Kenneth Nehrbass - Christianity and Animism in Melanesia: Four Approaches to Gospel and Culture

T his book deals with issues that are of great concern to missionaries and local peoples across Melanesia and the world at large. While the focus is on the Island of Tanna in Vanuatu, the issues are the same across the length and breadth of Melanesia, stretching from Fiji in the east to the Moluccas Islands (in Indonesia) in the west. Understanding traditional experience in contrast to the missionary response to spirituality is a crucial missiological issue in our day. Despite over a century of mission dominance and an apparent acceptance of the gospel message, churches throughout Melanesia quickly become nominal and people continue to rely on traditional sources of power. Therefore, it is crucial to understand how contemporary churches can maintain a dynamic interface of culture and biblical awareness. Dealing with Scripture in the contemporary reality of living life as God intended provides the rationale for the case study in this book.

On Tanna, as in much of Melanesia, two religions now reside side by side; traditional animism and missionary-introduced Christianity (Tippett 1967; Trompf 1987). Both religions reflect the cultural environment that spawned them; thousands of years of interaction with spiritual forces and their influence on enabling people to survive in their physical, social, and psychological world; and two thousand years of Christian expansion structured to reflect Greco-Roman philosophy in categories that reflect missionary understanding but have little relevance to local peoples. It is this tension between local and Western worldviews that structures Dr. Ken Nehrbass excellent book. Sadly, the missionaries encouraged people to abandon kastom and embrace Christianity. This forced people to make unfortunate choices resulting in split-level Christianity (Hiebert, Shaw, and Tienou 1999, 15ff). This dual perspective creates a dynamic syncretism which enables people to separate Christianity from the way they live their lives. The result is a lack of understanding of Scriptural perspectivesGods perspective. The Bible is all about God enabling people with whom he communicated to worship him appropriately in contrast to performing ritual to get something they want. God gave Israel many kastoms all with the focus of acknowledging and worshiping him. Nehrbass clearly presents this development in Chapter 1. This is closely juxtaposed with an anthropological understanding of animism as a religion of the people in Chapter 2. In focus, then, is how people respond to God as a product of their beliefs and values, not which worldview (local or Christian) they subscribe to. How people steeped in the reality of life process Scripture is far more important, for them, than the ideas the missionaries brought, as Trompf has made clear (1987, 56).

In our contemporary, globalizing world, the people of Tanna and Melanesia in general cannotmust notignore the rest of the world. Like missions in the past, a ubiquitous globalization now frames most things people do. However, they still live their lives in a particular context endued with their traditions and lifestyle expectationskastom. This is the context within which all outside influence must be evaluated. It is this understanding of context and the role of the gospel, encased in Scripture, that Nehrbass seeks to make sense of. Both are critical to the well-being of people who come to church whenever the bell rings and maintain their identity in the context of a spiritually, socially, and emotionally charged reality.