'Go and do likewise...': Remembering Jione Havea
12:38 06/05/2026
Six of his fellow authors pay tribute to the late Pasifika scholar and SCM Press author, Jione Havea, who died recently.
Michael Jagessar
I came across Jione Havea long before we met in person. Very early in my teaching stint at Queen’s Foundation for Ecumenical Theological Education (Birmingham, UK), I found a comrade through his boundary-pushing work on and around ‘spinning’ biblical texts that made my heart and head felt rightly warmed. It was Jione, one of the editors of the Cross-Cultural Series for Equinox Press, who worked with Stephen Burns and me to see our groundbreaking volume on postcolonial perspectives on Christian worship published. In the process, I experienced him then as a sharp, engaging, humble and constructive dialogue partner. My closer work with him was through the Council for World Mission (CWM) eDARE undertaking (online version of DARE [Discernment and Radical Engagement]) during the Covid-19 years.
While Jione’s work is grounded in the lived realities of the breathing and breadth of the Pasifika region, his reach, however, is longer and deeper. Like the waters of the sea and rivers, his ‘reach’ flows and transgresses across and against tides, currents, artificial reservoirs and fossilized deposits, finding uncharted flow, subterrain meanderings, fluidity and home in the ‘tidalectics’ (not dialectics) of global solidarity – all towards one cause: chanting down and overthrowing the ‘shitstems’ that continue to bind, shackle and hold in captivity the minds of people everywhere. Generous, creative, profane and always encouraging, Jione has been a gift of grace and cathartic breath of fresh air across the manure pen of ecclesial politics.
I experienced all the foregoing while we worked together to deliver the eDARE of CWM at a time when gallivanting across the globe to exotic places and hotels to comfortably theologize and chant down the ‘shitstems’ was parked because of a pandemic. Through Jione’s editing genius the five to six published volumes that resulted from our eDARE engagement remain crucial to theological/biblical conversation and conversion. This collection of theological/biblical engagement is significant for its intentional interdisciplinary trajectory (poetry, art, theology, biblical hermeneutics, etc.), which included established and newer/unknown voices. Jione Havea was a ‘talent-spotter’, encourager, nurturer and an excellent dialogue partner for these newer and upcoming voices.
Brilliant, daring, engaging and compassionate, I would locate Jione’s biblical and theological excursion and incursion into inherited texts and deposits of ecclesial empires largely shaped by a deployment of what I have termed as a hermeneutic of ‘suspension’. That is, to paraphrase Toni Morrison: nurturing habits, methods and spaces to the task of unravelling and ‘giving up the shit’ that continues to weigh us down. Before epistemic disobedience became a mantra, Jione Havea was living it out.
As Jione puts it in Doing Theology in the New Normal, ‘With verses this work seeks, as a collective, to do theology in the new normal, as well as to do theology that inverses the new normal. On that note, a dare: Go and do likewise’ (16: 2021, SCM).
I learnt so much from Jione. I remember drinking with him and others in a hotel bar just outside of Heathrow. We started talking whiskeys. A member of our group revealed a bottle of whiskey they had brought with them and started pouring us all glasses. Let’s just say it wasn’t a whiskey that graced my single-malt Scottish Highland favourites. Jione gratefully accepted a glass for both of us. I made a quiet joke to Jione. He rebuked me in the kindest way, reminding me that the person pouring us whiskey bought this bottle with their own money, probably the equivalent of a week’s wages, and couldn’t afford to buy drinks all night from the bar. This was a man who had a heart for everyone and who looked out for everyone. He was curious and interested in everyone. He had time for everyone. And he challenged absolutely everyone!
I was last with Jione, drinking whiskey again, in Thailand at the World Communion of Reformed Churches Global Council. He gave a beautiful Bible study on Matthew 14.13–21, called ‘Food and Talanoa Bear Witness: A Pasifika Economy Reading’. Jione noticed that only the men were counted by this account in Matthew. In his reading, therefore, it was the women who brought the food, teaching that collectives and communities are where we find God’s miracles.
When doing my PhD, Jione was one of my mentors through the Council for World Mission’s scholarship programme. He taught me how to discern which battles to fight and which to leave. How to find my voice and listen for (not just read) others – especially to listen for the voices who were not recorded. I also learnt from Jione how to teach. His sharp mind would not overbear and he would guide with gentleness and enthusiasm. I used Jione’s commentary on Jonah for my first sermon in my first ‘real job’, and impressed even the Old Testament tutor. I have used his ideas countless times in my own writing. I have shared food (he made excellent chicken) and we have scratched our heads together over multiple projects. I defended his controversial restorying just a few months ago in a seminar on Empire. I will miss having such a dynamic partner in crime.
