Stuart Piggin and Peter Lineham
The evangelization of Oceania from the end of the eighteenth century was an outworking of the rise of the modern missionary movement among Protestants. Military and commercial motives for the exploration and settlement of the southern Pacific by Europeans were accompanied by the missionary ambitions of the burgeoning evangelical movement with its vision of “the world for Christ.” This resulted in the settlement of New South Wales, not only as a place of confinement for convicts, but also as a base for missions to the many islands of the South Seas. Polynesia (which covers a vast expanse from Hawaii in the north to New Zealand in the south and includes Tahiti, Samoa, and Tonga), Melanesia (which includes Fiji and New Guinea and the islands between), and Micronesia (which includes the Marshall Islands and Kiribati) were progressively evangelized and now contain states with the highest percentage of Christians in their populations in the world.
Australia and New Zealand evolved as major primary producing economies and exemplars of the Protestant ethic. They were shaped by the forces of secularism and liberalism, and so their constitutions were based on the separation of church and state. But for much of their history they have been identified as “Christian nations,” often enacting Christian values and funding churches for their provision of welfare and education.
The attention of the British was turned to Oceania principally by the exploration of Captain James Cook between 1769 and 1779. Christianity came to Australia with the settlement of Sydney Cove in 1788. It came as a chaplaincy to soldiers and convicts rather than as a mission to the indigenous people. The transformation of a convict society into a nation of the law-abiding is arguably one of Christianity’s major achievements in the nineteenth century. The well-connected evangelical network in Britain was responsible for the training and selection of many of the early chaplains and ministers. Members of this network had links with many of the early governors, soldiers, merchants, farmers, and settlers. They helped to shape the justice system and laws of the fledgling colonies. They tried hard, although too often unsuccessfully, to protect indigenous peoples, and many who previously campaigned to abolish slavery turned their experience to the abolition of transportation (i.e., penal transportation, or the sending of convicted criminals to penal colonies).
In August 1796 the “Duff,” commissioned by the newly created London Missionary Society (LMS), set sail for Tahiti. On board were 34 artisans including five women and three children. Some of the missionaries were taken to Tonga; others to the Marquesa Islands. It was an over-extended mission and some parts failed. In Tahiti tensions over a demand to supply guns led the missionaries to flee to New South Wales in 1798.
Samuel Marsden, appointed chaplain to NSW in 1793, encouraged LMS missionaries to persevere with the Tahiti Mission, and in 1812 Chief Pomare II became a Christian and his whole island went over to Christianity. His military conquest of the Society Islands led to their mass Christianization. LMS missionary, William Henry, hailed this development as “one of the greatest miracles of grace ever exhibited on the stage of this world” (Henry 1814: 158).1 The missionaries adjusted to the role of law-givers, courtiers and facilitators of trade. They also translated the Bible and created strong Congregational churches.
In New Zealand, the Church Missionary Society began work in 1814. Marsden himself led the first missionaries to the Bay of Islands in December 1814 and delighted to see the British flag flying there, signifying “the dawn of civilisation, liberty, and religion in that dark and benighted land.” On Christmas day he preached on a text from Luke (2:10): “Behold I bring you glad tidings of great joy.” The CMS mission to New Zealand was followed by the Methodist mission in 1822 and the French Catholic Marist Order in 1838. The Maori, like most of the South Sea Islanders, were slow to respond to the faith, but accepted it en masse following the conversion of their chiefs. Relations between Maori and new groups of European settlers raised issues of land and sovereignty, necessitating the Treaty of Waitangi, 1840, which made New Zealand a British colony.
Meanwhile a new team of LMS missionaries, including the remarkable John Williams, recruited a group of “native missionaries,” and by the late 1820s the Cook Islands were Christianized. In 1830 the LMS placed native teachers in Samoa and, from there, a new mission developed, initiated primarily by converts from other parts of Polynesia.
In 1834 a wave of Methodist-style revival engulfed the Society Islands, including Tonga, cementing evangelical Christianity into the fabric of society: another Protestant kingdom emerged. In Fiji, Wesleyan missionaries arrived in 1835 and they united with Tongan visitors to spread the faith. A dramatic revival movement erupted in the 1840s. Tongans also spread Wesleyan Christianity to parts of Melanesia, including New Guinea, Papua and the Solomon Islands. The Presbyterians established a successful mission in the New Hebrides (Vanuatu), as did the Anglican Melanesian Mission which also worked in the Solomon Islands and Papua. The Queensland Kanaka Mission (later the South Sea Evangelical Mission) also operated in the Solomon Islands, while the Lutherans also had mission stations in Papua.
