The Adventist Church and Pathfinders in Papua New Guinea

On June 25, 1908, Septimus and Edith Carr and a Fijian of about 20, Peni Tavodi, stepped ashore at Port Moresby. That landing began the history of the Adventist Church in Papua New Guinea, the branch of the Seventh-day Adventist Church in a country with about 700 indigenous languages. Peni's support had been pledged by Adventist children and young people in Australia and New Zealand.

In 1964, the young people did it again: their offerings paid for a clinic boat for the Sepik River, named Pathfinder in recognition of the young donors. Today, the country's camporees gather thousands of Pathfinders. This is the story, with dates checked against the Encyclopedia of Seventh-day Adventists, the church's official website in the country, and the Adventist press, including issues printed at the time.

🧭How did the Adventist Church come to Papua New Guinea?

The first attempt never got off the ground. In 1895, the church's world headquarters planned to send medical student Albert Read to open a mission in Papua, but Dr. John Kellogg wrote to Ellen White with concerns about Read's health and preparation, and the plan was dropped, according to the Encyclopedia of Seventh-day Adventists (ESDA).

After Adventist leaders visited the coast between 1902 and 1905, the church set aside the Sabbath School offerings for the third quarter of 1906 for the new field. In 1907, Septimus and Edith Carr, teachers at the Buresala mission school in Fiji, were appointed to open the work, and they took a student with them: Penisimani Tavodi, known as Peni, one of the school's first ten students.

Peni's support was left to the young people. Youth societies in New Zealand, South Australia, and Queensland collected the money, and the ESDA records that children and young people in those three Conferences committed themselves to the cause. These groups belonged to the same family of societies that make up the JMV roots of the Pathfinders. The party sailed on June 5, 1908, and landed at Port Moresby on the 25th.

🌿Who was Peni Tavodi, the missionary supported by young people?

Papua took its toll from the start. Three months after arriving, Peni came down with severe malaria. On the Sogeri Plateau, inland, Carr found good soil, a milder climate, and no other denomination at work. In November 1909, Peni moved to the property, called Bisiatabu, about 45 kilometers from the port, and helped clear gardens of taro, bananas, and rubber trees.

The property was dedicated on February 28, 1910. On July 11 of that year, during a one-day stopover in Port Moresby, John Fulton, president of the Australasian Union Conference, organized the first Adventist church in Papua, with six charter members. It bore the name Bisiatabu but met in the port town.

In 1912, Peni married Aliti Rainima, also from Fiji. At the end of 1913, he climbed into the mountains along the trail now known as the Kokoda Track, preaching in villages such as Efogi and Kagi, all the way to the slopes of Mount Victoria. The Motu language he had learned on the coast was no use up there, so he communicated by signs. Once, he went to fetch his Fijian colleague Mitieli, who had been left behind with malaria in a village, and carried him alone for two days along the trail. In 1917, though they earned little, the couple gave a whole month's salary to the Sacrifice Offering.

🕊️Why did the first decade of the mission look like a failure?

The numbers from those years are hard reading. By the time Septimus Carr returned to Australia, the only person baptized was a young man named Taito, who soon went back to village ways and returned to the church only a decade later. Arthur Lawson, who took charge of Bisiatabu, admitted that ten years of work, from 1908 to 1918, had left no visible fruit.

On October 9, 1918, Peni was working in the garden when a black snake, one of the most venomous in the region, bit him on the leg. He treated the bite himself and went back to work; when he felt the venom taking hold, he chose to spend his last hours with his friends rather than risk the journey to the hospital in Port Moresby. Before he died, at 11 p.m., he made a final appeal to the mission workers. Two of them, Baigani and Orira, responded and were later baptized.

Aliti stayed on for a time to continue her husband's work; after returning to Fiji and remarrying, she came back in 1930 to run the Efogi station with her second husband. On June 13, 2008, at the church's centennial in the country, celebrated at Bisiatabu, a clan of the Koiari people asked forgiveness for Peni's death in a traditional ceremony. A sorcerer related to the clan had claimed to have caused that death, and the Koiari, most of them Adventists by then, carried a sense of collective guilt. In 2017, Peni's home village in Fiji gained the Peni Tavodi Memorial Adventist Church.

A true missionary, a faithful worker, and a humble, consistent Christian.Septimus Carr on Peni Tavodi, quoted in the Encyclopedia of Seventh-day Adventists

⛰️How did the mission spread through the mountains and islands?

The turning point came in the 1920s. On October 25, 1924, William Lock baptized 11 young men and 3 young women at Bisiatabu, all students at the mission school, and the next day he left with his family for the new Efogi station, high in the Owen Stanley Range. Missionaries from the Solomon Islands, such as Oti and Salau, took the message to Rabaul in 1929 and to the islands of Mussau and Emirau from 1931.

During World War II, Papuan and New Guinean leaders cared for the churches while most foreign missionaries were away. On August 26, 1950, before about 1,200 Highlanders gathered at Bena Bena, Taula and Guibau became the first pastors from the country to be ordained by the church.

The organization kept pace with the growth, as the table shows. The country gained independence from Australia in 1975, three years after the church created a union of its own there. According to the ESDA, at the end of 2018 the Papua New Guinea Union Mission, headquartered in Lae and part of the South Pacific Division (SPD), had 333,854 members. In 2026, the Union's official website reports more than 600,000 members in 1,339 organized churches.

