From an etic perspective and as a Christian myself, I understand the missionaries objective to save their souls from eternal damnation for the worship of idols (Nowak & Laird, Case Study: Social Organization, 2010). I believe the missionaries had a truly honest endeavor to educate them about the truth and separate myth from fact. This should not have completely dismissed nor discredited their traditional religious culture, but it should have enhanced it adding knowledge to their spiritual wisdom, therefore allowing discernment to manifest.
Now the followers and the chiefdoms that understood the value in what was taught to them had immediate acceptance of the change and voluntarily converted to Christianity. On one hand this may have caused the chiefdom to lose value in his position. If in fact the chiefdom did agreed with the dismissal of some of the practices because it went against the Christian belief system, then he had to either convince the tribe that other rituals were not practiced in vain, or that the rituals had new and improved meaning.
On the other hand if the some members and leaders of the tribe were not as open minded as those that voluntarily converted then they each ran the risk of ridicule from the other. Tribal people have an inherited duty to keep their culture and its traditions sacred so the efforts put forth during the syncretic movement were of dire importance to those non-converts and their culture (Nowak & Laird, 2010). More than likely the converted members outnumbered the non-converted members so to keep the peace they were forced to convert.