Sectarian rivalry between Catholics and Protestants in the South Seas was exacerbated by the economic rivalry between the French and the British in the Pacific. The French government made the Society Islands a protectorate in 1843 to ensure the safety of Catholic missionaries. The Marist Fathers labored as missionaries in the South Seas from 1836. Their romantic history includes the story of St. Peter Chanel, martyred on the island of Futuna in French Polynesia in 1841. Catholics were also active in the Solomons and in the New Hebrides, and outflanked the LMS to take control of mission work to New Caledonia. In the Loyalty Islands, LMS and Catholics missionaries competed with each other, enlisting British and French authorities for support.
It was not until the 1870s that evangelism commenced in New Guinea. LMS workers, William Lawes and James Chalmers, depended heavily on the pioneering work of Ruatoka (a Polynesian convert) from the Cook Islands in their work in the Papua region. At the eastern end and surrounding islands, Wesleyans established a presence, led by the Australian, George Brown.
Apart from chaplains, clergy and missionaries the Christianization of Oceania was given much support by men of influence, including high officials in the Colonial Office, the governors of new colonies, and by merchants and pastoralists.
Settlements established at Melbourne in 1834, Adelaide in 1838, and Brisbane in 1859, were Puritan counters to the gaol colonies. The surrounding regions of Victoria and South Australia were populated by Nonconformist and evangelical middle-class migrants displaced from Britain. Melbourne quickly became more observably “holy” than Sydney, and Victoria a conspicuous example of the Protestant ethic.
South Australia was settled in 1838, the product of a dissenting vision. George Fife Angas, a devout Baptist and prosperous shipowner, injected capital and pious young settlers into the new colony. He financed the immigration of evangelical Lutheran settlers under Pastor Kavel rejoicing that consequently there could be bestowed on South Australia “the honourable epithet of Pilgrim land” (Pike 1967: 131). The colony won self-government in 1856, gave women the right to vote in council elections in 1861 and the right to vote and stand for parliament in 1894. “Paradise of Dissent” was historian Douglas Pike’s apt description.
Queensland had convict settlements before its creation as a separate colony in 1859, but, thanks to the efforts of Presbyterian leader, John Dunmore Lang, was able to boast many staunch Protestant settlers among its pioneers, including Lutherans and Baptists. They established a robustly anti-Catholic society. That soon met with an equally stout response from the newly appointed Catholic Bishop, James Quinn. In 1862 he established the Queensland Immigration Society. Many Catholic immigrants poured into Queensland, driven out of Ireland by famine and denied entry to the United States because of the Civil War.
In New Zealand a marked Protestant presence characterized some of the planned settlements, although the Canterbury settlement of 1851 had Anglican High Church roots. Otago was established by those who had seceded from the Scottish establishment in 1843 and formed the Free Church. Captain Cargill, leader of the small group of 250 who settled Otago in 1848, espoused a conservative Scottish vision of a Christian society. An emphasis on the virtues of education was combined with staunch opposition to Sabbath-breaking, to the use of the organ in worship, or the use of hymns other than the metrical psalter. In this Protestant culture, liberal views of education struggled with a revivalistic vision.
In 2006, 65% of Australians and 50% of New Zealanders identified with a Christian denomination. In each region a distinctive denominational mix had evolved from its British base, largely reflecting patterns of immigration. The higher combined percentage of Presbyterians, Methodists and Catholics in Australia and New Zealand populations than in the British Isles made sectarian rivalry more significant and made the acquisition of establishment status by the Church of England impossible.
In his Church Act of 1836, New South Wales Governor, Richard Bourke, offered state aid to the major denominations to assist them in building churches and paying the stipends of their ministers. This Act was duplicated in other Australian colonies although not in New Zealand. It effectively bankrolled sectarian rivalry, which was to become a major theme in Australian history. The other side of that coin, however, is that the colonial populations were very well supplied with religious services and pastoral care. Typically four churches (Anglican, Catholic, Presbyterian, Methodist) were built even in small towns, often on opposite street corners. Anthony Trollope, visiting Australia in 1871/1872, observed, “wherever there is a community there arises a church, or more commonly churches . . . The people are fond of building churches” (Trollope 1873 [2013]: 225).
