Faith Among the New Hebrides

In the nineteenth century there sailed from Scotland a man who would spend his life among islands most of his countrymen could not find on a map. His name was John Gibson Paton. He was a Presbyterian, raised in a cottage where his father prayed aloud so often that the children grew up hearing God spoken to as a friend. And when the call came to carry the gospel to the New Hebrides, the islands now called Vanuatu, friends begged him not to go. One older man warned him plainly that he would be killed and eaten. Paton answered that whether he was buried in the ground at home or on a distant shore, the same Lord would raise him on the last day. So he went.

The islands were beautiful and they were perilous. Earlier missionaries had landed and been killed within hours. Paton came ashore on Tanna with his young wife Mary, and for a brief season there was hope. A home was built. A child was on the way.

Then the close, hard scene of his life arrived, and it did not come by a spear. It came by fever. Mary gave birth to a son, and within weeks the sickness took her. Soon after, it took the baby too. Paton was left alone on a strange shore, digging the graves with his own hands. He laid his wife and his child in the ground, and he later wrote that but for Jesus, he would have gone mad and died beside that lonely grave. There was no quick triumph here. There was a man on his knees in the dirt, weeping, far from everyone he loved. That grief was real. It deserves to be held still for a moment before the story moves on.

And the danger did not lift. There were seasons on Tanna when Paton spent nights expecting to be killed, when clubs were raised and weapons drawn, when he hid in trees and trusted God for the morning. In time he was driven off the island altogether, his house plundered, his work seemingly in ruins.

But the story did not end on Tanna. Paton came at last to the smaller island of Aniwa, and there the long, patient labour took root. He learned the language. He reduced it to writing. He translated the Scriptures so that the people could hear the word of God in their own tongue. He taught. He dug a well, and when fresh water rose up from the ground, many on Aniwa believed that the God Paton served was real. A church was gathered. People who had never heard the name of Christ now sang to him.

And here the story must open wide and tell the truth fully. The work did not stand on one brave Scotsman alone. Ni-Vanuatu believers carried it: teachers, translators, converts, whole families who risked everything to follow Jesus among their own people. They were not raw material for a hero's legend. They were image-bearers of God, peoples with their own histories and fears, who became brothers and sisters in Christ. The gospel took root on Aniwa because Christ was gathering a people, and he used many hands to do it.

John Paton lived into old age, travelling and pleading for the islands he loved, raising support so that others could go. His courage is worth remembering. But it was a courage joined to grief, and joined to humility, and joined to honour for the people he served. He buried his wife and his child on a foreign shore and did not turn back. And the deepest thing his life leaves behind is not the danger he survived, but the certainty that carried him through it: that the Lord who walked with him into every grave would not leave one of his children in the ground forever.