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The Wewak District of the Society of the Divine Word (SVD) is entering its second century of service to the church of Wewak and to the people of the East Sepik Province.

Thanks to the courage, the dedication and the outright hard work of those who went before us the first great work has been most successfully accomplished. They came to virgin jungle, to people who had been isolated from the rest of the world since the beginning of time, and they built schools and clinics, roads and development Most of all, they brought the Word of God and proclaimed God's Kingdom. Their seed fell on fertile ground and today the East Sepik Province is completely Christian. The Church they planted is today adult and thriving and has already given forty men to the priesthood and a hundred or more men and women to the religious life. People in every parish work closely with their priests to continue building up the Kingdom by their leadership and service, and many hundreds of teachers have dedicated themselves to every level of education, from pre-school to university, and everywhere, in large hospitals and on lonely bush patrols, nurses and doctors tend to the sick and the new-born

Those pioneers paid heavily for today's successes! In the earliest days they lived the loneliest of lives and one has to believe that it was only their love of God and of the people that sustained them through poverty, isolation, the ravages of malaria and the turmoil of war. With the Japanese invasion of the East Sepik in 1942 came death and destruction beyond what anyone thought possible. The bishop, Joseph Loerks, and more than half of his missionaries were murdered. A few escaped by trudging through swamps and scaling great mountains, and those who survived the first executions were imprisoned in the most intolerable conditions. As the war drew to its close, even some of them were accidentally killed.

Christians believe that the blood of martyrs is the seed of faith. Even while the war was still raging, a new generation of missionaries was preparing to join with the handful of survivors to rebuild what was destroyed and lost. As soon as hostilities ceased they began work. The church infrastructure was devastated, but faithful Christians gathered around the missionaries and within a very few years the church of Wewak was thriving. A young bishop, Leo Arkfeld, was given the leadership of the mission and his vision of what God wanted for the Sepik inspired priests and people alike to work tirelessly towards that dream.

And what happens now? The Divine Word Missionaries long ago now handed over the church they planted to the people of the church. Where do we go now? For the present some of us are still needed to care for parishes, for support work, and for a few specialist tasks. Should we leave soon? Should we go to the most isolated parts of the country - or to other countries - where the church is still struggling?

We have no answers. But we have a willingness to follow wherever the Spirit leads, and we have a strong belief in the mission of the whole church, and not just of our congregation, to proclaim the kingdom to the entire world.

The Divine Word Missionary is a mature Christian who, urged on by the love of Christ, has both a readiness and a capacity to leave his own culture as a lifetime member of an international community in order to build up the Church, the universal sacrament of salvation. Young men from the Sepik have also answered this call and are working and studying throughout Papua New Guinea and the world. We can do no better than to listen to their young voices as they lead us to a new church and a new world.