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

The Fiji men’s rugby team won gold medals at both the 2016 and 2020 Olympic games; this year, the team won silver. Videos of Fiji rugby teams singing have gone viral before, like this one from 2022, which shows the Fiji Bati team gathered on the field and chanting in perfect harmony before a match against Papua New Guinea.

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

For many Fijians, especially Fijian Christians, community singing has become part of the rhythm of daily life. In videos shot during the Paris Olympics, the Fijian delegation sings in Fijian (also known as iTaukei), sometimes a cappella and sometimes accompanied by guitar. (The three main languages ​​spoken in the country are English, Fijian and Hindi. English was the official language of Fiji until 1997, and Hindi is still spoken by descendants of Indian labourers brought by British colonialists to work on the sugar cane fields. Most indigenous Fijians, who make up 54% of the population, speak Fijian.)

Smith said most of the athletes in the Fiji coalition sang in four-part harmony from a very young age. Starting with family worship at home, Fijian children in Christian families grow up hearing the harmony and learn to join in.

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

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

“You can imagine that this might sound complicated when your three- and four-year-olds are learning,” says Neal, now an assistant professor of preaching at Duke Divinity School. “But kids can sit down with their families twice a day and sing in a circle of love. So by the time they’re seven or eight, they have an extraordinary ear for music.”

The indigenous music of Fiji and Papua New Guinea is primarily vocal and unaccompanied. Similarly, much of the traditional music of Polynesia is vocal, but is distinctly more “word-oriented” and includes a mixture of chants and high spoken tones. Despite considerable regional variation in indigenous musical practices across Oceania, the importance of choral music is almost universal.

In addition to practicing singing at family devotions and weekly church services, congregations periodically host visiting choir directors for weeklong workshops and rehearsals with different vocal groups (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, and the gathering has occasionally heightened political tensions in the country.

Although Fijian hymns derive from Methodist songs brought by 19th-century missionaries, they have become a deeply rooted tradition that has made room for indigenous practices across the country. Christianity’s connection to the colonial legacy of Fiji (which was a British colony from 1847 to 1970) is undeniable, but Fijian vocal music stands as an example of the ways in which Fijians have contextualized and integrated Christian worship into their society 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 more than 100 permanently inhabited islands) made a centralized approach to evangelism impossible. As ethnomusicologist Helen Black has observed, early missionaries realized that they would need to recruit Fijian converts to spread the gospel from island to island, and that combining indigenous musical practices with Methodist hymns would allow the gospel to spread more organically.

“Indigenous Fijian music, which played a central role in Fijian culture, was an excellent vehicle for communication,” Black wrote. “Christians who used their secular music to do (the general term for Fijian music with poetic texts) created their own repertoire of religious music by adding Christian texts to their own particular poetic style. Thus, this music became not only part of the liturgy of the Fiji Methodist Church, but also a tool of evangelization.”

Fijian Christians adapted traditional call-and-response hymns for teaching and reading the catechism. A leader would ask a question and the congregation would sing the answer in hymns. They also adapted hymns for congregational reading of the Psalms. These practices are still common in Fiji’s Methodist churches. Western missionaries brought with them Methodist hymn books, but today the hymn books in many Fijian churches do not contain musical notation, only the words. Music is an oral tradition.

Infusion to do Local adaptations and modifications of Christian and Methodist hymns created a uniquely Fijian body of song music, tailored to the singing style and cultural practices of the region. In some cases, the missionaries found that the hymns they brought were almost unrecognisable as Fijian Christians took up the music and reshaped its rhythms and harmonies.

Wesleyan missionary William Woon wrote in his diary in 1830: “Many of our excellent melodies have been corrupted by the minor singing of the natives; others have been so completely altered that we sometimes cannot tell what tunes they are singing.”

Some missionaries, like Woon, worried that the hymns they valued for both teaching and emotional appeal had been stretched too far, but most seemed happy, even eager, to let Fijians own their musical worship and create something new.

“There’s a kind of contextualization that happens when you claim a song as your own,” 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, accounting for approximately 34% of the country’s Christian population. Methodism’s emphasis on hymn singing has aligned it with Fijian culture, in which singing functions as a way of participating in and fully attuning with the natural world.

Indigenous religious practices in Fiji consisted of ancestor worship and animism, but today only slightly more than 60% of the population is Christian, 27% Hindu and 9% Muslim. However, even in Christian worship the connection between community songs and the natural world remains strong.

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

Neal noted that the sense of connection with nature was taken very seriously, and that biblical images of nature’s participation in worship came to mind.

“Singing is an example of connection to the world, to each other and to God,” Neal said. “In the Bible, we see images of trees clapping, rocks crying out. In some ways, we in the West have viewed these images as exaggerations and metaphors.”

The physicality of singing and its effects on a congregation are sometimes lost in worship settings, where the sound of a group can drown out the sounds in the room. Less than 20 percent of the U.S. population regularly sings in a choir, so many American Christians have forgotten what it feels like to be in a live singing group. Neal recalled that his first encounter with the sonic power of four-part harmony moved him to tears.

“I started crying. The sound filled the space,” Neal said. “I had a hymn book with Fijian words to follow along with, and it was shaking in my hands. The sound was so powerful. There was a deep sense of social validation of faith through song.”

While choral singing has become an important part of Fijian Christian identity, the practice is becoming increasingly precarious in a globalising world. Churches in urban centres more often use instruments and include popular worship music by Western groups such as Hillsong, which has been influential in part because of its geographical proximity.

Church leaders recognize that the use of new music and instruments can help attract young people to church, especially those who did not grow up in Christian communities.

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

“Some Fijians are concerned about the mindless adoption of musical traditions from the West that create a more individualistic definition of what music is and what people are,” Neal commented.

Navigating the growing influence of Western worship music is challenging Fijian Christians to find ways to preserve the tradition of singing that they hold dear and practice with pride. The Fiji Olympic team singing in Paris illustrates the centrality of singing to Fijian cultural identity. Smith said the Fiji rugby team often sings before or after a match, not because they want to make an evangelistic display, but because it is simply part of their identity.

“For example, when there is singing during rugby, whether it’s a loss or a win,” he said, “they sing because it involves their whole life, their whole community, their whole being.”