Anglican Mission Research Articles

Rubble and Ruin: the CMS Hospital of Gaza in World War I … and Today?

ABSTRACT While the Ahli Arab Hospital of Gaza – formerly the CMS Mission hospital – has been the focus of public attention due to the 17 October 2023 explosion on its premises and the ongoing Israel-Hamas war, less attention has been given to its history. Very little information is publicly available. This article addresses that gap, aiming to bring texture, nuance and depth to contemporary discussions. Taking a narrative approach, this article poses two questions: first, how did the social, political and religious contexts of the hospital’s founding period shape its identity and role in the community? Second, how did it fare in World War I and the political transition that followed it? This article argues that Anglican Missionaries from the Church Mission Society (CMS) established the hospital in 1881 with the motivation and inspiration of their evangelical faith. After facing resistance from the local population, the missionaries won people’s trust through medical service. Their work was boosted after local leaders gave their endorsements and British imperial agents offered support. The situation changed rapidly, however, during World War I and the Ottoman entry into the war on the German side. The missionaries were expelled and the hospital was closed and eventually destroyed. Yet, after British victory, the missionaries were granted permission to resume services and rebuild the hospital.

A Dissenter in the Ranks: Barzillai Quaife's Mission to New Zealand

The arrival of the Congregationalist minister Barzillai Quaife in New Zealand in 1840 casts a new light on the established historiography on the role of missionaries in the colony at this time, revealing substantial (imported) divisions between Anglicans and Dissenting sects, resulting in a level of antipathy that (ironically) exceeded that which existed between Protestants and Catholics in the country at this time. Quaife's presence also illuminates the overlapping roles of the Anglican mission as a branch of state polity as well as a distinct religious entity in the colony, how this othered Quaife's Congregationalist mission, and the potential for misconstruing individual personality traits with strongly‐held theological opinions.

The Rev. John Stainsby and the ‘diffusion of Gospel truth’ in Early Nineteenth-Century Jamaica

First dispatched to Jamaica in 1818 by The Conversion Society, the Rev. John Stainsby became a prominent figure on the island. This article examines his intense involvement in Anglican missionary affairs to reveal how dishonesties and concealment of belief were used to expand Anglican missions in the Caribbean. Firstly, this article examines two key sites of contention between missionaries and the plantocracy – Sunday markets and baptism – where Stainsby used deception to reconcile his religious duties and colonial law. Secondly, it considers the motivations and actions of The Conversion Society and the Church Missionary Society more generally, including the heavily censored material used for religious instruction. Finally, it examines Stainsby as an enslaver, and considers the religious justifications used to support enslavement by many resident Anglican clergymen in the early nineteenth century.

Involvement of the Anglican Church in Nation Building and Political Development in Nigeria

The Anglican Church in Nigeria has a rich history spanning over 180 years. Here is a brief overview of its journey during this time: In 1842, the first Anglican missionaries arrived in Badagry, Nigeria, which was then a British colony. The study depended on secondary sources of data information and its findings influenced the study conclusion and study recommendation.

African Indigenous knowledge versus Western science in the Mbeere Mission of Kenya

This article sets out to explore the way in which Western science and technology was received in the Mbeere Mission of central Kenya since August 1912 when a medical missionary, Dr T.W.W. Crawford, visited the area. In his dalliance with ecclesiastical matters, Crawford, a highly trained Canadian medical doctor, was sent by the Church Missionary Society (CMS) at Kigari-Embu, in 1910, to pioneer the Anglican mission in the vast area that included Mbeereland, where Mbeere Mission is situated. Contending with the African indigenous knowledge in medicine, environmental conservation, agriculture and other forms of indigenous science, the introduction of Western science and technology, 1912 to 1952, the article argues, did not erase the former; rather, it complimented it. Pockets of general resistance were evident, though Mbeereland, unlike its neighbouring Mutira Mission of 1912, did not offer elaborate opposition to the Western science and technology, partly because the locals could have learnt about it from their neighbours who had experienced it much earlier. Through a historico-narrative design, the research article endeavours to primarily review the coming of Western medicine in Mbeereland: Did it conflict with the African medicine? Methodologically, the data have been collected via archival sources, oral interviews and by reviewing applicable literature.Contribution: The input of this research article to the HTS Journal’s vision and scope is seen by appreciating its focus on the interface between African indigenous knowledge and the European science and technology. Although the main focus is

