Papua New Guinea: An intriguing land where the gospel has taken root

“If you can fly a plane in Papua New Guinea (PNG), you can do it anywhere,” a pilot once told me. That is an apt description of this mountainous South Pacific land. Roads are few. To reach most communities, one must fly, using their 650 landing strips (of which 20 can handle jets) in a land of only 10 million people. 

PNG is a complex and fascinating country, as I came to discover during my recent visit there as global ambassador for the World Evangelical Alliance. Its 10 million people still speak 840 different languages. Of all the actively used languages in the world, one-tenth are spoken in this land, which has less than 0.1 percent of the world’s population.

Much of PNG is mountainous, covered by forests and swamps, leaving only 2 percent of the land arable in which large palm oil plantations operate. Over time, tribes evolved as micro-cultures. Even when located close to each other, they were kept apart by dense forests and rugged terrain, which fostered unfamiliarity and often antagonism. The tribes developed their own cultural eccentricities, languages and rules of engagement.

PNG is part of the third-largest island in the world, with its mountains reaching as high as 14,793 feet. Volcanoes plague its people with accompanying earthquakes and tsunamis, made worse by landslides resulting from deforestation.

Located off the northern tip of Australia, the island is divided into two parts: the western half called Papua, a province of Indonesia, and the eastern half, which achieved independence in 1975 as PNG. Its current Prime Minister, James Marape, a Seventh Day Adventist, was elected in 2019. PNG was long controlled by Western countries attracted to its enormous natural resources. As with many other colonized lands, exploitation was the ruling mantra.

For those of us outside of this Pacific region, PNG is obscure and mostly out of mind. As a first-time visitor, I was both amazed by its beauty and enormous cultural diversity and intrigued by how the Christian message has been embraced by its people. With those factors in mind, let me introduce you to two features: an enormous effort at Bible translation and PNG’s dynamic social bonding mechanism called “Wantok” or “One Talk.”

Why Bible translation was the key

One of the first missionaries to PNG was Scotsman James Chalmers, who arrived in 1877 but was killed — a tragic occurrence in early missionary encounters. Doing outreach was no small task for these pioneer missionaries. Early on, they decided to create written languages, which meant that tribal languages needed to be put in written form before the Bible could be translated. But first the missionaries had to learn the language themselves.

For the indigenous peoples, this process not only gave them a new means by which they could record their history and create agreed-upon documents but also helped them establish and preserve their language. This development of written language facilitated the building of schools and the teaching of reading and writing, which opened up new educational and life opportunities for the people.

All this did not happen easily. When the Wycliffe Bible Translators and the Summer Institute of Linguistics were formed in 1942, the founders assumed that there were 1,100 working languages in the world. They sent teams to New Guinea and found about 1,100 languages on that island alone! When they learned of these findings, they were almost too stunned to react. It would take a massive undertaking to provide the Bible to even a small fraction of the population.

According to the latest calculation, among PNG’s 841 language groups, the full New Testament has been translated into 130 languages, parts of the Bible have been translated into 290 languages, and 421 still have none of the Bible in their language. Even so, 94 percent of PNG’s people self-identify as Christian and 23 percent as evangelical. 

In a country that never heard the gospel until the late 1800s, Bible translation has been the key to such a large majority of its people identifying as Christian. While many may be only nominal believers, PNG is an important example of the transforming impact that translation has in giving people the Bible in their own language.

For a people group to hold the Bible text and read it for the first time in their own language is like a re-enactment of the day of Pentecost when the Spirit descended. Translation carries with it the implicit assertion that God is at the centre of every culture. People of all tribes quickly learn that they are beloved and stand on common ground. The Bible, now in their tongue, affirms that in God’s economy, all are of equal value and worth. To translate is to incarnate. To bring the Bible to a people in words they can now embrace, in a language their tongue can feel and articulate, is to say in no uncertain terms that Jesus also lives in their neighbourhood. It is revolutionary, even for those who don’t consider themselves religious.

“One Talk”

Now let me tell you about a feature that is definitive of PNG’s people and strategic in getting messages out. I have never observed in any other country or among any other people a social dynamic that is so influential and powerfully active in defining relationships and responsibility. In their marketplace language of Tok Pisin, it is called “Wantok” (“One Talk” or in English, “people who speak the same language”) or as I’ve been advised better defined as the “wantok system.”

Wantok, a social safety net, was initially a means of ensuring that PNG’s people would have enough food and a place in which to live. Today it has come to mean more than that. It has become a national assumption that regardless of one’s work or station in life, your first responsibility is to your own tribe or religious or political tribe, giving preference to that group around which your life revolves. When I was introduced to a government minister, those with us indicated his church membership and added that naturally, his key people would be from that same church.

One Talk or Wantok is a social glue acting as a bonding force within their many cultures. In a society so defined by its tribal worlds, their social intercourse evolves around the well-being of tribes and clan members.

The influence of Wantokism spreads across all sectors – including business, the civil service, and churches – as one is expected to make their first contribution to their own group or tribe. Someone noted, “Saying no is simply not an option if the businessperson wants to maintain their position of respect in the community. This often leads to money being siphoned out of the business to meet the never-ending requests. In many cases, the One Talk system has led to bankruptcy.”

Such social bonding is not surprising in a land of hundreds of small tribes, as over millennia, they found ways to protect their own and ensure sufficient resources for all. In a more urban world, such clinging becomes a setup for corruption, as pressure is put on those with influence and status to use their power and influence to benefit their own. For a senior politician, the pressure to meet Wantok-related social obligations is high, with an accompanying sense of obligation to use their influence to meet expectations.

An upside of this remarkable form of social influence is that within tribal and family networks, the gospel spreads by way of these trusted family connections. Mission work could then bridge into entire communities that otherwise might be shut to them.

Nevertheless, the influence of the Christian message in this context is readily apparent. The Bible text is made holy when it inhabits other tongues. The power of the Scriptures is evident as it is made present in a new culture through translation into the culture’s indigenous language. Its first-century power is unleashed anew as native speakers hear and speak the Word in their own language, nestled within their own worlds and cultures. A Christian visitor to PNG cannot leave without marveling at how God has worked through faithful missionaries here.