Denied Establishment status, Anglican bishops devised new forms of governance. Charles Perry, the evangelical Bishop of Melbourne, procured from the legislature a bill granting self-government to his church. In 1856 he presided over the first synod in the colonies. His procedure was followed by the dioceses of Sydney and Tasmania. By contrast, the High Church bishops of New Zealand, Adelaide, and Newcastle (Selwyn, Short, and Tyrrell) created synods without any reference to the legislature.
Anglicans continued to be the largest denomination in New Zealand until 2013 when they were overtaken by the Catholics (12.61% Catholics to 11.79% Anglicans). Similarly, in Australia Anglicans were the largest in Australia until 1986 when they were surpassed by the Catholics. Anglicans were 53% of the Australian population in 1851 and 18.7% in 2006. Some states were far more Anglican than others. In 1986 the Anglican population of Tasmania was 35.5% whereas that of Victoria was only 17.8%. Regional differences in denominational adherence in Australia and New Zealand have been marked especially among Protestants.
Nonconformists, especially Congregationalists and Calvinistic Methodists, were respected early settlers in New South Wales. Wesleyan Methodists, by contrast, were not valued by colonial leaders. By the 1840s that had changed dramatically, after several revivals swept through the colonies, and even more after the discovery of gold in the early 1850s which brought many Cornish Methodists to the Australian colonies. Revivals within Australian Methodism probably explain the growth of that denomination from 6.7% of the population in 1861 to 10.2% in 1901 and in New Zealand Methodism grew to 10.9% in the same year. Methodism was the great success story of nineteenth-century Australian and New Zealand Christianity.
Catholics represented about 25% of the population in the Australian colonies (but only about 14% in New Zealand) for much of the nineteenth century. Yet it was not until 1820 that they were allowed to have their own priests. Though most of the Catholic convicts were Irish, the first two members of the hierarchy appointed by Rome in 1833 were English Benedictines, John Bede Polding and William Ullathorne. On the establishment of a diocesan structure in 1842, the ascendancy of Irish bishops in Australian Catholicism began, and with it the consolidation of strong Irish Catholic sub-cultures, fertile soil for sectarianism. There were those who transcended sectarian prejudices. Caroline Chisholm, “the immigrants’ friend,” a devout and philanthropic Protestant before marrying a Catholic and becoming one herself, gave equal support to the 11,000 people of whatever country of origin and religion whom she settled on the land. She believed the family to be the key guardian of society, not clergy and teachers.
John Dunmore Lang, Australia’s first Presbyterian minister, arrived in Sydney in 1823. He promoted Protestant immigration to Australia, and campaigned unceasingly and unscrupulously in the pulpit, press, and parliament for democratic rights in three colonies. He was also an early prophet of federation and republicanism. In New Zealand a number of Congregationalists and northern Presbyterians had a prominent role, but Lang was a unique figure.
Baptists did not hold their first service in Sydney until 1831, and unlike their American counterparts, remained among the smallest of the main Christian denominations in Australia. The Campbellite Churches of Christ and the Seventh Day Adventists came in the second half of the century. In 1883 Charles Strong formed the Australian Church, a liberal breakaway from the Victorian Presbyterians. It did not thrive. In contrast to American Christianity and the Christianity which developed in other parts of the South Pacific, Australia and New Zealand produced few genuinely indigenous Christian movements until the twentieth century when Aboriginal, Maori, and Charismatic indigenous churches were formed.
Especially in New Zealand the denominational landscape was transformed by the rapid growth of a number of new revivalistic denominations originating in Britain and the United States, but planted in the colonies primarily through evangelism rather than immigration. The Churches of Christ was one such group, whose evangelists made an impact beginning in the 1850s. The Plymouth Brethren made a deep impression in Tasmania and in the country districts of New Zealand, where small farmers responded positively to a church built on lay endeavor, discounting theological education and rejecting ordination. As dairying became crucial to the New Zealand economy, the Brethren became very strong and their evangelism created a conservative core to the Protestantism of the country. Then in the 1880s the Salvation Army sent missionaries to the Antipodes, and a sensation was created as they reached out to the working class urban communities on both sides of the Tasman Sea, and attracted strong initial support. But the largest groups remained the Church of England and the Presbyterian Church.
