Yes, Fiji Olympians Are Singing Hymns

Viral videos of the Fijian Olympic team singing in Paris show a congregation of athletes raising their voices in four-part harmony, as if they had been rehearsing in addition to training for the games. In several videos, the group is shown singing the Fijian hymn “Mo Ravi Vei Jisu” (“Draw Close to Jesus”). One video on TikTok has over 3 million views and 660,000 likes.

The Fijian men’s rugby team won gold in both the 2016 and 2020 Olympic games; this year, the team earned silver. Videos of Fijian rugby teams singing have gone viral before, like this one from 2022 showing the team Fiji Bati huddled on the field, singing a hymn in full-throated harmony before a match against Papua New Guinea.

“There is an understanding that singing, harmony, is a way of expressing our connection to the world and to each other,” said Tui Nuku Smith, a Fijian Methodist minister. “And in Fiji, community singing is related both to indigenous culture and to the Methodist tradition.”

For many Fijians, especially Fijian Christians, community singing is built into the rhythm of everyday life. In videos taken during the Paris Olympics, the Fijian delegation sings in the Fijian language (also called iTaukei), sometimes a cappella and sometimes accompanied by a guitar. (The three primary languages spoken in the country are English, Fijian, and Hindi. English was Fiji’s official language until 1997, and Hindi is still spoken by the descendants of Indian laborers brought by British colonialists to work in the sugar cane fields. Most indigenous Fijians, who make up 54 percent of the population, speak the Fijian language.)

Many of the athletes in the Fijian coalition have likely been singing in four-part harmony since they were very young, said Smith. Starting with family devotions in the home, Fijian children in Christian families grow up hearing harmony and learn to participate.

“When I would walk through the village in the mornings or evenings, I would hear singing coming from the homes,” recalled Jerusha Matsen Neal, who spent three years at Davuilevu Theological College on the island of Viti Levu with the United Methodist Church’s Global Ministries. “You’d hear singing in four-part harmony, with children.”

This tradition, said Neal, is one that Fijian Christians carefully cultivate and preserve. The four-part harmony we hear in those viral videos is the result of generations of teaching and practice.

“You can imagine that when you have three- and four-year-olds learning, it can sound like a mess,” said Neal, now an assistant professor of homiletics at Duke Divinity School. “But children get to sit and sing with their families, in a circle of love, twice a day. So by the time they’re seven or eight, they have a remarkable musical ear.”

The indigenous music of Fiji and Papua New Guinea is primarily vocal and unaccompanied. Similarly, much of the traditional music across Polynesia is vocal though noticeably more “word-oriented,” incorporating a blend of chanting and heightened speaking tones. Despite the significant regional differences in indigenous musical practices throughout Oceania, the prominence of choral music is nearly everywhere.

In addition to practicing singing during family devotions and in church services each week, congregations periodically host visiting choir directors for a week of workshops and rehearsals with different vocal groupings: children, women, men, youth. In this way, even small, remote churches take seriously the task of learning to sing as a community. The country’s annual hymn-singing competition draws thousands of Fijian Methodists each year, a gathering that occasionally heightens political tension in the country.

Although Fijian hymnody grew out of Methodist songs brought by 19th-century missionaries, it has become a deeply rooted tradition that makes space for indigenous practices across the diverse country. Christianity’s connection to the legacy of colonialism in Fiji (which was a British colony from 1847 to 1970) is undeniable, but Fijian vocal music stands as an example of the ways Fijians have been contextualizing Christian worship and integrating it into their communities for nearly two centuries.

When missionaries William Cross and David Cargill, sent by the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society, arrived in Fiji in 1835, they realized that the region’s hundreds of islands (Fiji has over 100 permanently inhabited islands) would make a centralized approach to evangelism impossible. As ethnomusicologist Helen Black has observed, early missionaries recognized that they needed to enlist Fijian converts in spreading the gospel from island to island, and that embracing the fusion of indigenous musical practices with Methodist hymnody would allow the gospel to spread more organically.

“Indigenous Fijian music, with its central role in Fijian culture, was a perfect vehicle for communication,” Black wrote. “Christians utilizing music of their secular meke [the generic term for Fijian music with poetic text] inserted Christian text in their particular poetic style, creating their own repertoire of religious music. Thus, this music became not only part of the liturgy of the Fijian Methodist Church, but also a vehicle for evangelization.”

