Fijians in Transnational Pentecostal Networks

Front matter

FIJIANS IN TRANSNATIONAL PENTECOSTAL NETWORKS

FIJIANS IN TRANSNATIONAL PENTECOSTAL NETWORKS

KAREN J. BRISON

Contents

Acknowledgements vii 1. Introduction 1 2. Pentecostalism and Global Moral and Economic Systems 25 3. The Harvest Ministry as an Exportable Vanua 37 4. Reciprocity in the Harvest Ministry Community:

Money and Spiritual Agency 59 5. Becoming Blessed: Learning a Charismatic Globalising

Habitus 73 6. Mission from ‘Everywhere to Everywhere’: Imagining Mission

Introduction

My first encounter with the Harvest Ministry, an independent Fijian Pentecostal church, was in April 2005, when a friend invited me to attend the Sunday morning service with her at the main church in Suva.’ As we entered the large circular auditorium with stadium-style seating, I looked up curiously at the hundred or more flags of nations around the world hanging from the ceiling. This Sunday, the church was packed with more than 1,000 people because the Harvest Ministry was having its monthly ‘combined service’ where those who usually attended the separate Fijian, Hindi and English language services designed to serve Fiji’s major ethnic groups came together for one English service. The service began with announcements for upcoming events, such as the weekly youth service that afternoon, Wednesday night ‘cell’ (prayer) group meetings, and a special workshop to be hosted by American guests Kenneth and Gloria Copeland in the next month. Pastor Anare, an indigenous Fijian man who looked to be in his late 30s, took the floor and told us that next Sunday was ‘Million Soul Sunday’. The Harvest Ministry would join with churches around the world to win 1 million souls for God in the next 10 years. “We believe,’ he said, ‘it is possible if we, as a body of Christ around the world, come together in unity and combine our resources together, it is possible to win the entire world for God.’ He reminded the congregation that they should continue their prayers on Monday, because Monday in Fiji would be Sunday in the many

1 In accordance with Internal Review Board protocols at Union College, I have used a pseudonym for the Harvest Ministry and I have also used pseudonyms for all the individuals mentioned in the book. I have changed names and some biographical details to protect the identities of my interlocutors.

nations on the other side of the dateline and it was important for everyone in the world to pray together. ‘I want you to look up because the world is in [this church]; he said, pointing to the flags hanging from the ceiling:

I want you to look up and look at one of the flags of the world ... And as you pray, focus on that one particular nation. I believe that if all of us focus on one flag we will be praying for the whole world and this particular initiative of reaching 1 million souls for God, amen?

Pastor Anare then turned to the call for tithes and offerings, reminding the congregation that their debts had been cancelled by Jesus’s death and that now they should give to God the tithe of 10 per cent of their income owing to Him and should then add more money to demonstrate faith and obedience. Those who gave generously would receive the prosperity and health that God intended for his people:

The Bible says give generously and do so without a grudging heart and because of this the Lord your God shall bless you in all your work and everything you put your hand to.

He explained that possessions could only transform individual lives if given away:

We are able to overcome as Christians and believers. We are able to overcome because of the power of the blood of Jesus Christ that he shed, amen? Listen, that blood had no power unless it was given, amen? If Jesus had not given that blood sacrificially, it wouldn't have had any power. But because he was willing to give that blood sacrificially for your sin and my sin, it has enormous power. That is the power of giving. Giving has the power to overcome ... And, friends, also when we give it has the power to overcome every force of poverty, selfishness, self-centredness and greed, hallelujah! Your gift has the power to overcome, amen? [To overcome] the spirit of poverty, the spirit of greed and self-centredness.”

After the tithes and offerings were collected and duly blessed, Pastor Anare asked the congregation to give a warm welcome to ‘the Father of the House’, the senior and founding pastor, Pastor Vili, who had just returned from a trip to visit Harvest Ministry missionaries from Fiji and Papua New Guinea serving in Tanzania. Pastor Vili, a tall indigenous Fijian man in his mid-40s, told us he had started his trip by speaking at The Lighthouse, a 7,000-member

2 This and other sermons were recorded and transcribed by the author.

church with an American pastor in Nairobi. This had reminded him of a trip to The Lighthouse in Nairobi six years earlier when the Lord had ‘spoken to him about opening up Africa to the Harvest Ministry:

