On Tuesday the senior residents and invited guests of the Chanel Home of Compassion in Tamavua, Fiji, took part in a ground-breaking ceremony to mark the construction of a new wing. The $3.5 million project will increase the bed capacity up to 33, and will make it easier to meet the greater needs of today Read more
A legal battle is taking place in Utah, USA, as a result of a split in the Tongan Wesleyan Church there. The split in the church took place after Filimone Havili Mone, the former pastor of the Tongan United Methodist Church, was charged with failing to report child abuse. The Rocky Mountain Conference removed Mone Read more
The Anglican Alliance’s biggest capacity building program Agents of Change has been launched in Honiara, the capital of the Solomon Islands. The Church’s Melanesian Board of Mission’s Secretary, Fr George Elo, helped to launch the study program with the Anglican Alliance Pacific Facilitator, Tagolyn Kabekabe. The course – a distance learning course in community development Read more
The Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea says it is surprised by and disappointed at the agreement reached by Peter O’Neill and Kevin Rudd that all asylum seekers coming to Australia by boat will be processed on Manus Island and that those deemed to be genuine refugees will be resettled in Papua Read more
The Fiji Government has given the Methodist Church of Fiji and Rotuma 40 hours, over 4 days, to hold its annual conference this year. Methodist Church general secretary Reverend Tevita Nawadra said the church had asked government for two weeks in which to hold the annual conference. “We wanted to hold our singing competition in Read more
This week in Guam, the island community gathered to pay tribute to the victims of the Tinta and Faha massacres. On July 15 and 16, 1944, with the American forces approaching Guam near the end of the Japanese occupation of the island in World War II, Japanese soldiers massacred nearly fifty Chamorro men and women from Read more
The spokesman for Papua New Guinea’s bishops has condemned a proposal, introduced in parliament, by the governor of one of the Papua New Guinea’s 22 provinces, to ban non Christian religions. Last Friday, Hela province governor, Anderson Agiru, moved a motion to carry out a nationwide consultation on the question of religious freedom and whether to Read more
The Archbishop of Suva, Peter Chong, says the church is faced with a dual commitment and faithfulness. The church has to be faithful to the church’s scripture, tradition, and teachings while at the same time being faithful when attending to the questions, problems and needs of the community. He argues this dual commitment can be Read more
On June 29, the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul, Suva’s new Archbishop, Peter Chong, with 35 other metropolitan bishops from all over the world, was in the Vatican to receive his pallium from Pope Francis. In the Catholic Church, ecclesiastical provinces, composed of several neighbouring dioceses, are each headed by a metropolitan, the archbishop Read more
The Society of Saint Vincent de Paul of Auckland, as part of the 2013 “Assist a School Project” in support of schools in the Pacific, sent a large shipment of desks and chairs to Takuilau College in Tonga and also to colleges in Samoa earlier this year. These 200 sets of second-hand desks and chairs Read more