In the first Australian settlements, it was assumed that the Church of England was responsible for all education. This assumption was soon challenged. Richard Bourke, Governor of NSW from 1831 to 1837, sought to subsidise the school systems offered by the various denominations. This plan failed due to opposition from the Anglicans who wanted to retain their educational monopoly, but in 1872 “free, compulsory and secular” education was established in Victoria and soon after that in New Zealand and the other Australian colonies. These state systems, which allowed religious instruction from visiting ministers did not reflect anti-Christian feeling, although the New Zealand government declared in 1877 that primary education should be “entirely of a secular character.” Consequently nervous Protestants put considerable voluntary effort into Sunday schools and Bible classes. Catholics campaigned, unsuccessfully, for state aid for their own schools. But public schools in Australia and New Zealand were probably what the majority of the Protestant laity wanted, systems which would allow the Christian religion a positive role in developing civic-mindedness in the rising generation, while excluding any denominationalism. Until the 1950s the state education systems achieved that end.
The Catholics created and funded their own education system, for which they received no state aid at all until 1963 in both NSW and New Zealand. In 1866 in South Australia the highly educated romantic, Father Tenison Woods, and the practical, courageous Mary MacKillop, who was beatified in 1995, founded the Sisters of St. Joseph. By 1901 there were 100,000 pupils in Catholic schools but this was a much larger sector of the school system in Australia than in New Zealand. This heroic campaign intensified Catholic identity, which was compounded with Irish anti-British feeling and galvanized the sectarian divide between Catholic and Protestant. Nineteenth-century Australian and New Zealand Catholics were a minority sub-culture: alienated, defensive, and clericalized, but cohesive, certain that to be Christian, one had to be Roman, and, though poor, better off than they had been before coming to the colonies.
The majority of the Australian and New Zealand populations in the second half of the nineteenth century were Protestants who believed in the separation of church and state. They also believed, however, that the prosperity of the nation and the freedoms of its people depended on the morality and values of the Christian religion, and that the practice of righteousness should have the force of law behind it.
Protestants argued that Sabbath observance had made Britain great and free, and that Australia should follow Britain and not the European continent. In 1889, the New South Wales Council of Churches was formed, representing the six major Protestant denominations (Anglicans, Presbyterians, Wesleyans, Primitives, Baptists and Congregationalists). Similar councils were formed in the next decade in other colonies, but not in New Zealand until 1941. Their chief task was to protect the Christian Sunday. The legislative brakes were kept on the secularization of the Sabbath until 1966.
Protestants were also eager for legislative restraints on the liquor industry. In 1882 the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, formed eight years earlier in the United States, began in Sydney, and it began in New Zealand in 1886. Among the Australian women associated with the Union who had worldwide renown was Bessie Harrison Lee (Cowie). Australians and New Zealanders “added value” to the messages of temperance, purity and women’s rights which they imported from America, and but ran ahead of Britain and the American states in reforms such as women’s suffrage.
In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, Australian workers sought to civilize capitalism, first by industrial power in unionism, and then by political power in the formation of the Labor Party. Christian values were foundational to both. W. G. Spence, the organizer of the shearers and workers unions, was a Presbyterian elder and Methodist preacher. A leader in the temperance movement, he insisted that he was doing what Jesus would have him do for the downtrodden of society. He wrote in l892: “New Unionism was simply the teachings of that greatest of all social reformers, Him of Nazareth, whom all must revere” (Spence 1892).
With the spectacular failure of unionism in the Maritime Strike of 1890, working men turned to politics, and in 1891 the New South Wales Labor Party was formed. The notion that the Labor Party was formed as an ally of the Catholic Church, was fixed in popular folklore very early in the party’s history. The evidence suggests that the Labor Party only later became strongly Catholic. In the inner suburbs of Sydney, the population did not consist mainly of the Catholic Irish working class, but of Protestants. In New Zealand the Labour Party was not formed until 1916, and the presence of Methodists and Baptists was even more apparent in it.