I remember when I stepped on that stage six years ago, Acts 1:8 became so real to me. I asked the people, ‘How many of you know where Fiji is? Just a few people raised up their hands. Later on I found out that they were from New Zealand ... Then I said, “Well how many of you know a part where Fiji is written in the Bible?’ No one raised up their hand. I mentioned Acts 1:8 and I said, ‘If you really want to see where Fiji is, it is in Acts 1:8. Jesus said, “When the power of the Holy Spirit comes upon you, you shall be my witness first in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria and then all the other parts of the earth.” The farthest-most place from where Jesus uttered those words in Jerusalem is the tiny nation in the Pacific Ocean of Fiji. And it was there in Kenya when the Lord spoke to me in that meeting where He said, ‘I really believe that Fiji ... has a very special place in the heart of God regarding the fulfilment of the Great Commission.’ So I came back with that word that the Lord placed in my heart and it was on that journey that I said, “We have to build a bridge from Fiji to Africa to Asia to Europe and other parts of the world.’

I was intrigued by Pastor Vili’s neat reversal of the Great Commission’s call for Christians to take the gospel to the ‘ends of the earth’, a message that once inspired Euro-American Christians to send missionaries to Africa, Asia and the Pacific. Pastor Vili suggested that those ‘at the ends of the earth’, like Fiji, now had a special call to spread the gospel. As Pastor Vili continued, he noted that Fiji had a long history of sending missionaries to other areas of the Pacific; indeed, Fijians working with the London Missionary Society had been among the first to bring Christianity to Papua New Guinea in the nineteenth century in missions that were referred to as the “Deep-Sea Canoe’ (Garrett 1982; Tippett 2014). But as Acts 1:8 proclaimed, God wanted people to spread the gospel to the ends of the earth, not just to their neighbours. Pastor Vili continued:

Because God’s call is always a global call and as we study the mission history we see that [in] 200 years of Christianity in Fiji, you know, our forefathers started sending out missionaries to other parts of the Pacific and over the years we have discussed launching what they call the Deep-Sea Canoe and they have already launched the Deep- Sea Canoe. But the problem with the Deep-Sea Canoe, it’s been launched from the Pacific and still remains in the Pacific and as I travel around the Pacific, I see that a lot of young people they have the passion to be of use to God.

Pacific churches lacked money to send missionaries, Pastor Vili continued, so he had worked for an international parachurch organisation, Every Home for Christ, that specialised in training and sending missionaries to fulfil the Great Commission in Matthew 28:16-20 to spread the gospel all over the world, particularly to what Every Home and other contemporary groups referred to as ‘unreached people groups’ who had ‘not yet heard their first gospel’.? When Every Home for Christ transferred its regional headquarters out of Fiji, Pastor Vili founded his own church, in 1990, to employ the Fijians that he had recruited to work for Every Home. The Harvest Ministry then created its own streamlined training program for missionaries, which included an accreditation through an Oral Roberts University program at the Harvest Ministry Bible College. These efforts had come to fruition a few years before that 2005 sermon when Pastor Vili sent a handful of Fijian and Papua New Guinean missionaries to Tanzania. He described his recent visit to these missionaries and to a Tanzanian Pentecostal bishop (a term that is used loosely in many Pentecostal churches to refer to people who lead church networks) working with them, accentuating the gap between the Fijians and East Africans by joking about the hardships he had endured when the group had gone to visit some ‘unreached peoples’, the Maasai. During this trip they had slept on cow skins in mud huts, eaten cow hearts and drunk cow blood, which caused ‘runny stomach’. They had also spent long hours in hot, dusty vans with no opportunity to wash for several days. Apparently, all were not equal in God’s world. As I learned in later sermons, Harvest Ministry pastors saw themselves as leading the charge passed onto them by the British and the London Missionary Society so many decades before to bring both Christianity and civilisation to those still ‘sitting in the back rows’ (see also Ryle 2005, 2010).