Jione’s being comes across in his writing, his talanoa will leave a long legacy through his works. As a prophet, however, his work challenges much that we take for granted. Simply, he was miles ahead of where much theological scholarship is. Any confrontation in his work makes the most sense when you know Jione and his gentleness, cheerfulness and attentiveness. Jione lived for the silenced and marginalized. I will keep telling and retelling and discussing the stories of the man who spent his career minimizing the importance of himself.
And so we return. To the Creator, to the ancestors, to the rivers, the land, the seas, the winds and the forests. The stories we tell, the stories we have been told, the stories our bodies live in will live on, in varying forms and purposes. As Jione Havea joins the ancestors, we will remember his story and we will tell it. We will remember how he taught us the anticolonial importance of a story, how storytelling opens up complex realities and pluralities of knowledge. We will remember that he taught us that one story can be told multiply, calling attention to the past, the present and the future. Across all of his work he reminded us how stories, embodied stories, resist economic, ideological and territorial domination, and summoned us to be collaborative in our theologizing. We will remember that he taught us the importance of the imagination, and of the creative worldview. We will lament the loss of this prophetic voice, but learn from him to walk forward in celebration and in hope.
Anthony Reddie
Since I received news of his death, I have spent several hours trying to recollect the moment I first met Jione. It took me a while to recount our first meeting – it was in Paramatta, near Sydney, in Australia. I was in Australia on a three-month lecture tour supported by the National Council of Churches, and their indigenous desk – The National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Ecumenical Commission of NATSIEC. This was April 2011. We met at an event at Charles Sturt University where Jione was then working as a biblical scholar. We had a mutual friend in Revd Professor Stephen Burns, a former colleague at the Queen’s Foundation for Ecumenical Theological Education in Birmingham. Our meeting was memorable in that Jione was chairing a public lecture I was giving, my topic being ‘Deconstructing Whiteness’. One of the people present was a right-wing bigot who was a supporter of Pauline Hansen’s ‘One Nation Party’. As he began to heckle me, Jione told him brutally to get out, and the reactionary irritant was unceremoniously removed from the room.
We immediately hit it off. The bonus was discovering that we were both dissident Methodists, shaped by the Wesleyan tradition but in critical resistance to strictures of this largely White-led movement.
Over the next 15 years I had the pleasure of meeting Jione in a variety of settings. We met through World Council of Churches events and CWM consultations at the annual American Academy of Religion and Society of Biblical Literature conferences in the US every November. On each occasion we met my life always felt infinitely better and my mood more positive and hopeful than it had been previously. Jione was a force of nature. There are some radical, liberationist scholars whose intellect and ethical posture are to be admired, but upon meeting them, you soon realize that they are best appreciated at a distance because the embodied reality is disappointing. Jione was nothing of the sort. Meeting him in person was as exciting and joyful as his voluminous writings. Jione was a joyful human being. He held to that important adage of ‘take the issues extremely seriously, but don’t take yourself too seriously’. Some of my happiest memories of him were sitting in a bar at some international consultation, putting the world to rights over a beer or two, or several in fact. He used to tease me for my internalized Englishness, noting my ability to critique all the worst aspects of British colonialism but noting my pronounced lack of rhythm when trying to shake my booty on the dancefloor. ‘Why are you so English, Anthony?’ he would exclaim! And I would reply sheepishly, ‘Because I am, Jione, because I am.’
Upon hearing the news of his death, I went immediately to look at the video interview he recorded with my friend and colleague, Carol Troupe, in April 2024. Carol and I had the idea of her interviewing all the contributors to our joint edited book Deconstructing Whiteness, Empire and Mission. Jione’s interview is funny, reflective and deeply honest.
His parting words to Carol’s final question are quintessentially Jione. When asked what he hopes people will take away from reading his chapter, he shrugs his shoulders, and says defiantly that he doesn’t care what they take from it. They can think what they like. His words are said with a smile and a twinkle in the eye. Jione was never bombastic or arrogant. Never pompous or self-important. His was a gentle spirit, but one underpinned by a fierce will to be on the side of those consigned to the underside of history. I will miss Jione. Not only for his prophetic and illuminating writing, but also because he was a wonderful human being, full of grace, joy and laughter. I will miss my friend!
