About sixty years after the first Christian mission influence was exerted in Papua New Guinea, the Seventh-day Adventist Church sent its first missionaries to Papua. S. W. Cart trained as a teacher and minister at the denomination's Avondale College came from mission work in Fiji to represent his church in Papua, with him came Bennie Tavodi, a Fijian convert, who actively represented the Seventh-day Adventist church in Papua until his death there of snakebite.

When these two missionaries arrived they found that, though Papua was divided into four spheres for the four missions already operating there, and that government support of those spheres was exerted by means of the land laws, by no means all areas of Papua were under mission influence. Certainly the distinctive beliefs of the Seventh-day Adventists were not being presented.

In the face of the mission and official opposition a start was made in a restricted way to build up an Adventist influence. This early Adventist influence was meagre, but momentum was gained after about fifteen years, and with a new drive working up from the Solomon Islands through Bougainville, New Britain and Mussau, Manus and into the New Guinea High¬lands, by the time war disrupted mission activity, the Seventh-day Adven¬tists had made some solid contributions to the education (in its widest sense) of some areas of Papua New Guinea.

This thesis gives an introduction to the Seventh-day Adventists in order to explain why they felt they must intrude where many did not welcome them; looks very briefly at the Papua New Guinea into which they entered; and seeks to follow their fortunes, particularly with regard to their educational work, in Papua and New Guinea. The writer is a Seventh-day Adventist who from 1951-1969 was engaged in the denomination's education program in Papua New Guinea, and so was particularly involved in the material of the thesis, knowing some of the men involved, seeing some of the places, working with the products of the prewar education program, facing some of the problems faced by people in an earlier period, and facing some of the problems resulting from earlier answers to problems. Such being the case, it is hardly possible to be totally objective, or non-committed in certain aspects and issues. On the other hand, there is the ability to understand and present the denominational viewpoint in a way that one less closely connected with the denomination could hardly do. Opinions and viewpoints are those of the author, but they are formed out of an association with the Seventh-day Adventists, as well as of the documents and people studied.