My interest was already caught by these early parts of the service. I had regularly attended a Methodist church—some 60 per cent of indigenous Fijians are Methodist—in Rakiraki, a village on the north-east side of Viti Levu, the main island of Fiji, where I had conducted almost two years of research between 1997 and 2003. There had been a weekly collection, a monthly tithe paid by each lineage and a large annual village fundraising for the church, as well as special collections for particular causes like sending

3 ‘Unreached people groups’ are defined by the Joshua Project (joshuaproject.net/definitions.php) as ‘a people group among which there is no indigenous community of believing Christians with adequate numbers and resources to evangelize this people group’. The Harvest Ministry often referred to the Joshua Project and also spoke of ‘unreached people groups’ (as originally defined by the Joshua Project) as groups with less than 5 per cent Christian adherents.

the choir to the annual national choir competition in Suva. Requests for money were so common that people often grumbled about them. Like Pastor Anare, Methodist pastors had encouraged people to be less selfish and to think of others. But Methodist discourse linked humility and selfless service to the vanua, the hierarchical, landholding community that is the centre of indigenous Fijian culture and society. When people performed their duties (4 tavi) and carried their burdens (i colacola), designated according to gender, age and rank in the vanua, they secured their place in Heaven and God blessed the community with abundant harvests. There was no talk of individual financial gain or of Fiji's mission to spread the gospel to the world.

The Methodist Church in Fiji was strongly associated with indigenous Fijian culture. Methodist missionaries had initially worked through high chiefs in south-eastern Fiji, resulting in a close association of indigenous Fijian chiefs and Christianity (Kaplan 1995). The Bible, hymnal and other Methodist literature were translated into Fijian in the nineteenth century and the leadership of the Fijian Methodist Church was entirely in the hands of Fijians. Methodist sermons were almost always in Fijian. The Methodist Church, although conceptually distinct from the clan and lineage structure, also reinforced the vanua with local chiefs and lineage elders sitting at the front of the church and often serving as lay preachers (dau vunau) leading services. Men sat on one side of the church in order of seniority with women on the other side with older and more senior women in front. Methodist sermons frequently reminded people of the importance of conforming to Fijian tradition through respectful dress and comportment and playing one’s role in the community (Brison 2007a; see also Ryle 2010; Tomlinson 2009) .4

The Harvest Ministry challenged the close association between church, indigenous Fijian identity and the vanua. In the main Suva church, the auditorium was circular, and people sat in nuclear family groups so there was no obvious ranking by gender and age. Pastors were referred to by their first names and even nicknames, flouting the indigenous Fijian practice of avoiding the first names of senior people as a sign of respect. In addition to the weekly Fijian service, there was an English service every week and there were also weekly Hindi services to include members of the Indo-Fijian descendants of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century indentured servants brought by the British to work in sugar plantations, who constitute

4 Tomlinson (2009) and Brison (2007a) both note that indigenous Fijians distinguish /otw (church) from vanua (ranked community), but that there is considerable overlap between the two.

about a third of Fiji’s population.” The Methodist Church emphasised lineages and reminded people of their duty to uphold the vanua and to restore Fijian society to an original perfect state established when chiefs led the conversion to Christianity where people had observed custom and played their designated roles (Tomlinson 2009). In contrast, the Harvest Ministry called on individuals to transform their lives, to overcome poverty, and to support their senior pastor’s novel vision of Fijian missionaries leaving the Pacific and going to other areas of the world. Pastors Anare and Vili also encouraged people to think of themselves as important contributors to the world community. I wondered what the appeal of this vision was for the Fijians who attended the church and supported its overseas endeavours through their tithes and offerings.

The Harvest Ministry vision of Fijians bringing civilisation and Christianity to a world community was cast in different language nine years later, during a Sunday service in July 2014 that I attended after I had been studying the church for several years. The years between the 2005 service and the 2014 service had been turbulent ones in Fiji. Army Commodore Vorege (‘Frank’) Bainimarama took over the government in a coup in 2006 and introduced measures to erode the position of indigenous Fijian chiefs and the Methodist Church that supported them. Bainimarama’s government also challenged Fiji’s political and economic ethnic pluralism that was entrenched through such things as ‘racial voting’, which designated a fixed number of seats for Indo- and indigenous Fijians, and a small number of seats to represent Fijians from other ethnic groups, with each community voting for its own slate of candidates. International sanctions that followed the coup had disrupted the economy. These political and economic conditions had led many Fijians to migrate to Australia, New Zealand and other areas, and had prompted those at home to emphasise their professional ties to the outside world, perhaps in order to pave the way for migration in the future or as an attempt to distance themselves from chiefly leadership.°

5 The Methodist Church of Fiji and Rotuma also has a division for Indo-Fijians, although there are very few Indo-Fijian Methodists—only about 2,250 out of a total church membership of over 225,000 (see worldmethodistcouncil.org/member-churches/name/fiji-and-rotuma-methodist-church/). The Methodist Church does not bring Indo-Fijians and indigenous Fijians together for common services.

