Mandated to focus on pastoral and socio-cultural issues
The Institute examines how traditional Melanesian cultural practices and beliefs interact with Christian teachings, and how churches can best serve the spiritual needs of their members within this cultural context. It studies the social structures, customs, and changing dynamics of Melanesian societies. This informs how churches and other organisations can work effectively with communities, addressing issues that impact their well-being.
Ongoing dialogue between Christian values and Melanesian cultures
The Institute seeks to preserve Melanesian traditions alongside Christian ones, fostering conversation and integration between the two. It researches how Christian values such as compassion, forgiveness, and service resonate with existing Melanesian values, and examines how Melanesian beliefs and customs can be respected and understood within a Christian framework.
Peace and reconciliation; dignity and respect; justice
The Institute promotes peace and reconciliation, dignity and respect, and social, economic and ecological justice. It addresses issues that cause conflict in Melanesian societies — tribal tensions, sorcery accusations — and promotes understanding and peaceful resolutions influenced by both cultural values and Christian teaching.
It affirms the inherent worth of every individual within Melanesian cultures, advocating for human rights and challenging practices that undermine dignity. It advocates for fair and equitable development, sustainable resource management, and the protection of traditional lands and ways of life, informed by Christian ethics of care for creation and the vulnerable.
Our framework
The Institute's formal statement of vision, mission, values and strategy.
Vision
Venturing to become a
- Hub of cross-cultural understanding and multi-disciplinary learning
- Catalyst of transformative social justice and inter-faith dialogue
- Social conscience of critical participation in governance and development
Mission
Fostering participatory processes of
- Integrating faith, culture and social change
- Cultural brokering, critique and revaluing
- Enculturating mission and pastoral services
- Forming critical consciousness and collective social analysis
- Building cultural resilience and relevance
Core values
Nurturing a Melanesian sense of
- Shared fullness of life — gutpela sindaun
- Reciprocity and eco-relationality
- Social inclusion and option for the vulnerable
- Subsidiarity and solidarity in diversity
- Integral human development
- Equitable peace based on transformative social justice
Major objectives
- To develop cultural and socio-pastoral orientation courses that promote critical understanding of the diverse Papua New Guinean and Melanesian cultures, the impact of social change, and emerging challenges to missionary and development work.
- To carry out relevant cross-disciplinary social research that builds up local and indigenous knowledge, critical analysis and scientific evidence as a catalyst for culture-sensitive social transformation.
- To promote social development schemes and church pastoral initiatives that build the capacities of the most affected grassroots communities.
- To strengthen information sharing and cross-cultural learning by publishing contextual socio-pastoral documents and designing thematic educational materials.
Key strategies
- Diversifying thematic courses responsive to the emerging development agenda and the needs of different interest groups.
- Aligning and framing modules to make sense of the intersection between Christian faith, Melanesian cultures and social change.
- Designing alternative curriculums and learning course packs based on a transformative social justice framework.
- Promoting participatory processes and tools of thematic social analysis.
- Facilitating applied and participatory action research involving affected sectors and grassroots communities, to search for relevance beyond research for evidence.
- Adopting and contextualising participatory action research and grassroots field-school approaches, turning research into a resource for social development and transformation.
- Building the collective capacities and critical consciousness of grassroots communities so they become drivers and owners of their own development.
- Engaging in broad-based multi-stakeholder networks beyond the churches’ backyards and borders — geographically, thematically and institutionally.
- Facilitating and brokering cross-cultural learning and thematic horizontal exchanges (“cultural brokering”).
- Developing alternative communication strategies and counter-narratives for positive influencing and advocacy for good governance and social accountability.
Approaches, principles and practices
- Preferential option for the poor; social inclusion and empowerment of marginalised sectors, vulnerable groups and victims of structural injustice — women, children, youth, the elderly, people living with disability, ethnic minorities, migrants and displaced peoples.
- Transformative social justice perspectives and structural approaches to a “toxic” social agenda understood as structural injustice — gender justice and gender equality, generational justice, and ecological justice and the integrity of creation.
- Conscientisation — consciousness-raising and the formation of critical thinking — through liberating, transformative adult learning.
- Participatory grassroots development processes from below.
- Cultural self-critique and revaluing, or cultural audit.
- Cross-cultural learning and multi-disciplinary perspectives.
- Multi-stakeholder engagement and collaboration.
- Knowledge-based and citizen-led participation in governance.
- Spectrum perspectives on social development initiatives, project partnerships, mentoring, and the organisational development of grassroots social movements.