North Solomons Mission office, Rumba, Bougainville.
Photo courtesy of Pauline Yorio.
North Solomons Mission, South Pacific Division
By Barry Oliver
Barry Oliver, Ph.D., retired in 2015 as president of the South Pacific Division of Seventh-day Adventists, Sydney, Australia. An Australian by birth Oliver has served the Church as a pastor, evangelist, college teacher, and administrator. In retirement, he is a conjoint associate professor at Avondale College of Higher Education. He has authored over 106 significant publications and 192 magazine articles. He is married to Julie with three adult sons and three grandchildren.
First Published: July 14, 2020
The North Solomons Mission was the name given to the Seventh-day Adventist administrative entity for the island of Bougainville, a province of Papua New Guinea, between 1977 and 1995.1
The territory of the North Solomons Mission was “North Solomons and adjacent islands.2 Its headquarters were at Rumba, Arawa, North Solomons, Papua New Guinea. It was a part of the Papua New Guinea Union Mission which had headquarters at Palm Beach Rabaul.
In 1994, the North Solomons Mission had thirty-seven organized churches. Church membership at the end of 1994 was 5,211. The mission had fifty-nine active employees. Its tithe receipts for 1994 totalled US$51,886. Its tithe and offerings per capita were US$10.423
The Presidents of the North Solomons Mission
Adrian Craig (1975-1979); Raymond B. Newman (1980); Peter Pondek (1981-1983); Timothy Pakivai (1984-1987), Wilson Stephen (1988-1989), Jeffrey Paul (1990-1995).
Sources
132nd Annual Statistical Report—1994. Silver Spring, MD: General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists, 1994. Accessed February 11, 2020. http://documents.adventistarchives.org/Statistics/ASR/ASR1994.pdf.
Seventh-day Adventist Online Yearbook. Various years. http://documents.adventistarchives.org/Yearbooks
Notes
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See Bougainville Mission. The Bougainville Mission and the North Solomons Mission has refered to the same administrative entity of the Adventist Church at various times in under different conference configurations.↩
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Seventh-day Adventist Online Yearbook, “North Solomons Mission,” page 293, accessed February 11, 2020, http://documents.adventistarchives.org/Yearbooks/YB1995.pdf.↩
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132nd Annual Statistical Report—1994 (Silver Spring, MD: General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists, 1994), accessed February 11, 2020, http://documents.adventistarchives.org/Statistics/ASR/ASR1994.pdf.↩