Paper short abstract:

Based on how one becomes a prophet on Malaita, I advocate for a two-pronged approach to recognise both the agency of impersonal forces and the agency of the (self-altering) individual in the changing of society.

Paper long abstract:

An outpouring of the Holy Spirit or ‘fire in the islands’ dramatically transformed evangelical Christianity on the island of Malaita in Solomon Islands in the early 1970s. Perhaps most powerful was the emergence of a series of revelations from God about the vital future role of Malaita during the end times, prompting a number of people to become charismatic leaders. One of them, Reverend Michael Maeliau, successfully established a movement around what he calls the revelation of the glory of the Lord. In this paper, I reconstruct the process in which Maeliau changed from being a South Sea Evangelical Church minister and aspiring black theologian to a visionary ‘captain’ of a movement and, with a sense of being part of an ever growing temporal and geographical field, to become a broker between Malaita’s past, present and future and biblical and present-day Israel. I argue that it is healthy for anthropology to keep ambiguity in place when looking at self-alteration and I advocate for a two-pronged approach to recognise both the agency of impersonal forces and the agency of the (self-altering) individual in the changing of society.