After long resisting Seventh-day Adventist efforts to establish a church on the Shortland Islands, part of the Solomon Islands, residents are now welcoming an Adventist church and school. Jones Jama, a Seventh-day Adventist pastor has spent the last eight years as leader of the Adventist Church in the Western Solomon Islands, part of an archipelago that dots the blue waters of the southern seas.

“The people are really getting down to knowing Christ,” he says. “We need to teach more about Christ and the simplicity of grace. To me this is most important in our situation . . . to give the key to salvation.”

But teaching about Christ and the gospel message hasn’t always been easy. Jama, the son of Adventist missionary parents, has inherited a long tradition of outreach: the church first entered the Western Solomon Islands in 1914. Missionaries met with strong resistance in some places. Residents of the Shortland Islands, a small group of islands in that area, twice tried to burn missionary ships sent there. Jama’s father, who visited the Shortlands in the 1970s, was able to baptize one convert; no one else was interested.

Toward the end of 2003, George Taylor, a businessman in Gizo, telephoned Jama and said he wanted to see Adventists in the Shortlands. Residents would welcome Adventist schools, and an Adventist church.

Why? Taylor says because the residents have seen the success and influence of those educated in Adventist schools, and the way in which the church was ready to provide schools even in somewhat isolated islands, not just Honiara, the far-away capitol of the Solomon Islands. After a hundred years of neglect by the dominant church in the area, which refused to build a local high school, the people of the Shortlands rebelled.

“The schools are a great witness,” Jama says. “Kukudu Adventist College has students from the Shortlands who have been baptized, so when they go home, they tell the stories. So when the people looked for a church to establish a school, naturally they opted for the Adventists. We got the land and were ready to start putting up the buildings when George Taylor came to me with a [request]: ‘We want the first building erected to be a church. The audience is ready.’ Later Taylor came to me with the request that we arrive on the Sabbath. ‘We want the first service you perform to be church on a Sabbath morning!’ he said.”

Jama said he was appreciative of the support of the local community and from Adventists in the region and throughout the world church.