6 Newland (2012) and Tomlinson (2013) both noted the attempts of some Fijians to distance themselves from the Methodist Church in the period when Bainimarama was criticising the Methodist

Church for opposing his regime.

This Sunday, the service began with a mystifying combination of management-speak, fundraising and religion. Pastor Vili encouraged church members to buy shares of 1,000 FJD (about 500 USD) in the church’s new project, the Global Development Corporation, which sounded at first like a modest business venture. The project would begin with a small shopping plaza and then add a cement factory, a hotel and a consulting firm to give church members advice on developing plans for their own businesses. But Pastor Vili went on to show that this modest beginning was part of a much larger vision. He assured the congregation that the world was ‘tipping’ towards Fiji. Although Fiji was a tiny island nation, the Harvest Ministry was at the forefront of God’s plan to spread the gospel to all areas of the world and had missionaries everywhere. Pastor Vili said that he and the elders who founded the church had a vision, that they institutionalised this vision in the church and that the church now channelled God’s anointing to Fiji. Those who submitted to their anointed men of God and ‘sowed seeds’ by buying shares in the Global Development Corporation would share in the prosperity. The church was unique among Fijian enterprises, he continued, in being a global institution with missionaries in ‘unreached people groups’ around the world. The Fijian missionaries would bring the ‘two hands of the gospel’—that is, salvation from the Lord and help in developing small businesses and good work habits—to these neglected and lost people. When they experienced improvement in their standard of living, they would provide a market for Fijian goods. Pastor Vili concluded by pointing out that he could have left Fiji and taken a good job with Every Home for Christ, but he wanted to stay home to help those who had worked with him from the beginning and to help Fiji to become a blessing to the world.

The Harvest Ministry, Moral Transformation and Fijian Middle-Class Projects

In the following pages, I look first at the appeal of the Harvest Ministry, and the world community it envisions, to Fijians and then examine the ways this imagined community is realised in practice through following Fijian and Papua New Guinean missionaries to East Africa and to Papua New Guinea. Pentecostalism is known for spreading Euro-American individual-centred moral systems and possibly paving the way for free market economies, processes that seem to be evident in Pastor Vilis emphasis on progress, individual initiative and Fijians conveying business-sense and development to East Africans. Pentecostalism is also known for imagining a flat transnational community where those on the periphery participate as equals to those from the centre, possibly paving the way for new ideologies from the global south that challenge entrenched world inequalities. The importance of this vision is apparent in Pastor Anare and Pastor Vili’s suggestions that Fijians are at the forefront of a world Christian movement. As I examine the Harvest Ministry in Fiji, East Africa and Papua New Guinea, I suggest that understanding Pentecostalism as a global force requires close ethnographic examination of particular contexts. Pentecostalism neither spreads Euro- American moral and economic systems nor leads to a systematic critique of these ideas. Instead, the moral and economic impact of Pentecostalism is shaped everywhere by the way it is incorporated into local projects.

Turning first to the appeal of the Harvest Ministry to Fijians, I argue that the Harvest Ministry is one of several middle-class projects in contemporary Fiji through which a growing group of urban, professional indigenous Fijians create new leadership roles and new kinds of communities. The Harvest Ministry draws on common Pentecostal themes, such as the importance of individual agency and participation in a world Pentecostal community that transcends local cultural differences. But the ways that these themes are realised in the local context is shaped by the particular project of creating new roles and communities for an urban, professional class. This class project stems from a series of changes in Fiji. Some of these, like those following on from the 2006 coup, are relatively recent. Others have been gradual trends over the past three or four decades that have increased the number of indigenous Fijians, and particularly those who do not come from highranking families, with good professional jobs in urban areas. These changes include the removal of colonial restrictions on commoner Fijians moving to urban areas, and affirmative action policies of the 1980s and 1990s directed at increasing the educational attainments of indigenous Fijians, particularly those of non-chiefly status (Ratuva 2013, 173).