Anglicanism in Africa: History, Identity, and Mission

A historical perspective is a vital part of insight into Anglicanism in Africa. This article assesses the role of missionaries when colonialists and missionaries were often perceived as collaborators. Further, the African nations’ struggle for independence impacted issues of identity and enculturation, so it offers a review of the place of African cultural and religious practices in this new faith, including the place of the uneducated in a seemingly elite religion and how addressing this necessitated liturgical renewal and other adaptations. Finally, it will look at the Anglican mission in African societies in relation to leadership, injustice, poverty, disease, secularization, and a restive youth population and highlight African Anglicans’ response to Western revisionist tendencies and redefinitions of gender and family. KEYWORDS: Anglicanism, bishop, colonialism, historical perspective, identity, Kikuyu Conference, East African Revival, missionary

Quaker Outcasts and the Creation of Missionary Anglicanism, 1691–1706

Abstract This article re-examines the creation and implications of missionary Anglicanism during the later 1690s. It focuses on a small group of Quaker outcasts and their role in the creation of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, as well as their continuing influence during the institution’s earliest years. An initial Anglican missionary impulse was stimulated and directed by the belated realisation among ministers that, since the 1670s, the Society of Friends had expanded rapidly in the Americas. Seeking strategies for how they might respond to this growth of organised dissent, Anglicans turned to those who had been cast out of the Society of Friends on both sides of the ocean. In particular, they sought the aid of George Keith, who had been disowned by the Quakers because of the schism he caused in Pennsylvania during 1692. These outcasts came to serve as confessional intermediaries, importing specifically Quaker techniques of missionary tours, networking and the usage of cheap print into the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. Their actions also had further, parallel consequences across the Atlantic. The division Keith caused and the activities of the outcasts thereafter encouraged a reformation of Quakerism, the formation of Anglican networks and the first soundings of a transoceanic public sphere. Being neither Quakers nor truly Anglicans, but entangled with both, the outcasts fomented strife between these two faiths. However, they also promoted ecclesiological reaction and borrowing between them, which, in turn, catalysed processes of Atlantic confession-building and opened a transatlantic dimension in anglophone debates around religiosity.

Brief introductions to Anglican theology: Christian mission

This essay explores changing understandings of Anglican mission from the nineteenth century to the present. Three periods are identified. First, when mission was practiced “over there” (in the period before World War II), then when mission was understood in terms of mutuality (in the postwar era), and finally when mission was understood as being everywhere (from the end of the Cold War to the present). The essay pays attention to shifting theological rationales for mission and demonstrates how ecclesiology and eschatology are critical themes for Anglicans in relation to mission. The essay concludes with suggestions for Anglican mission theology and how ecclesiological and eschatological emphases can be combined in a mutually enriching fashion.

“To Abjure Popish Heresys”: Crafting a Borderlands Gospel during Queen Anne’s War at St. James Parish, South Carolina, 1701–20

Abstract In 1706, local authorities institutionalized the Church of England in South Carolina hoping to bring Carolinian social practice into conformity with that of the metropole. Anglican missionaries worked to install religious instruction as a pillar of community identity in this contested space. Employing the specter of war and popery—and the associated fear of slave rebellion—helped ministers Samuel Thomas and Francis LeJau articulate a borderland-specific conception of race, place, and paternal responsibility in an aggressively expanding colony from 1701 to 1720. Utilizing correspondence surrounding the activities of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG), this article asserts that rather than serving as a link to English society, the Anglican missions of the SPG functioned as an ideological space for creating a distinct regional identity. Thomas and LeJau crafted a community-specific application of Anglican beliefs, working out their conceptions of religious practice concerning the threats presented by Spanish attempts to secure the loyalty of Yamasees Indians and enslaved Africans. Understanding how fear operated in the southeastern borderlands provides a nuanced understanding of how colonialism operated in the southern colonies.

St Cuthbert’s Mission Station: Fragments of living heritage, the archive and documentary filmmaking – ‘the future of the past’

This paper offers a reflection on a research project undertaken over a period of nearly five years at the St Cuthbert’s Anglican community near Tsolo in the Eastern Cape, South Africa. St Cuthbert’ was established by Father Bransby Key, an Anglican missionary in the nineteenth century. On a site visit with art historian professor Anitra Nettleton, we met elders who still remembered the missionaries and could relate to lay-worker Frank Cornner who collected beadwork made by the amaMpondomise even though the missionaries discouraged these practices. Cornner’s collections are housed at the Iziko South African Museum in Cape Town, the British Museum in London and at Pit Rivers in Oxford, in the United Kingdom. The importance of recording testimonies of elders underlines the value of ‘living heritage’ as an added research tool in attempts to contribute to the existing archive, especially as many of the elders have since passed away. The elders recall their experiences with fondness and it was only at a later stage that the researcher encountered dichotomous reactions to the missionary project in the area. For the researcher / documentary filmmaker this tension presented a dilemma as the value of the testimonies could in no way whatsoever be undermined despite the challenges faced by practitioners at this time in the history of our country. My research does, however, point to the importance of constantly adding to existing archival collections of historical records by recording the lived experiences of relevant individuals.

