One mind: Enacting the Christian congregation among the Auhelawa, Papua New Guinea

Abstract

This article examines the relationship between Christian worship and the production of religious identity among Auhelawa speakers of Normanby Island, Papua New Guinea. Auhelawa people live in a society in which a locally developed form of Christianity has emerged from a long engagement with missionaries. In the colonial era, missionaries spoke in terms of light and darkness to mediate their contradictory aims of both authentic personal conversion and total social change. Today Auhelawa believe that their society has been changed, and that this change entails a new way of thinking as well as acting, though like the missionaries they also struggle to express the relationship between the two. Viewing themselves as already converted, Auhelawa today use an ideology of ‘one mind’—unity in purpose which is subjectively felt and outwardly expressed—to resolve how their collective worship relates to individual belief. This framing of ritual, embedded in church prayer and music, however, is always incomplete. I argue this not only points to an important step in the process of formation of congregations, but also suggests why Christianity globally is both unitary yet also so strikingly diverse.

Affordances and Audiences

“…Moving from doctrines to institutions, we have seen in this issue how both the church and the denomination serve as important affordances for claims about proper social relations, particularly relations among Christians (e.g., Handman 2011). Finally, as a corollary to the Pentecostal seed offerings described in the Zambian case, the practice of giving money has much to teach us not only about Christian social life (e.g., Coleman 2004;Schram 2010) but also about the way that believers make claims to membership in a globalized labor economy (e.g., Premawardhana 2012).…”

“…For Christians, this audience may be made up of several different groups or actors. In part, it is comprised of other Christians, who may or may not be members of one's church or denomination (e.g., Bielo 2011;Schram 2013) and, indeed, who may or may not share the same definition of what counts as Christian orthodoxy (e.g., Daswani 2013; see also Garriot and O'Neill 2008). Another element of the Christian audience is "the world" at large, including one's non-Christian neighbors and kin, the people one encounters on the street, and evenalbeit on a more abstract level-the nation and planet as a whole (e.g., O'Neill 2010).…”

“Tapwaroro is true”: Indigenous Voice and the Heteroglossia of Methodist Missionary Translation in British New Guinea

“…Methodist preaching and teaching often presented Christianity as a stark choice between good and evil. In missionary writings, the village is a synecdoche for evil as opposed to the mission station (see Schram :34). In Field's narrative, he constructs a dialogue between himself and indigenous people still in darkness.…”

Introduction

“…; Gooren ; Hermkens ; Hoenigman ; Jolly et al. ; Tomlinson ; Hermkens ; Schram ; Strathern ; Cox and Macintyre ; Van Heekeren , to name but a few). Melanesia has also played a prominent role in theorisation within the discipline that takes gender as an analytical point of reference.…”