The expanding group of indigenous Fijians in good professional jobs is interested in creating new leadership roles that highlight achieved success and communities that relax some of the many protocols structuring vanua life, some of which they see as antithetical to professional success. In rural vanua, successful younger siblings with careers overseas or in Suva are respected and their money is coveted for village causes. But they are often spoken of as the ‘children of the workplace’ (Brison 2003, 2007a), submitting to elders in the village who are in charge of the vanua and who take a good part of the credit for the money that affluent urban siblings contribute to their lineages for funerals and other events. Vanua life requires respect (veidokai) for elders and village traditions, which involves displaying shame (madua) in front of those of higher rank. People must be willing to give time and resources to communal work and to put aside personal plans to spend many hours drinking kava and socialising to show respect for others (Erasaari 2013). Many Fijians view these qualities as antithetical to those required to succeed in professional jobs where people have to manage their time and resources, deal with new situations and present an impressive persona (Williksen-Bakker 2002). Rural chiefs are also constrained by many social obligations to the extent that, in some areas of Fiji, it is difficult to find people willing to serve in these positions (Erasaari 2013).

Urban professional indigenous Fijians also differ from previous generations in aspiring to a cosmopolitan identity in the wake of a series of coups since 1987 that led to economic downturns. The combined political and economic instability prompted people to keep options for outmigration open for themselves and their children through such measures as sending their children to multi-ethnic schools to improve their English (Brison 2014). Further, when Army Commodore Frank Bainimarama staged a coup in 2006, he began a series of measures to erode the privileged place of chiefs, such as reforming land rent policies that had given them a disproportionate share of rent monies for leased land and abolishing the Great Council of Chiefs through which they influenced government policy. These measures made chiefly-style leadership less attractive. Many members of the indigenous Fijian urban professional community, particularly those employed in government and in government-controlled parts of the finance industry, also came under attack for corruption and disloyalty (Ratuva 2013, 173). In 2010, Bainimarama banned the annual conference of the Methodist Church, an event that often highlights chiefs, for several years. These measures all prompted some people to distance themselves from chiefly leadership and the Methodist Church.’

All of these political and economic changes have led to a series of middle-class projects through which successful urban professionals seek ways to establish new leadership roles that emphasise their ties to the external world over their position within the vanua.

7 Although the Harvest Ministry supported the regime deposed by Bainimarama, the head pastor also counselled church members not to oppose the government and many church leaders were proud of the fact that their annual convention was allowed in years other church conventions were banned.

Fijian middle-class projects share a generic resemblance with similar attempts to construct new leadership roles for urban professionals in other areas of the global south where affluent professionals try to distinguish themselves from traditional elites by emphasising their good education, ability to consume mass-produced goods and facility with the outside world (see, for example, Besnier 2009 on neighbouring Tonga; Dickey 2016 on India; Gewertz and Errington 1999 on Papua New Guinea; Liechty 2003 on Nepal). However, as Dickey (2016), Ortner (2003), Liechty (2003) and others argue, social class is not a unitary phenomenon but is realised as numerous class projects fashioned when individuals attempt to convert access to economic resources into social and cultural capital (Bourdieu 1986). Consequently, ways of constructing class-based identities will differ from place to place, since the social and symbolic systems within which individuals manoeuvre are locally specific.

In Fiji, for instance, a history of ethnic pluralism makes it much more likely that Indo-Fijians will work in private businesses while indigenous Fijians are clustered in government bureaucracies and in jobs at banks and insurance agencies. This economic pluralism limits the degree to which emerging middle-class identities cross ethnic divisions since Indo- and indigenous Fijians tend to work in different places and have different experiences. In contrast, in Papua New Guinea a very small number of successful people from a wide variety of ethnic groups cluster in the same kinds of jobs and interact frequently, so middle-class projects cross ethnic lines (Gewertz and Errington 1999). There may also be more than one middle-class project in a given society, leading to different kinds of class-linked identities. In Fiji, some successful indigenous urban professionals join Pentecostal churches while others emulate the ‘part-European’ elites of colonial days through de-emphasising local cultural identities and emphasising facility in transnational fashion, technology and so on. Still others find communities of successful professionals and new kinds of identities by spending time with the ‘old boys’ clubs of elite, secondary schools.