The ambivalence which Australians felt about their experience of Christianity at the beginning of the twentieth century was nicely reflected in the debates over the Constitution of the Australian Commonwealth enacted in 1901. The preamble speaks of “humbly relying on the blessing of Almighty God,” while section 116 affirms that there are to be no religious establishments and no religious tests for holding office. The majority of Australians wanted to “recognize” the deity, but, weary of sectarianism and allergic to establishments, they would not allow preference to any denomination. The great majority of Australians and New Zealanders adhered to a Christian denomination, a sizeable minority attended church weekly, and most wanted their society and their children to be shaped by the teachings of Christ. But they were wary of entrusting either their souls or their civic life to the clergy.
Women’s suffrage, divorce and temperance were all aspects of a deeper social movement. Women won not only the vote. Aided by clergy and the demand of capitalism for a sober and industrious workforce, they also won the fight to domesticate their men. But it was a victory won at a price. The Christian moralizers in Australia and New Zealand were saddled with the label of “wowser,” by which was meant a hypocrite, a Methodist, a puritanical kill-joy.
Australian Protestant males were keen to demonstrate that they had not been feminized. They spoke fervently of “muscular Christianity” and were eager to endorse the popular male creed of “mateship.” “Mateship” was a genuinely indigenous working-class creed. It had one doctrine: that at all times and whatever the cost, a man should stick by his mate. Some argued that it distilled the essence of Christianity.
The land wars in New Zealand from 1860 to 1863 led to the withdrawal of missionaries. In their absence indigenous adaptations of Christianity flourished among Maori who faced systematic confiscation of their lands. In 1918 a new movement led by a Maori farmer, T. W. Ratana, called Maori back to a covenant with Jehovah. There was enough religious revival and renewal in the early movement to make churches look with sympathy towards it, but later theological, political, and exclusivist trends frightened most away, and its spiritual life was dissipated as the movement threw its support behind the Labour Party.
Evangelical missionary societies working among Australia’s indigenous people started too late, and in the first half of the nineteenth century all failed. Later in the century failure was still chronic. Missions needed to recognize Aboriginal culture, teach in the vernacular, and develop indigenous leadership and spirituality. Evangelical convictions made it hard for missionaries to learn these realities. Early in the twentieth century the Aboriginal population began to increase again, for which Christian missionaries, most of whom were evangelicals, deserve a modicum of credit.
One highly significant outcome of traditional evangelical missionary work combined with new Charismatic insights was the Aboriginal Revival which began in the Uniting Church in Elcho Island, 500 kilometers from Darwin in 1979. Few on the island were left untouched. Then the Elcho Islanders spread their joy all over Arnhem Land, and northern and northwestern Australia, and perhaps most effectively, the central south of western Australia, in a great swathe of blessing.
Revival can be the power sufficient for the indigenization of Christianity in minority cultures. It was one of the means by which Aboriginal people were able to persevere in their campaign for land rights and for a just recompense for the land from which they had been dispossessed. The churches, together with the Aboriginal people, have been in the vanguard in the matter of land rights and self-determination, and together they have changed the views of many Australians into seeking reconciliation between black and white and atonement for past wrongs. There are signs today that indigenous ministries in New Zealand and Australia have much to offer in the re-awakening of the spiritual power of the Christian movement.
The identity of Australians and New Zealanders was shaped profoundly by their extensive involvement with two world wars. In World War I Protestants were commonly uncritical supporters of the war effort. The appallingly high death toll had profound consequences. In World War II there was less enthusiasm among churchmen for the conflict, only holy resignation to the fact that the evils of fascism had to be stopped. Far fewer men died, so the churches of the 1950s were far more effective than those of the 1930s.
Between the wars, Protestant churches wrestled with the challenge of theological liberalism, championed in Australian Presbyterianism by Samuel Angus, Professor of New Testament in their theological college in Sydney. The controversy left the Presbyterians, Methodists and Congregationalists weakened and divided as the 1930s came to a close. Anglicans, Baptists, and other evangelicals in Sydney watched and learned from the Presbyterian experience with Angus. Sydney’s Archbishop Howard Mowll with the aid of T. C. Hammond, Principal of Moore Theological College, G. H. Morling, Principal of the Baptist College, and C. H. Nash, the best-known of Australian Bible college principals, launched a counter-offensive.
