Church Missionary Society Research Articles

‘Only cuppa tea Christians’: colonisation, authentic indigeneity and the missionary linguist

‘Cuppa tea Christians’ were Aboriginal people whose faith was supposedly only as deep as their desire for a cuppa. At the Church Missionary Society of Australia’s Angurugu mission to Anindilyakwa people in the Northern Territory, missionaries in the 1960s suspected that most ‘conversions’ were only shallow. This article examines the long association in English speakers’ minds of Aboriginal cultures with insincerity or fakery. I argue that the prevalence of Anindilyakwa ‘backsliding’ at the mission in the 1960s pushed missionaries to search for new approaches to know for sure who, if anyone, was sincerely converted. Language became the key for missionaries to speak directly to Aboriginal hearts and know the Aboriginal mind, based on an assumption that Aboriginal people were only authentic when speaking their own languages. Although missionary linguistic projects tended towards impulses to ‘colonise Indigenous consciousness’, Anindilyakwa people managed this project, as well as working out their own diverse responses to the missionaries’ gospel.This article has been peer reviewed.

The Missionary and the Anthropologist: The Intellectual Friendship and Scientific Collaboration of the Reverend John Roscoe (CMS) and James G. Frazer, 1896–1932

A rapidly expanding field, the study of the interactions between missions and sciences, and most notably missions and anthropology, has opened up new ways of examining the scholarly work of missionaries and their extra-apostolic activities. Historians of missions are drawn to archival materials that had been previously overlooked, such as the contributions of missionaries to scientific journals, or their correspondence with figures that worked outside of missionary circles. This article focuses on one such correspondence between the social anthropologist James George Frazer and the Revd John Roscoe, who worked for the Church Missionary Society in Uganda between 1889 and 1911. Not only was Roscoe a mine of information on Central African tribes for Frazer, he was also, after he retired from the CMS, a keen student of anthropology who devoted the second part of his life to anthropological ventures: he wrote the first ethnological account on the Baganda, contributed to enriching the Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology's collections of Central African relics and artefacts, helped set up training courses in anthropology for prospective missionaries and led an anthropological expedition. His work, and his long correspondence with Frazer, bears the mark of the renowned anthropologist's theories on totemism, a notion that was at the core of the international anthropological scene in the late-Victorian and Edwardian period.

Christopher Oliver Payne

Christopher Oliver Payne’s father was a music hall variety artist who had left school at 12; his mother was a shorthand typist. Chris was proud to be a scholarship boy...

Tony Ballantyne. Entanglements of Empire: Missionaries, Māori, and the Question of the Body. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2014. Pp. xii + 360. $94.95 (cloth).

Tony Ballantyne’s wide-ranging, energetic, and intellectually provocative writing has profoundly shifted debates in new imperial history and a cluster of cognate disciplines. In Entanglements of Empire, Ballantyne returns home to New Zealand for a deep reconsideration of key moments in the precolonial 1810s and 1820s. In particular, he illuminates encounters between Maori and British missionaries and explores the legacy of the Reverend Samuel Marsden, a foundational figure in the Church Missionary Society’s efforts in the South Pacific.

The Relationship between Religion and the Public Square: Freedom of Religion in the Public Space

The Relationship between Religion and the Public Square: Freedom of Religion in the Public Space

The "dirty weather" diaries of Reverend Richard Davis: insights about early colonial-era meteorology and climate variability for northern New Zealand, 1839–1851

