43. The Fijian preachers in 1845 interpreted these revivals as fulfillment of Joel 2, a new Pentecost, Tippett, Christian, 29.

      44. Hunt, Journal, June 3, 1844 referring to native accounts of their conversion. Cf. Tippett, Christian, 26.

      45. Fijian Methodists became missionaries to New Britain, Papua, and the Solomon Islands.

      46. An important role in attaining sanctification had the deathbed testimonies, quoted by Tippett, Christian, 24–25, when the dying Christian confessed that he will enter heaven as owner of this land and has seen the Lord who has come to take him to heaven, the land of rejoice.

      47. Hunt, Journal, January 2, 1842.

      48. Hunt, Journal, October 22, 1842.

      49. Wood, Overseas Missions II, 143.

      50. Andrew W. Thornley, Fijian Methodism, 1874–1945. The Emergence of a National Church (ANU Canberra: unpublished PhD Thesis, 1979), 101–105.

      51. Thornley, Methodism, 107, 111–16.

      52. A chiefly spokesman at Nakorotubu in 1885 quoted by Thornley, Methodism, 107.

      53. Wood, Overseas Missions, 122.

      54. Thornley, Methodism, 103.

      55. Methodist Church of Australasia, The Fiji Mission. Report of Commission Appointed by the Board of Mission to Visit Fiji and Report upon Matters Connected Therewith (Sydney: Epworth Printing, 1907).

      56. Wood, Overseas Missions, 146. After Kadavu (1861) and Navuloa (1873), Davuilevu has become the site of the Methodist Theological College since 1908.

      57. Wood, Overseas Missions, 149.

      58. Ibid., 228–30, 278.

      59. Ibid., 279. Futile were also the attempts of Methodist mission chairman George Brown in 1907 to convert the mission into a Fijian church, Ibid., 282.

      60. Tippett, Christian, 18.

      61. Wood, Overseas Missions, 343.

      62. Plant Today for Tomorrow. A Self Study Report of Methodist Church in Fiji and Rotuma as Commissioned by the 1980 Conference of the Methodist Church in Fiji and Rotuma, ed. I. Jovili Meo, Dorothy A. Dale (Suva: Lotu Pasifika, 1985), 153. Michael Press, Kokosnuss und Kreuz. Geschichten von Christen im Pazifik (Neuendettelsau: Erlanger Verlag für Mission und Ökumene, 2010), 152–55.

      63. Missionary Lorimer Fison was at the front of these protests, see Wood, Overseas Missions, 186, 200, 212. There was also resentment between the mission and different British governors about power and money.

      64. Wood, Overseas Missions, 142, 239, Thornley, Methodism, 121.

      65. Thornley, Methodism, 105.

      66. Wood, Overseas Missions, 244, Thornley, Methodism, 123.

      67. Thornley, Methodism, 105, 122. The Fijian translation of sin as “bad habit” might have encouraged such interpretations though the missionaries complained about the weakness of this translation.

      68. Thornley, Methodism, 122.

      69. Wood, Overseas Missions, 241, 317.

      70. Thornley, Methodism, 120–21.

      71. Ibid., 134. Thornley attributes the decline in membership to the rules which made membership