Christianity arrived in 1830 with John Williams of the London Missionary Society and was adopted with unusual speed, in part because it was received through Samoan channels and taken up by matai. Within a generation the village pastor, the faifeau, had become an office standing alongside the matai, supported by the village and holding real authority in it, and church buildings became the largest structures in most villages.
Samoa today is among the most churchgoing societies in the world. The Congregational Christian Church, the Methodists, the Catholics and the Latter-day Saints all have substantial memberships, Sunday observance is enforced by village rule in many places, and the constitution was amended in 2017 to declare Samoa a Christian nation. Church obligation, family obligation and the matai system are in practice inseparable, and the remittance economy that sustains many villages funds all three.
Colonial rule was divided between Germany and the United States in 1899, and then between New Zealand and the United States, and the two Samoas remain politically separate. The Mau movement of the 1920s, which sought independence from New Zealand by non violent means, was met with shooting in Apia in 1929. Independence came in 1962, the first in the Pacific islands. Large Samoan communities now live in New Zealand, Australia and the United States, and the churches are the institutions holding them together.