The First World War as a Turning Point: The Impact of theYears 1914–1918 on Church and Mission (with Special Focus on the Hermannsburg Mission) ed. by Frieder Ludwig

Reviewed by: The First World War as a Turning Point: The Impact of theYears 1914–1918 on Church and Mission (with Special Focus on the Hermannsburg Mission) ed. by Frieder Ludwig Marcus Felde The First World War as a Turning Point: The Impact of theYears 1914–1918 on Church and Mission (with Special Focus on the Hermannsburg Mission). Edited by Frieder Ludwig. Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2020. 236 pp. This book originated in a symposium in Hermannsburg on the 100th anniversary of the end of the First World War. The purpose was to consider the impact of that war on German missions overseas and the churches planted by their work. These writings are of personal interest because I served fourteen years in the part of Papua New Guinea (PNG) which once was known as "Kaiser-Wilhelmsland." It is not difficult to see in the PNG church the effects of actions taken against German missions during the First World War and again during the Second World War. German missionaries in New Guinea were from Rhenisch and Neuendettelsau organizations rather than the Hermannsburg Mission, but they faced similar difficulties and had similar outcomes. "New World" missionaries were one answer to the dilemmas created in the "Third World" when the "Old World" went to war. Philip Jenkins opens the volume by showing how people and their governments made use of religion during World War I both for legitimation and for comfort; it was pervasive and powerful. But he ends his essay with an aphoristic quip (a play on the title of a Goya painting) which seems to contradict his thesis: "The sleep of religion brings forth monsters" (48). Is he blaming the horrors of World War I on a dearth of religion, after arguing that religion was pervasive throughout? Is he advocating for any and all religions? One declaration made me wince: "The good news for the churches was that the war did not kill religion" (38). Perhaps his 2014 book The Great and Holy War made clearer distinctions? Perhaps in it he had room to explore also the faith-based revulsion many Christians felt and feel about warfare? Martin Tamcke, Volker Metzler, and Rolf Hosfeld opened my eyes to a neglected part of history: troops, local officials, and citizens massacred about 200,000 Christians in the Urmia region of Assyria (now parts of Iran and Turkey) during World War I. (This is distinct from the better known massacre of Armenians.) What [End Page 96] a horrible dilemma Germans faced. They had a relationship with those "Nestorian" Christians through mission work. Their government was allied in war with a largely Muslim nation (the Ottoman Empire) which used the cover of war to purge violently Christians who traced their faith heritage back to the fourth century. Kevin Ward brings a British perspective on the nexus of war and mission and its ramifications for Anglican missions in Africa. "The war called into question 'German' assumptions of European cultural superiority and 'British' delusions of imperial splendour, but it certainly did not automatically end them" (122). He points out that the war followed closely the 1910 World Missionary Conference, damaging (perhaps fatally?) its high aspirations for the Christianization of the world. Adam Jones and Fritz Hasselhorn perceive a silver lining to the deleterious effect of the war on German missions in Africa. During and after the war, at first of necessity and then intentionally, missionaries were moved to yield authority to the people they had come to serve. A new and necessary trend had only begun. "While the missionaries were used to be[ing] 'in the position of little kings with their congregations,' in the future they should feel 'part of the whole.'" (140) [Emphasis is in the 1903 letter of Egmont Harms, director of the Hermannsburg Mission.] Essays by Hagos Abrha, Iris Leung Chui Wa, Pui Yee Pong, and Jayabalan Murthy ensure some balance, representing not the mission societies but the churches that grew from (and despite) their efforts. Two of those essays look at Hong Kong and one at India, British territories where German missionaries were regarded as hostiles. Like the other essays, they offer both "facts on the ground" and thoughtful reflection about mission work...

Modern African Missionaries. A Reassessment of Their Impact in Uganda 1890s–1920s

Abstract Using examples from Anglican missions in the Great Lakes region of Africa this article explores the roles of African Protestant missionaries in the modern era. It argues that many committed African Christians understood themselves to be missionaries and examines the nature of their missionary activity. Those who called themselves missionaries evangelised outside their own ethnic group. They were engaged in regional and transnational developments. The article attends to local and regional historical processes to show how African missionary activities were infused with transnational notions of belonging to a world religion.

The Wesleys and the Anglican Mission to Georgia, 1735–1738: “So Glorious an Undertaking.” By John Thomas Scott. Studies in Eighteenth-Century America and the Atlantic World. Bethlehem, Pa. Lehigh University Press, 2021. xix + 364 pp. $125.00 cloth.