It’s not even as though I met Jione many times, but I am struck by how much I feel the force of his death, in community with so many networks and movements worldwide and personally to so many. We first met in 2014, in South Africa, as part of a consultation that led to chapters in a collection, Bible and Theology from the Underside of Empire, and then at just two or three more conferences. Yet, somehow, I felt so connected to him – not only through enjoyable conversations at those events, but email correspondence, contributions to DARE collections edited by him, his leading an inspiring online class on moana readings of Scripture for a course at my college, and most recently, he generously wrote the foreword for my forthcoming book The Anarchic Spirit: Interpreting the Bible and the World in troubled times. He was the perfect person to do this because he epitomized the anarchic spirit – disruptive, mischievous, eager to see dominant systems subverted, decolonizing land, bodies and consciousness, and offering glimpses of a different horizon where power is confounded, reordered, distributed.
He helped me to ‘sea’ differently – and even as I dip my toes into oceanic engagements, they resonate so deeply with me: the interactive, decolonial storying of faith and the world, the flows between us and each other and earth, and the destabilizing movements of hope and justice which resist containment and control. As he has gently asked incisive editorial questions of my work, enabled revelatory conversation and laughed at the absurdity of it all, he has stimulated ongoing talanoa – and I will not be able to look back at the products of our various collaborations without a deep sadness and deep gratitude. His anarchic spirit will continue to flow like a never-failing stream of justice-seeking – and generous trouble, good trouble, beautiful trouble.
I did not know Jione or his impressive corpus of work well, but he made a significant impact on me. I was privileged to meet him in Melbourne in 2019, when I spent a month’s sabbatical at Pilgrim Theological College, part of the University of Divinity. Jione and Monica Melanchthon, Jione's spouse, with their polycultural daughter Diya Lākai, welcomed me into their home on several occasions for food, drink and conversation. I can't remember what we ate or drank or what we spoke about, but I remember well the ease and warmth of the occasion, the way words flowed along with wine and food to enlarge mutual enjoyment and our shared theological, political and pedagogical commitments, and to probe whatever it was we were conversing about. A couple of years later, in 2022, the other side of the pandemic, Jione visited the Queen’s Foundation, Birmingham, as part of a wider European trip hosted by the Council for World Mission's DARE programme, to meet with staff and students and share some of his key concerns and motivating influences. Our mutual friend and former Queen's colleague, Stephen Burns, interviewed him in an informal, conversational manner, drawing out many significant themes and strands. Again, I can't remember the content of that conversation, but I remember the quality of attention and listening in the room, the respect commanded by Jione's presence and witness.
I was struck by Jione's warmth, gentleness, generous hospitality and sense of playful humour – qualities all evident in his written work and his theological corpus. I warmed to his creativity with language, metaphor and storytelling – what he preferred to term talanoa – as ways of reclaiming the power of shaping thought and coming against the hegemony of patriarchy and white supremacy, and his insistence on multiple, complex, interlocking contexts out of which theology is done and the Bible read. As someone deeply shaped and formed by my own close proximity to the sea as I was growing up in North Devon, I love the way that the ocean – moana –is a living force in all his theology. Metaphors of the sea, its vastness and restlessness, its ebb and flow, its to-ing and fro-ing, pervade Jione's work as they do my own. There was also a courage and a steely resistance in Jione and his work, notwithstanding his gentleness. To me, he exemplified a form of masculinity that the world is desperately in need of: rooted in his own island context and history of colonialism yet always en route towards new becoming; proud of his native traditions and cultures, aware of his dependence upon and profound connectedness to land, sea and earth creatures, and not ashamed of his kinship with earth/dirt; a lover of food and drink and conversation, a convivial host; a delighted partner and parent who committed to the flourishing of the women in his life; a weaver of words and a welcomer of others into shared storytelling; a stern, vigilant resister of all forms of abusive power-over and a worker for the well-being of those most at risk of marginalization and exploitation. I am glad to have known him, if only briefly, and wish I had known him better. I mourn and grieve with Monica, Diya and all who are reeling from his sudden death. The Methodist Church and the worldwide community of theologians has lost one of its foremost scholars, pastors and spokespersons. Yet he has left a rich legacy, both in his written works and in the profound impact he has made on all those he has taught, pastored and befriended, and his spirit lives on. May his words and his witness be carried by the waves to the outermost edges of the islands of the world, where they will continue to do their healing, restorative and liberating work.
Our thanks to William Gibson/WCRC for their permission to use the image of Jione.
