MISSIONARY WORK

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 77, Issue 6567, 17 September 1948, Page 3

MISSIONARY WORK

ASSOCIATES OF MELANESIA

ADDRESS BY PRESBYTERIAN MINISTER

“You have a mission of which you have every reason to be proud,” said the Rev. J. E. Stewart (Papanui), a Presbyterian minister, to Associates of Melanesia, at their annual meeting in Christchurch, when telling them of work done by the mission which he had seen when he was stationed with an Air Force squadron a few miles from the mission’s headquarters during the war. He thought the success of the mission could be attributed in part to the responsibility given to the natives in the life of the church in their own land, said Mr Stewart. He had been interested to see that education had been so closely linked with the Christian faith that the two were one. Prejudice against medical treatment had also been overcome. Before the mission hospital had been established, native women had been left to their own devices at childbirth and were often left without food. Now, however, many of them went to the hospital for the delivery of children, and a system similar to the Plunket method was in operation for the after care of babies. Another reason why the mission was successful was that workers had tried to combine the Christian faith and native culture, and had not attempted to impose on the native people a culture that was alien to them. The goal of mission work should be a blending- of the Christian faith and the native way of life, said Mr Stewart. He emphasised also the need to have Christian people on strategic islands in the Pacific.

Referring to the increased cost ol* maintaining the mission boat Southern Cross, which is the only boat carrying supplies to the southern part of Melanesia, Mr Stewart said nothing but first-class equipment should be used for repairs. If members had to pay £5OO for a new launch engine, every pfenny of the money would be well spent if the engine was the best that money could buy. AH equipment sent to the mission should be the best that could be procured, he emphasised. New Zealand workers for the mission should remember, he said, the loneliness of the people who served the mission. Mails -and radios could never make up to them for being so far away from their own kind. He urged associates to remember them in their prayers as well as by material assistance. A resolution, moved by Canon F. B. Redgrave, that an endeavour be made to get more Sunday schools to support a scholar in Melanesia schools, was passed.