‘A Truly Christian Village’: The Farmerfield Mission as a Novel Turn in Methodist Evangelical Strategies, Eastern Cape, South Africa, 1838–1883

Abstract

ABSTRACT Between the 1820s and the 1830s, the superintendent of Wesleyan missions, William Shaw, and his colleagues created ‘a chain of stations’ that effectively established a Methodist sphere of influence in the Eastern Cape. Despite the romance associated with this era, pioneer evangelism yielded Africans who attended church without becoming bona fide Christians, and the small number of baptised, official church members paled in proportion to the actual resident mission population. Shaw and his missionary colleagues complained of equivocation, lack of interest, and dissimulation among their potential African converts. The outbreak of war on the frontier in 1834, the subsequent destruction of some of the Methodist missions and the dispersal of the mission population all compounded the disappointment with pioneer missions. That the patterns of romance followed by despair over signs of backsliding and lack of interest were commonplace in the annals of missionary history did little to assuage the disillusionment. Determined to remedy the spectre of ‘nominal Christianity’, Shaw created Farmerfield, a new mission settlement designed to cultivate a vital, mature African engagement with Christianity. Farmerfield's strict rules of residence, its location amid a white community, and its recruitment of ‘a select class of natives’, changed the tenor and direction of African evangelism as William Shaw had envisioned it and represented a novel turn in Methodist evangelical strategies.