Acceptance of Christianity in Southern Polynesia during the eighteenth century proceeded rapidly without missionary activity. This fact attracted the attention of Alan Tippett, who served for twenty years as an Australian missionary to the Fiji Islands. What he found was that the key to their conversion lay in the fact that, without missionary presence, the south sea islanders responded to demonstrations of what Tippett learned to call “power encounters.” These were contests, some staged, some not staged, in which there was a power encounter between the true God and the gods of the islanders in which the traditional gods were defeated. Kraft here discusses the fact that this power principle applies much more widely.