In New Zealand it was Baptists who began the fight against Modernism, in the person of J. W. Kemp from Scotland, pastor of the Baptist Tabernacle in Auckland from 1920. He followed the strategy of the urban fundamentalist chapels of America: strongly apologetic Bible teaching, support for interdenominational missions, the establishment of a holiday spiritual convention and a Bible Training Institute. Kemp’s best-known convert was E. M. Blaiklock who became a Professor of Classics and an influential apologist. With a strongly dispensational theology and an evangelistic passion, Kemp made these institutions beacons of conservative Protestantism. Meanwhile in Christchurch an Anglican vicar with a passion for biblical preaching, William A. Orange, recruited a remarkable group of evangelical ordinands, the “orange pips,” who profoundly affected the New Zealand Church, and there was also an evangelical movement in the Presbyterian Church. Meanwhile small fundamentalist churches – Brethren, Baptist, and Salvation Army, rapidly increased their following in society.
English institutions also played a role. The newly founded Inter-Varsity Fellowship sponsored the visit of Howard Guinness to Canada, Australia, and New Zealand in 1930. Challenging the liberal emphasis of the Student Christian Movement, he created “Evangelical Unions” in many cities in the dominions, and they birthed an educated elite for the future, distancing themselves somewhat from Kemp’s sharpness. Meanwhile Scripture Union sponsored the growth of an evangelical movement of state school Christian clubs, called Crusaders. Thus Fundamentalism was modified by a more positive evangelistic outlook.
The 1950s was the decade when church-going in Australia and New Zealand grew rapidly and peaked in the early 1960s. The Billy Graham Crusades in 1959 brought Australia and New Zealand close to revival in 1959. During the three and a half months of the Southern Cross Crusade, nearly 3,250,000 people (one-quarter of the whole population) attended meetings. Of these 150,000 decided for Christ - in Australia that was 1.24% of the population. To that point it was the largest, most successful evangelistic campaign in human history and there were initial promising consequences in social trends. The rate of retention of converts was high, and the dramatic increase in student enrolments in Bible and theological colleges produced a ready supply of evangelical ministers of religion and missionaries in the next generation.
The crusades were the high point of fifteen years of very active growth in all churches, Catholic and Protestant. Huge Marian processions honored the newly promulgated dogma of the bodily assumption of the Virgin Mary in 1954. The Methodists in Australia were stirred by Alan Walker’s “Mission to the Nation” in the early 1950s. Anglicans in Australia and New Zealand mounted large-scale stewardship campaigns organized by the Wells Organisation. The Presbyterian Church in New Zealand renewed its conservative and evangelical tone, with its New Life Movement, led by Norman Perry. The result was a very extensive expansion of the denomination. It was a decade of rapid urbanization of Maori, and evangelical churches and missions (notably the United Maori Mission and Maori Evangelical Church) provided hostels and support for many young Maori.
Though the origins of Pentecostalism in Australia has been dated back to 1870, its expansion in Australia may be traced primarily to the visits in 1920 and 1921 of the British Pentecostal evangelist, Smith Wigglesworth, whose missions reported scores of miracles, and the American female evangelist, Aimee Semple McPherson, whose meetings were attended by huge crowds. In New Zealand Smith Wigglesworth laid the foundations of Pentecostalism in two visits in 1922 and 1924. In Wellington and Christchurch new congregations were founded, and although the movement was unstable, there was a provocative evangelistic energy about it which laid strong roots for the future.
After World War II the South Seas Evangelical Church was formed in Melanesia, but its spiritual life was subdued through involvement in politics. Then Muri Thompson, a Maori evangelist affected by the Charismatic Movement in New Zealand, held evangelistic meetings in Papua New Guinea and throughout the Solomons. There was a huge and highly emotional result.
New Zealand moved more rapidly in a Charismatic direction than Australia. Beginning in the South Island in 1960, a group of young men from Sydney began a new Charismatic movement. Their style was not sectarian. Friendly contacts were forged across the theological spectrum. It emphasized new experience, an existential encounter with Christ in an age of existential authenticity. “Tongues” were ecstatic proof of the reality of God, and not capable of rational explanation. Pentecostal evangelists began to attract new believers and more ardent Christians from many of the more formal wings of the church.