Fijian Christians adapted their traditional call-and-response chants to teach and recite the catechism. A leader would call out a question, and the congregation would chant the answer. They also adapted chants to recite the Psalms communally. These practices are still widespread in Fiji’s Methodist churches. Western missionaries brought Methodist hymnals with them, but the hymnals in many Fijian churches today don’t include musical notation, only words. The music is an oral tradition.

The infusion of meke with Christian content and the local adaptation and alteration of Methodist hymns formed a uniquely Fijian body of sung music, tailored to the singing style and cultural practices of the region. In some cases, missionaries found that the hymnody they brought became almost unrecognizable as Fijian Christians took charge of the music and reshaped its rhythms and harmonies.

William Woon, a Wesleyan missionary, wrote in his journal in 1830, “Several of our excellent tunes are spoilt by the natives from singing them in a minor key; others are so completely metamorphosed that we scarcely know sometimes what tunes they sing.”

Some missionaries, like Woon, worried that the hymns they prized for both teaching and stirring the emotions were being stretched too far. But most seemed content, even eager, to allow Fijians to take ownership of their musical worship and forge something new.

“There’s a kind of contextualization that happens just by claiming that a song belongs to you,” said Deborah Wong, a worship leader and ThD candidate in liturgical studies at Duke Divinity School. “God’s family includes all people. These songs belong to the global church. They may have originated in one part of the church, but they still belong to all of us.”

In the centuries since Methodism’s arrival in Fiji, it has remained the dominant Christian denomination, constituting around 34 percent of the country’s Christian population. Methodism’s emphasis on hymn singing made it compatible with Fijian culture, in which singing functioned as a way of participating in and literally harmonizing with the natural world.

Indigenous religious practices in Fiji consisted of ancestor worship and animism, but today just over 60 percent of the population is Christian, 27 percent Hindu, and 9 percent Muslim. However, the connection between community singing, even in Christian worship, and the natural world remains strong.

“If there is a hurricane, we see that as a sign that we have angered God. We have awareness that we shouldn’t violate nature but should care for it. We acknowledge that interconnectedness,” said Smith. “Singing is an expression of harmony with God, with the community, and with nature itself.”

Neal noted that the sense of connection with the natural world was taken very seriously, calling to mind biblical images of nature participating in worship.

“Singing is an embodiment of interconnection with the world, with each other, and with God,” said Neal. “In Scripture, we see these images of trees clapping their hands, of rocks crying out. In some ways, we in the West have written off those images as hyperbole and metaphor.”

The physicality of singing and its effects on a congregation are sometimes lost in worship settings where the sound of a band drowns out the voices in the room. In the US, less than 20 percent of the population regularly sings in a choir, so many American Christians have lost touch with what it feels like to be in a vibrant singing community. Neal recalled that her first encounter with the sonic power of four-part harmony in a Fijian Methodist church moved her to tears.

“I began to weep. The sound filled the space,” Neal said. “I had a hymnal to follow along with the Fijian words, and it was vibrating in my hands. That’s how powerful the sound was. There was a profound sense of communal affirmation of faith through song.”

Although choral singing has become an important part of Fijian Christian identity, the practice is increasingly precarious in a globalized world. Churches in urban centers are more frequently using instruments and incorporating popular worship music from Western groups like Hillsong, which is influential in part because of its geographic proximity.

Church leaders are aware that new music and the use of instruments can help draw younger people to a church, especially those who did not grow up in Christian communities.

“Those who have access to instruments now might use them, probably not all of the time,” said Smith. But he added, “There is a suspicion about the use of instruments, even though the Bible is filled with references to them. There is such a strong tradition here, people have almost demonized musical instruments.”

Neal commented, “Some Fijians are concerned about unthoughtfully adopting musical traditions from the West that create a more individualist definition of what music is and what the human is.”

Navigating the growing influence of Western worship music is challenging Fijian Christians to find ways to preserve the singing tradition that they highly value and practice with pride. The Fijian Olympic team’s singing in Paris demonstrates the centrality of singing to Fijian cultural identity. Smith said that the Fijian rugby team often sings before or after a match, not because they want to make an evangelistic demonstration but because it’s just part of who they are.

“When there is singing in rugby, for example, whether for a loss or a win,” he stated, “they sing because it involves their whole life, their whole community, their whole being.”