Island of Angels: The Growth of the Church on Kosrae (review)

Island of Angels recounts the history of the Christian church on the Micro­nesian island of Kosrae from the 1852 arrival of the first Congregational missionary couple. Author Elden Buck himself served as a missionary on Kosrae from 1958 to 1962. His wife, Mary Alice Hanlin Buck, had earlier been a missionary on the island and contributed to the new translation of the Kosraean Bible, completed in 2002. Buck's documentary research and firsthand Kosrae experience produced a monograph of twenty chapters, each exhaustively covering an era in the history of the island's mission and independent church.

The book begins with a discussion of pre-Christian life. It goes on to recount the experiences of Benjamin and Lydia Snow, the first missionaries. Buck gives special attention to the history of the boarding school at Wot ("Mwot"), where in 1879 the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions provided missionaries to educate and train Kiribatese and Marshallese children. He describes the work of the Baldwin sisters (Elizabeth and Jane) at Wot between 1911 and 1940 in exhaustive detail, including their first translation of the entire Bible into Kosraean in 1926. He leads readers through the Japanese and American periods, concentrating on the enduring faith of Kosrae's Christians as they coped with the deprivations of World War II and adapted to the changes introduced by the American government. Buck concludes by describing changes in the Kosraean church in the past thirty years, including the controversial shift from infant to adult baptism and in the governing structure of the all-island church.

The book is a thickly detailed temporal narrative, with practically no interpretation or analysis. It is very thorough: Buck mentions virtually every event of the last century and ahalf connected to the mission and church, describes the work of all missionaries ever stationed on the island, and seemingly names every Kosraean pastor and church leader of the past and present. He quotes dozens of lengthy passages from missionary journals and letters, most of which provide a sense of the devotion of the residents of this "island of angels" to their cultural variant of Christianity. Buck fills the book with praise for the devotion and good works of members of the Kosraean church. Himself a former minister of the Church of Christ, Buck's admiration for the Christians of Kosrae and for the ­dedication of those Americans who brought them the gospel is almost unqualified. The handy appendix lists all Kosraean pastors from 1869 on, all missionaries and a brief description of their activities, and all deacons, lay ministers, and other important church leaders. A two or three page summary in Kosraean precedes every chapter. For these and other reasons, most Kosraeans will find the book a valuable resource, and I suspect that many will consider it downright ­inspirational.

I found a few features of Island of Angels mildly annoying. The plethora of names sometimes made the narrative hard to follow, even for one who is familiar with Kosraean church history and with Kosraean names. Other readers probably will have a rougher time than I. Each chapter is divided into dozens of sections, some of which are no longer than a sentence or two. Although these divisions make it easy to locate a particular topic, the narrative is more disjointed than it needs to be. Although understandable given his objectives, Buck chose to organize the book's chapters temporally rather than topically. For example, information about the mission schools at Wot or the Baldwin sisters is scattered widely among the chapters, making itdifficult to learn about a particular subject. A careful mixture of a temporal and a topical organization would have alleviated this problem. The book's length and incredible...