These challenges towards new spiritual life have continued to be burning issues in many other parts of the Pacific. The old mission churches proved unreceptive to the emphasis on personal spiritual experience. Their old evangelical theologies were nominally in place, but cultural and political identification with the maintenance of the traditional status systems of the islands made them resistant to any emphasis on spiritual democracy. Consequently, particularly in Tonga, where church splits have been common over the last hundred years, and where concern at the growth of the Mormons was high, Charismatic separatism occurred. When the Pacific peoples came in very large numbers to New Zealand and a lesser extent to Australia in the 1960s–1990s, their churches were the key organizations that maintained their social identity. While their traditional churches were conservative rather than evangelical, they challenged the liberalism of the denominations, especially Presbyterians and Methodists in New Zealand. Streams of Tongan, Samoan, and Cook Islands native speaking Charismatic congregations also emerged. The same phenomenon has not really happened within the Maori community except in sectarian groups like the recent Destiny Church.
In the last four decades of the twentieth century the Pentecostal movement within new and existing churches achieved annual growth rates between 20 and 30%. The largest church in Australian history is a Pentecostal church. Hillsong, an Assemblies of God church, founded in 1983, had 18,000 members in 2005 and was courted by state and federal politicians. With 200,000 attending their churches in 2005, Pentecostals now outnumber church-going Anglicans in Australia.
At the same time as the Charismatic and Pentecostal movements burgeoned, so too did Reformed Christianity. In 1962 the Reformed Church of Australia opened their first Christian school. The Christian schooling movement has become the third major player in Australian education, after the public and Catholic systems. When in 1977 the Uniting Church was created out of Methodist, Presbyterian and Congregationalist churches, the Reformed evangelical wings of the Presbyterian and Congregationalist churches favored continuing in their traditional denominations. Within a generation, the Presbyterian Church of Australia was no longer liberal, but evangelical, Reformed and augmented by Korean immigrants who have not neglected the experiential dimension of traditional evangelicalism. In New Zealand after powerful liberal leadership within the Presbyterian Church produced forty years of theological controversy from 1965, conservative evangelicals gradually asserted the leadership that their numbers warranted and by 2006 the denomination was largely in their hands.
It was, however, through the Anglican Moore College in Sydney that Reformed theology was to have its greatest impact on Australian Christianity. During his long principalship, Broughton Knox (1959–1985) forged “the biblical theology movement.” The chief work of the ministry, he insisted, was to teach the Bible, the chief work of the theologian was to defend the inerrancy of Scripture, and the chief glory of the believer was to learn the Scriptures. It is a formula which has galvanized the Diocese of Sydney into one of world Anglicanism’s evangelical powerhouses. Its counter-cultural stance attracts much media attention. The opposition of Sydney Anglicans to the ordination of women and gay clergy has forged links with similar conservative groups throughout the world. Peter Jensen, Archbishop of Sydney from 2001, is seen as a warrior for the truth by African bishops and by those who have had liberal change thrust upon them.
In recent decades the evangelical movement has recovered the social conscience for which it was so celebrated in the days of William Wilberforce (1759–1833). Though commenced in America, World Vision’s international President from 1989 to 1995 was Australian Graeme Irvine and he led its rapid growth. In Sydney, David Bussau established Opportunity International, which specialized in giving small loans to the poor in developing countries. Many other development agencies flourish at local, national and international levels. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the commitment of all branches of the Christian Church to welfare, aid, and relief had become unequivocal. In 2006 23 of the top 25 charities by income in Australia were Christian. Protestants are now joining with Catholics, who have a longer track record of effective political involvement, to defend by legislative means, what they have failed to achieve by cultural influence, a conservative moral society, based on Christian values.
During the past two centuries, for most of the peoples of the Pacific Islands, Christianity has become the prevailing worldview, fashioning their identity, values, and cultures. Pacific Islanders are arguably the most Christianized people in the world and have developed indigenous Christian movements. Yet they, like Australians and New Zealanders, have been shaped by the Christianity they inherited from the West and, where they do change denominational allegiance, they are likely to adopt imported conservatively evangelical or Charismatic values. Australia and New Zealand are far more secularized than the Pacific Islands; they have not been adept at generating indigenous Christian movements and Christianity has not been the key to their identity. But the great majority of Australians and New Zealanders still are at least nominally Christian, and, while nominal adherence to Christianity has declined in recent decades, Christians have turned away from the sectarianism which prevailed through much of their history. The Christian movement has displayed its essential unity, established a Christian presence in culture and society, and deeply contributed to national life.