Erromanga e os martires missionários

Erromanga e os martires missionários.

Erromanga, an island in the southern region of Vanuatu (formerly the New Hebrides) is only 40 kilometres long and 25 kilometres wide, at its widest point. The famous explorer, Captain James Cook, who visited the island in 1774 and ended up having a military skirmish with the islanders, commented afterwards that "no one would ever venture to introduce Christianity into Erromanga because neither fame nor profit would offer the requisite inducement." In November 1839, John Williams, a British missionary who had worked in the eastern Pacific for over twenty years, did attempt to make contact with the people of Erromanga. Williams, who was scouting out potential new mission sites for the London Missionary Society, visited Erromanga on board the Camden. He received what he thought was a cordial reception. On his second excursion on the island further than the beach at Dillon's Bay, the sheltered anchorage on the north-west part of the island, he and his companion James Harris, a sailor who was seriously considering entering the ministry, were attacked and killed. The news of their deaths shook the missionary community in the southern Pacific and back in Great Britain and in Canada as well.

The London Missionary Society missionaries from Fiji and Samoa supported a series of Samoan and Roratongan Christians who moved on to Erromanga with the purpose of preaching the gospel and teaching the children of the island. These missionary ventures often ended in tragedy as some of the Samoan and Roratongan missionaries were killed and others starved to death because no one on Erromanga would assist them with acquiring food. It is estimated that approximately forty Samoan and Roratongan Christians, both adults and children, died seeking to proclaim the good news about Jesus to the people of Erromanga. By the early 1840s all missinary endeavours to reach the people of this tiny island ceased.

Our story now moves to Prince Edward Island. In 1848, John and Charlotte Geddie and their family bid farewell to Prince Edward Island becoming the first Canadian Presbyterian missionaries sent to another part of the world. They went to the island of Aneityum, the most southern of the islands in the New Hebrides to establish a mission. Shortly after his arrival Geddie wrote home, asking that the mission board send more missionaries. But it was not until 1855 that the board was able to meet that request in the person of George N. Gordon.

In June 1857, the Gordons arrived on Erromanga setting up their mission station at Dillon's Bay. They purchased the land for the mission from Kowiowi, a chief on the island, who had been responsible for the murder of John Williams seventeen years earlier.

1861 was a bad year for Erromanga. In January a typhoon devastated the island. In March, a group of sandalwood traders brought two people who had measles with them on their ship, and proceeded to expose these infected people to as many Erromangans as possible. The measles killed hundreds; in some villages half the people died. Gordon was kept busy caring for the sick; only two of the patients he attended died of the measles. They happened to be children of one of the island's chiefs. The chief believed that Gordon had cast a spell on his children and killed them. In his anger and grief, he plotted to kill George and Ellen, which he and a group of warriors did on May 20, 1861. After burying the Gordons, the forty Erromangan Christians fled to Aneityum, and told Geddie and the other missionaries the story.

At the time of the Gordons' deaths in 1861, there were three baptized believers on Erromanga -- Gordon was demanding in his expectations of baptized believers -- and a cluster of forty Christians.

On hearing of his brother's death, James D. Gordon, immediately volunteered to take his brother's place so that he might go and proclaim the gospel and a message of forgiveness to his brother and sister-in-law's murderers. James, ten years younger than his martyred brother, was born in 1832.

Late in 1861, the Christian community had returned to Erromanga at their own request, so there was a small church communtiy with which Gordon could work.

In 1868, Gordon became a missionary under the auspices of the Presbyterian Church in New South Wales, Australia. That year he was asked by the mission to return to Espiritu Santo, but Gordon did not feel that his work on Erromanga was finished, and so told the mission that he was going to remain there, taking "this step on his own responsibility." Then, in 1870, as the result of a misunderstanding between himself and the rest of the Presbyterian missionaries in the New Hebrides, Gordon resigned all official ties with the mission, continuing his work on Erromanga.

James Gordon seems to have had a foreshadowing that his life might end much as his brother's had. When out walking with one of his closest companions, Soso, Gordon had pointed to a place and said, "If I die, bury me here." On March 7, 1872, while working on the translation of the book of Acts, he was killed for reasons that are still unclear. In his translation work, he had reached Acts 7:60, Stephen's words, "Lord, do not hold this sin against them."

James Gordon had followed his brother's missionary methodology, choosing to train a small group of young Erromangan male converts in the faith, with the hope that they would become the future leaders of the church. This group of young men travelled with him everywhere on the island, and he built into them a deep understanding and commitment to the faith. By 1870, he had baptized sixteen people, and only one of them had turned their back on the faith.

Most of those who were baptized became proclaimers of the gospel to their own people, and after Gordon's death in 1872, the Erromangan church was able to raise up its own native leaders, moving more quickly to self-sufficiency in its leaders than most of the other island churches in the region. In their twelve years of ministry, George and Ellen, and James Gordon, while marching to the beat of a drummer they alone could hear, laid the groundwork for an indigenous church led by native leaders.

In 1880, a church building was dedicated at Dillon's Bay, and named the Martyrs' Church. One of the native Christian leaders who spoke at the dedication of the church predicted that within a generation the whole island would be Christian. His words were prophetic, for by 1900, 95% of the people of Erromanga identified themselves as Christians. It was to this goal that the Gordons gave their lives.