Edinburgh Companions to Global Christianity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021. xx, 424 pp. (Tables, graphs, figures, maps.) US$195.00, cloth. ISBN 9781474480079.
This attractive volume is the fifth in a projected series of eight volumes surveying the current state of Christianity around the globe. Drawing upon 40 authors, the book “offers four angles of analysis” (xi) in its approach to Oceania. The first is a demographic comparison of Christian affiliation in 1970 and 2020, broken down by region, country, and ecclesiastic tradition presented in a series of charts and maps. This is followed by 14 chapters summarizing the history and contemporary status of Christian churches in 21 countries and territories across the region. The third angle of analysis comprises eight essays surveying the presence of “major Christian traditions” as well as the Pacific Conference of Churches, the primary regional ecumenical body based in Fiji. The book is rounded out with 11 thematic chapters, some providing context (e.g., gender, migration, political systems) and others primarily theological.
This is not an academic work in the conventional sense. Instead, it is written for and largely by clergy, theologians, and lay members of regional churches. While some attention is paid in the essays to the social and political contexts impacting the lives of ordinary Christians, the emphasis throughout the book is institutional: an accounting, first, of the reconfigurations of church affiliations over the past half century; and second, a showcase for Indigenous theologians whose innovative work infuses ancestral spirituality and cultural values into Christian thought and practice. The volume is further shaped by two key editorial decisions. The first is the inclusion of Australia in Oceania (and to a lesser extent the exclusion of Hawaiʻi and Indonesian Papua, presumably because they are covered in other volumes in the series). While the Australian churches have long and close associations with their counterparts in the Pacific Islands, their situation has much more in common with Western countries—a point made repeatedly in this volume. (The same, of course, is largely true for pakeha (white) New Zealand churches, but Indigenous Maori have had a long and significant influence on Christianity in that country, whereas Indigenous Australians have only recently embraced Christianity in large numbers.) A second editorial decision is far more consequential. Remarkably, the 36 essays include no footnotes or citations. Each essay concludes with a brief list of four to five works, which may or may not be mentioned in the preceding essay. One can only guess why the editors elected to source a major reference work so thinly, not least given the immense richness of the literature on Oceanic religion in general, and Christianity in particular. The choice constricts analysis of the individual chapters and diminishes the value of the work for readers who wish to pursue topics and issues further.
As a mainly standalone work, Christianity in Oceania provides readers with a reasonably comprehensive if necessarily superficial overview of the history of missions and churches in the region, their current status, and the challenges they face. The individual essays are not written to a common framework and there are wide variations in what individual authors choose to discuss. One also finds variation in the quality of the research and writing—an otherwise serviceable essay on Papua New Guinea, for instance, is marred by careless misspellings of the names of two pioneer missionaries (116)—but in general, the chapters are competently written. One also finds inconsistencies in the regional survey essays between those including Australia and those that focus on part or the whole of the Pacific Islands. Brenda Reed’s chapter on Anglicans, for instance, limits itself to Polynesia (including New Zealand), despite that the majority of regional Anglicans live in Melanesia and Australia. A secondary ethnocentrism creeps into several of the thematic essays in which the central South Pacific Island nations are presumed to represent Oceania as a whole. Andrew Williams, for instance, writes in “Migration and Diaspora,” “[t]his volume is about people of the sea” (p. 352) ignoring the fact the ocean does not bear the same cultural significance for millions of Papua New Guineans and Australians as it does in the smaller Pacific Islands.
Despite the inclusion of Australia, the thematic centre of gravity of Christianity in Oceania is the Pacific Islands, specifically the central Pacific and New Zealand’s Indigenous Maori. While Europeans in Australia and New Zealand have been abandoning religion, the islands remain firmly and overwhelmingly Christian. Demographic data, however, show a steady and profound shift from the longer-established mainline churches to newer and more theologically conservative Evangelical and Pentecostal sects. This shift provided the focus for Manfred Ernst’s magisterial study, Globalization and the Re-Shaping of Christianity in the Pacific Islands (Suva: Pacific Theological College, 2006), a work listed in 11 of the slim bibliographies of Christianity in Oceania. A comparison of the two volumes is revealing. In Ernst and his colleagues’s systematic survey of Christian organizations in the Islands, drawing upon scores of interviews of church members, the study documented Oceanic Christianity in transition from a handful of largely rural-based denominations that had long-accommodated local cultural orientations, towards a vastly more fragmented field, one distinctly shaped by individualistic values that resonated with the global neo-liberal economic changes sweeping through the region. In short, they argued that the cultural values that sustained Oceanic communities post-European contact were in danger of being swept away along with the churches in which they had become embedded as their members left for individually-oriented sects more in tune with their social experiences and economic aspirations. Christianity in Oceania conveys a more hopeful message. The authors acknowledge the challenges Pacific Island churches face with increasing sectarian rivalry and adjusting to the relentless pressures of economic and social change, along with the existential threat of rising sea levels.
Three powerful thematic essays nevertheless insist that the future of Pacific Christianity lies in an informed and creative embrace of Indigenous culture. In “Faith and Culture,” Upolu Lumā Vaai draws upon holistic Indigenous concepts to propose an eco-relational theology. Cliff Bird explores possibilities for reconciliation between imported Christian orientations and an Indigenous worldview grounded in the interconnectedness of all life in “Integrity of Creation.” And in “Indigenous Spirituality,” Cruz Farauti-Fox argues for the decolonization of church practices and styles of worship through the embrace of ancestral stories and the values they convey.
Despite its limitations as a reference work, Christianity in Oceania is a welcome and valuable addition to the literature. Drawing primarily upon local and Indigenous authors, it conveys a rare insider’s view of Oceanic and Australian church development, challenges, and aspirations during a time of immense and rapid change.
John Barker
The University of British Columbia, Vancouver