‘The Lion from Judah is the Only Star’: Between individual self-alteration, collective belonging and impersonal forces in a New-Israelite movement in Solomon Islands

Jaap Timmer 

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 wave of revelations of God about the future role of Malaita during the end time which prompted 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 alongside a realisation that he can dwell on continuing wonder because the Spirit comes down regularly and revival is thus always new. 

 In this paper, I will reconstruct the milieu 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 growing 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. Both Malaitan genealogy and a theology inspired by the Book of Exodus allowed Maeliau and his group to create a sense of collective belonging in which personal identity is subsumed by a field of relationships that goes back to biblical Levites and encompasses a worldwide network. Key theological principles of this neo-Israelite movement suggest that Malaitans are descendants of the tribe of Judah and that all nations in the South Pacific must constitute theocracies to prepare for the return to Jerusalem. “The Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has conquered, so that he can open the scroll” (Revelation 5:5). 

My analysis will show that this case gives an ambiguous answer to the question of whether history is made by the wills of powerful people or by impersonal forces. I will argue that it is healthy for anthropology to keep that 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.