The Wesleys and the Anglican Mission to Georgia, 1735–1738: “So Glorious an Undertaking.” By John Thomas Scott. Studies in Eighteenth-Century America and the Atlantic World. Bethlehem, Pa. Lehigh University Press, 2021. xix + 364 pp. $125.00 cloth. - Volume 90 Issue 4

“For the Good of Their Souls”: Performing Christianity in Eighteenth-Century Mohawk Country

William Hart’s stated objective in his fine new monograph is to “problematize” the ways in which individual “faithful Mohawks” (20) engaged and performed Protestantism over the course of a long eighteenth century. Informed by deep research in a sizeable primary archive of missionary correspondence, and grounded in broad study of both ethnohistorical scholarship on Christian missionization and performance theory, Hart’s book succeeds admirably in providing an evenhanded assessment of the phenomenon of Anglican missionary work among the Mohawks from the late seventeenth century to the early nineteenth century. Additionally, his insights into this particular case study address broader questions for all those interested in the dynamics of cross-cultural contact.Hart moves beyond long-standing tropes in studies of missionary work among Indigenous people, expressing healthy skepticism of the efforts of prior scholars to measure the degree to which Mohawk conversions to Christianity were bona fide. Instead, Hart maintains that we can glean better insights into Mohawk engagement with Church of England missionaries by assessing the Mohawks’ actions—how they assimilated the religious messaging offered to them, integrated it into their own cultural framework, and subsequently performed it among themselves and before settler audiences. Fundamentally, Hart contends that Mohawks engaged Protestant Christianity initially as a means of “turn[ing] outsiders [i.e., the Anglican missionaries] into insiders” (4), and eventually, by the mid-eighteenth century, as a vehicle for acquiring literacy in a world where “talking papers” (i.e., treaty documents, land deeds, contracts) (228) exerted powerful influence over the Mohawks’ collective future.Hart is forthcoming about the limits of his evidence—he does not presume to represent what Mohawks believed about the Anglican faith (138, 227–28). Rather, he is more interested in how the Mohawks residing in the Mohawk Valley during the eighteenth century leveraged their acceptance of Protestant missionaries as part of a broader effort to cultivate ties of alliance to Great Britain. Carrying the narrative through the upheavals of the Revolutionary War, Hart also offers a detailed and nuanced assessment of the role of Anglican religious performance in the establishment of post-Revolutionary Mohawk/Haudenosaunee diasporic communities in Upper Canada (Tyendinaga and Grand River).Notwithstanding Hart’s commendable unwillingness to allow the current international boundary between Canada and the United States to structure his inquiry into the Mohawks’ social and political history in the first, second, and sixth chapters of the book, there are some ways in which a still more comprehensive adoption of that perspective might have offered better contextualization of his chosen case study. By 1700, two-thirds of the Mohawk population resided in the St. Lawrence River Valley community of Kahnawake (24). By the eve of the American Revolution, that proportion grew to approximately three-quarters of the Mohawk population, with additional Mohawk communities at Kanesatake and Akwesasne, each of which hosted a Catholic mission. A more consistent effort by the author to engage in comparative assessment of how the so-called Catholicized (36) Mohawks of the St. Lawrence Valley engaged the Jesuits over the course of the eighteenth century might have shed important light on the contemporaneous approaches to Protestant missionaries of their kinfolk remaining in the Mohawk Valley.Hart’s study is a welcome addition to early North American ethnohistorical scholarship. The book offers fresh insight not only into Mohawk culture during a crucial era of their history but also into the challenging question of assaying what the Mohawks meant and wanted by their persistent (albeit infrequently answered) requests for Protestant ministers.

The Theology and Ecclesiology of the Prayer Book Crisis, 1906–1928. By Dan D. Cruickshank

Geoffrey Cuming (whose name recurs below) once told me that the only time that he ever heard his clergyman father swear was when he heard the news of the defeat in the House of Commons of the 1928 ‘Deposited’ Book of Common Prayer. On the other hand, pioneer Anglican missionaries in remote upper Burma held a special gathering to give thanks for that same defeat. One saw the Church of England as grievously damaged; the others saw it as miraculously saved. The defeat had actually happened twice, in December 1927 and in June 1928. And the liturgical texts and programme of the Church of England have been planned, drafted, authorized, and used in worship ever since, in a context shaped by that controversial defeat. The liturgical story was told with much textual detail in Ronald Jasper’s Walter Howard Frere: His Correspondence on Liturgical Revision and Construction (Alcuin/SPCK, 1954). Cruickshank, though...

