Missionaries were major agents of change in the Pacific region during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They were arguably more effective as such than any other foreign agents of the time due to their numerical strength, their dispersal, their tenacity, their learning of the local languages, and hence their ability to communicate, but above all, to their commitment to effecting change – a metanoia, as Burridge defines it (1975:10) – in the lives of the people with whom they interacted. This change was primarily a change in the hearts and souls of converts, but an inevitable corollary was a change, to a greater or lesser extent, in their social organisation and cultural activities.

Despite a popular image which sees missionaries as unremittingly and uncritically iconoclastic, they in fact varied considerably in the extent and types of change which they required as evidence of conversion. In this chapter I will discuss some of the changes in family life and related aspects of social organisation imposed by missionaries of the four organisations operating in Papua before the World War I – the Roman Catholic Sacred Heart Mission (SHM), the predominantly Anglo-Catholic Anglican Mission, the Australasian Wesleyan Methodist Mission and the London Missionary Society (LMS), comprised largely of British Congregationalists – and later suggest some explanations as to variation in expectations, not only among the four missionary bodies but even, within the constraints of mission organisation, among the personnel of a single mission.