Contribution short abstract:

For members of a Pentecostal church in the Kingdom of Tonga, becoming a ‘good Christian’ entails negotiating between and reconciling what their pastor labels ‘island mentality’ and a Pentecostalism heavily influenced by the US based parent church.

Contribution long abstract:

The majority of people in the Kingdom of Tonga identify as Christian. Inside a Pentecostal church in the country’s capital Nuku’alofa, a pastor wanted his congregation to become ‘good Christians’ in the way his US based parent church desired them to be. However, he faced one issue: a mode of indigenous subjectivity that he called ‘island mentality’. As a Pacific Islander himself, the pastor intimately understood how this local Tongan ‘island mentality,’ and its corresponding field of cultural practices, were shaped and enacted. The ‘island mentality’ sometimes contradicted Christianity as defined by the American parent church, taken to include living like Jesus, studying the bible, and taking part in world evangelism. My paper thus poses the question: for members of this Pentecostal church, how is the tension between local Tongan ‘island mentality’ and American Pentecostalism reconciled and negotiated in their pursuit of becoming ‘good Christians’? The entire congregation were socialized in other mainline Christian denominations that were more aligned with local Tongan cultural frameworks. Many church members had to leave behind their former church, and consequently often also their kin, to become a ‘good Christian’. These interconnected translations of different religious and cultural settings across local and global contexts interacted to generate novel cross-cultural perspectives from the believers, the pastor, and from myself. With different objectives, we collectively navigated through plural cultural and religious landscapes that positioned us between the uniform idea of a ‘good Christian’ and a personal impetus to shape the identity we desired.