In Fiji, Pentecostal churches like the Harvest Ministry are often part of indigenous Fijian middle-class projects because they allow for some renegotiation of social roles reinforced by the Methodist Church. The Harvest Ministry, for instance, as apparent in the services described above, implicitly challenged the ranking by age and gender in the vanua reinforced by the Methodist Church. Instead, the Harvest Ministry drew attention to professional achievements through such means as portraying church leaders as business experts who would bring prosperity to Fiji and to the world through the Global Development Corporation. Services also often emphasised that Pastor Vili, and other senior church leaders, had been successful in professional careers before joining the church. This kind of rhetoric helped to validate achieved success in business, something that many Fijians felt violated the obligations of chiefs to care for their community instead of pursuing personal profit (Pauwels 2020; White 2015). These constructions also legitimated behaviours and styles that defied vanua protocol, such as the ability to ‘sell oneself? by portraying Fijians as equal participants in world Pentecostal and business arenas. The church, as was also evident in the services described above, located its members in a world community in which church leaders were shown to be successful participants who could do things like bring the gospel to the ends of the earth and establish a corporation that would build a global market for Fijian goods. Such messages implicitly contrasted church leaders—successful participants in a world community—with vanua elders who had a distinctly local kind of power.

Through joining the Harvest Ministry and other Pentecostal churches, people gained some independence from the vanua since they were forbidden by the church from participating in the frequent kava ceremonies that reinforced and acknowledged the vanua hierarchy. The Harvest Ministry, like many Pentecostal churches, provided a moral justification for achieved success by linking such success to good habits and to God’s favour (see also Gewertz and Errington 1999). This helped affluent urbanites to fend off at least some of the requests from less prosperous relatives, although most people continued to give money to relatives and to the vanua. When enlisted for vanua causes they did not support, people could excuse themselves in morally acceptable terms by saying that they were Pentecostals who needed to give money to church causes. In doing so, they both became respected church elders and avoided alienating their kin. Church members also supplemented their kin and vanua networks with new ones that brought them together with other successful people who could help each other with business contacts, finding jobs, getting their children into good schools and other things (see also Burdick 1993; Chesnut 1996; Gershon 2006; Gewertz and Errington 1999; Gooren 1999; Lindhardt 2009; Martin 2001; Maxwell 1998; Wiegele 2004).

The Harvest Ministry illustrated well the locally specific nature of middle-class projects and the ways Fijian projects cemented rather than challenged ethnic divisions and identities. To achieve greater recognition and autonomy for successful indigenous Fijians, Harvest Ministry pastors drew on, but reformulated, the model of the vanua. Vanua were attached to particular localities from which, in theory, the ancestors or vu of the group had first emerged on earth. In the vanua, each person nurtured and cared for others (veilomani), respected and obeyed those of higher rank (veidokai) and gave service to others and support to the community (veigaravi) (Toren 2004, 2006, 2007, 2011). The mutual service of community members was in some contexts translated as a form of tribute to the chief (7 liuliu or tui), who would channel spiritual efficacy (mana) to the community (Toren 1999). In the Harvest Ministry, church members were directed to care for one another, but also to direct their love to the less fortunate peoples of the world. Church members also both preserved the community through reciprocal performance of duties (i tavi) and directed tribute, in the form of tithes and offerings, to the senior pastor. Particularly in the period following the Bainimarama coup, pastors cast these ideas in a language of free enterprise, speaking of the importance of a strong corporate church structure, where the head pastor ensured ‘brand’ consistency and channelled anointing to the church. Once properly branded, the ‘productivity’ of the church could be exported and ‘reproduced’ elsewhere.

Through this rhetoric, successful urban professionals could define a status for themselves that was similar, but superior, to that of rural elders, by showing that they could go beyond the local agency of traditional chiefs by performing service (veigaravi) and dispensing compassion (veilomani) in a world Christian community conversant in transnational business—a construction that became all the more attractive after the 2006 coup led people to want to emphasise facility with and ties to the outside world. Harvest Ministry rhetoric, in short, partially challenged the Fijian status quo by highlighting the leadership of urban indigenous Fijians, but, as I will outline below, it offered no serious challenge to ethnic divisions, the importance of indigenous Fijian culture or the position of senior men in a hierarchical community (see also Morgain 2015).