There are more important things than bicentennial celebrations – and it would be wholly inappropriate to begin this 2022 selection of historical Methodist events and people without giving, firstly, serious and compassionate thought to the thousands of Tongan people whose lives have been affected by eruption and tsunami.

This is being written when the full nature of the catastrophe is hardly known – but it is proper to express, as members of a family, our sorrow and our support to the people of that island kingdom with which New Zealand Methodism has been so long associated.

That association, in a somewhat indirect way, began in 1822 with the decision of Walter Lawry, then a circuit minister in Sydney, to extend the Wesleyan mission-field to the Friendly Islands. He did this largely on his own account. Walter was a determined and able man and he did not find Samuel Leigh the most supportive of Superintendents. So he looked further afield and from the beginning of 1822 tried to find the means of transporting himself and his wife to the Islands. This was not an easy task, since there were few ships travelling in that direction and the Friendly Islands had a bad name with the sea-farers of the South Pacific. However, Walter was determined, and a man of means, and by the middle of the year had bought a boat, the St Michael, partly at his own expense (£600) and set out on what was initially a trading venture. They stopped firstly in the north of New Zealand where time was spent trading.

They sighted Euea in mid-August and then Tongatapu. They were helped by immediately making contact with William Singleton, an Englishman who had lived there for many years. He presented Lawry to the Island’s chief and such a positive relationship was established from the start with Palau that Lawry purchased land near the chief’s residence. He landed his sheep and cows and a bull - and all the other necessities for a mission station - and within a month had moved ashore, naming the Mission Station after Thomas Coke, the founder of Wesleyan overseas missions.

Lawry dutifully preached the Gospel, but he found it difficult to adjust to the culture of his new neighbours. Their feasts and ceremonies alarmed him - he felt he had ‘reached the ends of the earth’. He was busy, of course, in many things, but he realised he would need to establish regular links with Wesleyanism in New South Wales. From this source there might come converts who would staff the ongoing mission. With Singleton’s help Lawry continued to make contact with the chiefs of the Island and he described one nine-day feast which he thought resembled a harvest festival. His forward-thinking included planning for a school and a schoolmaster. The St Michael returned to NSW in October, promising to return in six months, and Lawry and his wife were now alone.

While Palau protected them - the Mission was, in its way, his property - there were problems with theft. His English ‘agent was helpful enough’, but Lawry considered his beliefs to be those ‘of a savage’. The trouble for Lawry was that he was unmarried but living with a native wife, and this was totally unacceptable to an evangelical. It became clear the mission was living among the people on sufferance, because of their trading value. Lawry acknowledged they made little impact, and the first six months ended in despondency and loneliness.

Eric Hames suggests that Lawry was not a good missionary, though he would have made an admirable director of missions. He had no gift for the language, there were no conversions; his assumption of cultural superiority was an insurmountable barrier; his wife had miscarried, and the promised arrival of supplies did not happen. The final straw was a letter from the London Committee which passed judgment on his actions in Sydney a year earlier, declaring his behaviour irregular and disobedient. It disallowed the mission to Tonga, though this had already happened. There’s no point here in analysing the factors which led to the Committee’s decision, but the outcome was Lawry’s decision to return to Sydney, which he and his wife did in October 1823.

This brief survey is not in any sense a celebration of a new endeavour. It is, in fact, a summary of a failure. But it does represent, in a real way, the very beginning of a long relationship between Methodism and the people of Tonga. They were not forgotten, and by 1830 a new and more effective start was made, and the results of that are to be seen everywhere in Tonga today. That part of God’s world, so damaged at this very moment, is an essential concern of Methodism and Methodists in Aotearoa/New Zealand. That’s what we can say of Walter Lawry’s dream of 1822.