Visions and Realities in Hong Kong Anglican Mission Schools, 1849–1941

This article explores the tension between missionary hopes for mass conversion through Christian education and the reality of operating mission schools in one colonial context: Hong Kong. Riding on the wave of British imperial expansion, George Smith, the first bishop of the diocese of Victoria, had a vision for mission schooling in colonial Hong Kong. In 1851, Smith established St Paul's College as an Anglo-Chinese missionary institution to educate, equip and send out Chinese young people who would subsequently participate in mission work before evangelizing the whole of China. However, Smith's vision failed to take institutional form as the college encountered operational difficulties and graduates opted for more lucrative employment instead of church work. Moreover, the colonial government moved from a laissez-faire to a more hands-on approach in supervising schools. The bishops of Victoria were compelled to reshape their schools towards more sustainable institutional forms while making compromises regarding their vision for Christian education.

Lux et Tenebris? Coloniality and Anglican Missions in Argentine Patagonia in the Nineteenth Century

Within the modern capitalist World-System, Missionary work was mostly developed through the connubiality with colonial powers. The missionary work of the Anglican Church is no exception. This article centers on the missionary enterprise carried out in Argentine Patagonia in the nineteenth century. Missionaries’ reports carefully narrated that venture. However, the language and the notions underlying the missionary work’s narration reveal the dominion of colonial ideologies that imbued how religious agents constructed alterity. Connecting the missionaries’ worldview with the political context and expansion of the British Empire allows us to unfold the complex intersections of religious, ethnic, racial, and geopolitical discourses that traverse the lives of indigenous peoples in South America.

Alternative Entry Points for Adaptation: Examples from Vanuatu

AbstractAs climate change accelerates, effective adaptation is an urgent and unavoidable priority. Bottom-up approaches such as community-based adaptation have been portrayed as the panacea. Recent studies are, however, highlighting the ongoing and inherent issues with normative “community” conceptualizations that assume a geographically bound, temporally fixed, and harmonious unit. Despite documentation on the negative impact these problematic assumptions can have on adaptation outcomes, adaptation at the community scale remains the preferred option for project delivery in highly exposed places such as the Pacific Islands region. More creative entry points that are less charged with problematic assumptions are needed at the local scale. This paper draws from three examples in Vanuatu to offer compelling alternative entry points for adaptation: 1) a rural technical college embedded within an Anglican mission village, 2) a whole-of-island approach, and 3) the “collective of vendors” at marketplaces. We offer hope by identifying ways to expand on and complement existing, restricted notions of community and, through this, to improve adaptation outcomes.

Intolerance before and after the 1517 Reformation and the Kenyan context

The article sets out to demonstrate that theo-social intolerance in both colonial and post-colonial Kenya, a phenomenon which reminisces other forms of intolerance during and after the 1517 reformation and the persecutions in the early Church, can be overcome. In Kenya, theo-social intolerance was evident when both the missionaries and the colonial authorities blocked any room for dialogue with the practitioners of African religion. It reached its climax when African Instituted Churches and their founded schools were closed down in 1952 by the colonial authorities. Intolerance also manifests itself through the tensions that are evident among Christians and Muslims, afro-Pentecostals versus mainline Churches and so on. As we mark over 500 years of reformation (1517–2019), are there lessons that can inform our theo-social discourses in the 21st century, especially in regard to theo-social tolerance? How can this Ubulwane/Unyama (beastly) behaviour be avoided in our future socio-ecclesial discourses? Despite borrowing broadly in order to build the case for religious tolerance, the article has cited the case of St Andrew’s Kabare, an Anglican Mission centre that was established in 1910, where Rev. Edmund Crawford demonstrated that dialogue between African culture and the Gospel has a positive impact on the society being evangelized.

Keeping up with the Chinese: Constituting and Reconstituting the Anglican Church in South China, 1897–1951

When Anglican missionaries helped to constitute the Chinese Anglican Church (Chung Hua Sheng Kung Hui) in 1912, they had a particular expectation of how the church would one day become self-supporting, self-governing and self-propagating. The first constitution crafted by missionary bishops presupposed an infant church that would require the step-by-step guidance of its parent association. However, the intended trajectory was superseded by the zeal of Chinese Christians and drastic changes in the national government of China. The constitutional basis of the Chinese Anglican Church had to be restructured fundamentally again and again due to political upheaval in republican China, the Japanese occupation and the Communist revolution. This article explores the difficulties of crafting and implementing church constitutions in China in the first half of the turbulent twentieth century. Focusing on the South China diocese, wider questions are posed about the formation of canon law in an age of extremes.