Ini Kopuria

Ini Kopuria was a Solomon Islander Anglican Christian, born about 1900 in the village of Maravovo on Guadalcanal, in what was then the British Solomon Islands Protectorate. He grew up in the orbit of the Anglican Melanesian Mission, which had worked in the islands since the nineteenth century, and received his education in mission schools. As a young man he joined the Native Armed Constabulary, the police force of the colonial protectorate, and served as a police officer. During that period of government service, according to Brotherhood and mission tradition, he experienced a vision of Jesus Christ, who told him that he was not doing the work he was meant to do and called him to take the Christian gospel to people who had not heard it. That experience, rather than any ordination to the priesthood, became the turning point of his public life: Kopuria was a layman, not a bishop or priest, and is not to be confused with earlier Melanesian clergy such as George Sarawia.

In 1925, with the encouragement of John Manwaring Steward, Anglican Bishop of Melanesia, Kopuria founded a community of evangelists that became the Melanesian Brotherhood, known in the Mota mission language as Ira Retatasiu. He gave land at Tabalia on Guadalcanal, associated with his own people, as the community’s headquarters; Tabalia has remained the Motherhouse. The brothers took vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience and followed a simple, itinerant rule adapted to Melanesian village life rather than to European monastic custom. They commonly went out in pairs to unevangelized or weakly evangelized communities, living among the people, teaching the faith, and preparing the way for settled pastoral ministry. Kopuria served as the first Head Brother. Missionaries of the Melanesian Mission, among them the long-serving priest Charles E. Fox, later helped to shape a written rule, but leadership and membership were Melanesian, which made the Brotherhood an indigenous religious order within Anglicanism rather than a transplanted European community.

Under Kopuria and his successors the Brotherhood spread through the Solomon Islands and into other parts of island Melanesia, becoming known for simplicity, courage, and closeness to ordinary village life. Kopuria did not remain in the community until his death. In the late 1930s or about 1940 he left the Brotherhood and returned to ordinary village life on Guadalcanal; historical accounts of the order record that after leaving he married. He died in 1945. He held no papal or patriarchal office and was not canonized or beatified in the Roman Catholic manner. Several Anglican provinces commemorate him on 6 June as founder of the Melanesian Brotherhood. The community he established continued after his departure and grew into one of the largest religious communities in the Anglican Communion, with later households in the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea, and elsewhere, so that his foundation remains a principal expression of indigenous Anglican religious life in the Pacific.