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In recent years, the relationship between conversion, culture and personhood has been a key issue in anthropological approaches to Christianity. From one perspective, the force of Christian ideation stimulates reflection on existential and ontological truths. Working with recently converted Urapmin people, Joel Robbins (2002; 2004) argues that conversion prompts or compels a shift to more individualist understandings of the person and erodes relational values because of Christianity’s premise that individual souls have discrete fates. For Robbins (2007), with whom the individualising argument is most famously associated, anthropologists have been prone to ‘continuity thinking’ in depicting conversion in terms of cultural resilience and disregarding the very real impetus for change represented by Christian ideas. For others, such claims risk overplaying the efficacy of exogenous ideologies, underplaying the hermeneutic possibilities of Christian texts, discourses and principles, side-lining social forces and contexts and ignoring the extent of cultural interplay in conversion and later contexts. Discussion of the issue is often constrained by overdrawn contrasts between Western and non-Western personhood, vague deployments of ‘dividual’ and ‘individual’1 and limited historical and denominational contextualisation. Anthropological discussions of personhood also articulate with, but pay limited attention to, longstanding questions about Christianity’s relationship to personhood in the Western heartlands whence emanated the great proselytisation projects between the 18th–20th centuries. I turn the lens back towards one group of European missionaries (see also Lindstrom 2013), analysing published and unpublished materials associated with the late 19th–early 20th century Australasian Methodist Missionary Society (AMMS), based in Sydney, Australia, which oversaw Methodist missions in the

‘Greater love …’: Methodist missionaries, self-sacrifice and relational personhood