There was a man in Fiji whose name was Varani… This man was a cannibal, and he was the war chief of a little island called Viwa. He was the right hand warrior, the captain of the army, of the greatest cannibal chief that ever lived in Fiji. The king[i] depended on Varani for the organization of the army. The king lived on the island, Bau. Nearby, on the subordinate island, Viwa, where Varani lived, there began to grow a little church. There was a missionary there, and the place became the main station where the early Fijian evangelists were trained. They were allowed to build a church and the work grew. Converts whose villages were destroyed by cannibals frequently took refuge in Viwa, but Varani himself was still a cannibal and a heathen.

Now it happened that a group of young Viwans about 13 or 14 years of age… said, ‘If our chief was a Christian it would make all the difference in the world. We can’t do very much by ourselves, but if he was a Christina he could do much.’ These boys had seen an important missiological truth, that there are natural leaders in a society and that it is a good thing to have them won for the Lord. So the boys decided that the best thing they could do was to meet in the forest and pray for their chief. So, day-by-day, as they were going to work, they went off into the forest by themselves and they prayed. ‘Lord, save our Big Chief, and make him a Christian.’

Varani was a very wise man… As his people became Christian one by one and family by family, he noticed that their lives changed. There was something about this that mystified him. He saw that their faces changed, their ethics changed, their whole way of life changed. Something was going on in that small…fellowship of believers. So Varani…asked, ‘When one of my people becomes a Christian, what does the missionary or the evangelist do to him?’ The man he questioned replied, ‘Well, the first thing that happened to me was that they gave me an alphabet and I started to learn to read.’ …Varani said, ‘I'm the chief of these people and they can do things that I can't do!’ So he went to John Hunt, the missionary, and said, ‘I want to learn to read!’ Normally people became Christians before they learned to read. This was the only case I know of in Fiji in those days, of a man who learned to read before becoming a Christian.

Hunt spent a long time finding the most appropriate texts in the Bible to teach this cannibal chief to read… When the first short sentence was given to Varani, he read something like this: ‘God is love.’ As soon as he had learned these words, he asked, ‘Who is God?’ And so the missionary told him about God, and about God's way, and God's way of love… One day Varani heard that there was to be a worship service that was not held on the regular Sunday. It was Good Friday. John Hunt selected a number of texts that related to Good Friday and the sacrifice of Christ on the cross, for sinful man. When Varani read these passages he asked, ‘Is this true, that this man died for me?’ …Varani was coming to the point of realization, and the prayers of the boys in the forest were being answered. He had realized the truth, but he had not yet acted on it, not yet made his decision.

The week went by to the Friday. For some time Varani had been attending the Sunday services, but he had never become a follower of Christ. But on this day, when the message of the sermon was about the work of Christ on the cross, Varani got up from the place where he had been sitting on the floor and walked up to the front of the congregation, and there he kneeled down and gave his heart to the Lord.[ii]

Now, how do you bring a man who has been a great warrior chief into the Christian church and make him a Christian worker? Some of the British missionaries wanted to persuade him to become a Christian teacher or evangelist. They said, ‘Because this man has authority and now has a Christian experience, he will be a great evangelist.” And no doubt, in time, he would have become a Fijian minister, if he had followed that path. But Varani said, ‘No, I am a Chief. I have the duty of leading my people in their various work programs and social responsibilities, and I feel that God wants me to show them what it means to be a good Chief. I will run my community in a new and different way. I will protect them from war instead of leading them into war.’ And, as good as his world, Ilaija Varani became the greatest peacemaker of all Fijian history. He traveled to the very places where before he had previously made war and laid waste the land; but now he tried to persuade the people to give up war, and live in peace. He is still remembered to this day as a model Christian layman, and a man of strong faith, who resisted temptation, who witnessed for Christ wherever he went. This chief…in the end…gave his own life on a mission of peace and died a true martyr for the faith.