Source: Encyclopedia of Seventh-day Adventists (ESDA), entries Papua New Guinea and Papua New Guinea Union Mission; 2026 row: official website of the Papua New Guinea Union Mission.

🛶Why was a Sepik River clinic boat called Pathfinder?

When the church began medical work on the Sepik River, in partnership with the government, the team had only a dugout canoe with an outboard motor and an unreliable diesel launch, and the distances made visits almost impossible. According to the ESDA, in 1964 Adventist young people in what was then the Australasian Division raised about £6,000 to build a houseboat that could serve as a floating clinic.

The 36-foot boat (about 11 meters) took eight or nine months to build at Wewak and then went up the river to Ambunti, its base. On August 13, 1965, during the Sepik Mission session, the president of the Coral Sea Union Mission, Pastor O. D. F. McCutcheon, dedicated the vessel and named it M.V. Pathfinder "in recognition of the great part played by the youth of Australasia," as the Australasian Record reported on October 4, 1965. Nurses began serving villages along some 400 kilometers of the river, vaccinating babies and caring for expectant mothers.

The same report, written by the union's MV secretary, J. R. Lee, says where the money came from: the houseboat was "made possible by the loving gifts of the Australasian Division MV societies and interested American friends." The MV (Missionary Volunteer) Societies were the church's youth movement, the same one from which the JMVs also came. None of the sources consulted credits the offering to Pathfinder Clubs, even though Pathfinder, the one who finds the way, is also the name of the club itself, made official by the General Conference in 1950 (learn the origin of the Pathfinder name).

The first boat did not work out. In floods, its open hulls filled with water, and the jet pushed only one of them, which made steering risky for nurses on their own. It was taken out of the water during 1968 and never returned to service. On May 18, 1972, Pathfinder II was dedicated: a 52-foot vessel (about 16 meters) of marine aluminum, built at Ambunti. The teams vaccinated against diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough, tuberculosis, and polio, and by the early 1980s the boat was in the hands of Papua New Guinean nurses and a Papua New Guinean captain.

Laid up from the early 2000s until 2013 because of maintenance costs, Pathfinder II underwent major repairs in July 2013. The ESDA entry, published in 2020, records that it "continues to operate, albeit with some challenges."

⛺When did Pathfinders start in Papua New Guinea (PNG)?

The name and date of the first club do not appear in the sources consulted, so this article does not guess a year. The oldest record of clubs in the country that we found is from 1977: the Australasian Record of November 14 that year described the "first-ever Western Highlands Mission Pathfinder Fair," held on an airstrip at Togoba, about 1,800 meters (6,000 feet) above sea level, with 300 Pathfinders from nine clubs competing in ten contests.

In 1989, Malcolm Allen, General Conference Pathfinder director from 1986 to 1996, attended a camporee on Mussau Island, according to an article of his republished by Adventist Record. To meet him at Milne Bay, a pastor and seven Pathfinders walked for seven days through the mountains; for another camporee, 55 Pathfinders traveled three days in a huge dugout canoe from Kikori, on the Gulf of Papua.

In December 2017, the Ambunti district, base of the Pathfinder clinic boats, held an entire camporee on a floating platform measuring 50 by 40 meters, on a lagoon linked to the Sepik, with 350 Pathfinders and leaders and 47 baptisms, according to Adventist Record. From January 7 to 13, 2018, more than 5,000 Pathfinders from across the country camped at Bautama for the union camporee, Chosen to Serve, which opened with a reenactment of the first missionaries' arrival and closed with 80 baptisms, according to the Adventist News Network (ANN).

In 2024, a regional camporee at Mohuveto passed 12,000 participants, as our coverage of the 2024 Papua New Guinea camporee shows. In July 2026, Pathfinders from PNG crossed the border, some after days of walking, for the Arafura International Pathfinder Camporee in Indonesia.

🎒What can Papua New Guinea's history teach your club?

In December 2025, Adventist Record reported that more than 60 Pathfinders and instructors from two churches in the Central Papuan Conference hiked for three days from Bisiatabu to Furimuti, across the Yamagi range, to complete investiture requirements. The trail began on the land Peni Tavodi helped clear in 1909. That same year, the magazine reported the first investiture at the Fifteen Mile church.

Twice, at the start of the 20th century and in 1964, money from children and young people opened the way for the mission in Papua. In April 1908, two months before Peni sailed, the Brisbane young people's society held a program night at the church: the children sang and recited, and two of them went through the audience collecting what each one had earned from small enterprises, 4 pounds, 12 shillings and 6 pence, according to the church's paper in Australia. When your Unit saves coins for a mission project, it repeats that gesture.

Peni was about 20 when he landed at Port Moresby, and he died without seeing the church grow: the first group baptism at Bisiatabu came six years later. Paul's advice to Timothy fits his story well: “Don’t let anyone look down on you because you are young, but set an example for the believers in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith and in purity” (1 Timothy 4:12, NIV).

At your next meeting, find Port Moresby, Bisiatabu, and the Sepik River on a map, and tell your Unit about the canoe journey from Kikori. The Australian side of the same story is in the history of Pathfinders and Adventism in Australia.