In 1996, I went to Tonga as a participant in About FACE 4, a Uniting Church exchange program designed to encourage reflection on mission and church leadership in multicultural Australia, where migrants from Asia and the Pacific Islands are now a very significant part of church life, especially in the eastern states. Over 100 participants travelled to six different countries: Tonga, Samoa, Fiji, Indonesia, Korea and El Salvador for a period of two weeks and we also spent a weekend in migrant churches in Australia. Some of you will recall assisting the Rev. Cate Baker (nee Clarke) to go to El Salvador.
About a dozen of us arrived in Tonga, where over half of the population adhere to various branches of Methodism, for the Festival of New Year – a Watchnight Service on New Year’s Eve, the Covenant Service and a week of feasting. It was quite extraordinary to be involved in morning and evening services, up at 5am and in bed late into the night.
The Covenant Service is unique to Methodism and is a model for Christian unity, with the Church of South India and the Church of England adopting the service and influencing revisions of it. The closest equivalent is the renewal of baptismal vows found in the Easter mass of the Roman Catholic Church.
John Wesley transformed private Puritan practices of rededication into a corporate act of worship. He held the first service in London on 11 August 1755, which involved a long exhortation and covenant prayer. He often linked the service with Holy Communion and his brother Charles wrote a hymn for it: ‘Come, let us use the grace divine’. It became associated with the New Year because Methodists held the service to coincide with Wesley’s annual visits.
Scholars of liturgy have criticised the service for being too focused on worshippers rather than God, for overshadowing baptism and the Eucharist, and for being too intense to observe frequently. Around the world Methodists adopted the service unevenly, which reflected and contributed to wider attitudes to church life and discipline. In British Methodism the covenant service became almost universal, but in other countries such as America, the service was not adopted widely. If the covenant service reflects an appropriate level of commitment between God and members it can be a constructive contribution to Christian unity. But what is an appropriate commitment?
These traditions are now rarely observed in English speaking churches in Australia to the same extent, but continue in Pacific Island ones. In Tonga the covenant service reflects a very intense commitment to the church with churchgoers sacrificing personal needs for the sake of the maintenance of the church. In a subsistence economy there is usually enough land and food for all.
For Tongan migrants in Australia, however, loyalty to the church can occur at the expense of keeping up with mortgage repayments or the education of the young who are encouraged to attend too many singing practices to the neglect of their homework. The main aim of the current generation of youth workers is to get young Tongan Christians out of the time-warp of eighteenth century Methodism and focussed on their education and the development of an informed faith so that they might be kept out of jail.
As Christians, our covenant is appropriate when we are concerned about the whole of life, not just with the perpetuation of our own existence.
Dr Julia Pitman
Julia is currently a candidate for Minister of the Word and is studying at the Uniting College for Leadership and Theology in Adelaide. |