Abstract. Reverend Richard Davis (1790–1863) was a colonial-era missionary stationed in the Far North of New Zealand who was a key figure in the early efforts of the Church Mission Society. He kept meticulous meteorological records for the early settlements of Waimate North and Kaikohe, and his observations are preserved in a two-volume set in the Sir George Grey Special Collections in the Auckland Central Library. The Davis diary volumes are significant because they constitute some of the earliest land-based meteorological measurements that were continually chronicled for New Zealand. The diary measurements cover nine years within the 1839–1851 time span that are broken into two parts: 1839–1844 and 1848–1851. Davis' meteorological recordings include daily 9 a.m. and noon temperatures and midday pressure measurements. Qualitative comments in the diary note prevailing wind flow, wind strength, cloud cover, climate variability impacts, bio-indicators suggestive of drought, and notes on extreme weather events. "Dirty weather" comments scattered throughout the diary describe disturbed conditions with strong winds and driving rainfall. The Davis diary entries coincide with the end of the Little Ice Age (LIA) and they indicate southerly and westerly circulation influences and cooler winter temperatures were more frequent than today. A comparison of climate field reconstructions derived from the Davis diary data and tree-ring-based winter temperature reconstructions are supported by tropical coral palaeotemperature evidence. Davis' pressure measurements were corroborated using ship log data from vessels associated with iconic Antarctic exploration voyages that were anchored in the Bay of Islands, and suggest the pressure series he recorded are robust and can be used as "station data". The Reverend Davis meteorological data are expected to make a significant contribution to the Atmospheric Circulation Reconstructions across the Earth (ACRE) project, which feeds the major data requirements for the longest historical reanalysis – the 20th Century Reanalysis Project (20CR). Thus these new data will help extend surface pressure-based reanalysis reconstructions of past weather covering New Zealand within the data-sparse Southern Hemisphere.

Corporate Holiness: Pulpit Preaching and the Church of England Missionary Societies, 1760–1870 by Bob Tennant (review)

Reviewed by: Corporate Holiness: Pulpit Preaching and the Church of England Missionary Societies, 1760–1870 by Bob Tennant Laura M. Stevens Bob Tennant, Corporate Holiness: Pulpit Preaching and the Church of England Missionary Societies, 1760–1870 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). Pp. xii + 342. $105.00. This review is also a tribute, for Bob Tennant died on January 6, 2014, his sixty-fifth birthday, just two weeks after his book was published. Tennant’s posthumous scholarly reputation—especially in regard to his work on Anglican sermons, missionary societies, and the eighteenth-century bishop and philosopher Joseph Butler—will exceed the reputation he enjoyed during his lifetime, because most of his publications either came out in the years just preceding his death or are now in press. Tennant’s career followed a nonstandard path: he earned his doctorate in English literature from the University of London in 1970 and taught at the University of Sussex (where he had received his BA) until 1978; then, for more than two decades, he worked in London as a senior manager in adult education while being active in the labor and trade union movement. It was not until 2001 that he took up full-time scholarly research, first as Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Glasgow and then at the University of Durham. During these thirteen years, which included a term as Visiting Scholar at Baylor University, he was remarkably prolific, publishing two books, Conscience, Consciousness and Ethics in Joseph Butler’s Philosophy and Ministry (2011) and Corporate Holiness, along with several articles including two chapters in The Oxford Handbook of the British Sermon 1689–1901 (2012), a project for which he was a consultant editor. Corporate Holiness is a study of what Tennant calls “the operational ethos” of the Church of England’s three missionary societies in existence between the mid-eighteenth and late nineteenth centuries: The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK), founded in 1698; the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG), an incorporated society chartered in 1702; and the Church Missionary Society (CMS), founded in 1799. The first two organizations shared founders, many members, and general sensibilities, with distinct but mutually [End Page 303] supporting purviews emerging from a wave of Anglican pastoral and reformist engagement spanning the turn of the eighteenth century. The SPCK’s projects included funding charity schools throughout Britain, providing chaplains for the East India Company, distributing religious literature at home and abroad, and supporting missions to India, many of which were staffed by Danish and German Lutherans. The SPG’s primary tasks were to supply ministers to colonial populations where the Church of England was not the established church, to assist with the conversion of African slaves, and to bring the gospel to indigenous heathen populations near colonial settlements. The CMS was one of several organizations launched by the Clapham Sect, an evangelical Anglican group best known for its abolitionist activism and its moral reform projects. Being “the prototype in a broad-front intervention in society by the Evangelicals” (95), with a stated mission overlapping those of the SPG and SPCK, the CMS occasioned some controversy and competition within the Church of England. The book’s title speaks to a core challenge faced by all three societies: the Church of England “had no obvious mandate beyond the nation,” and thus had a “corresponding constitutional need to justify missionary activity . . . to an extent unapproached by those of the Roman Catholic and Dissenting Churches” (284). The Anglican societies thus faced the task of crafting from scratch an extroverted missiology, with accompanying governing structures and methodologies. Tennant drew the phrase “corporate holiness” from Bishop of Gloucester William Warburton’s conception “of corporate holiness as an expression of national spirituality and practice, grounded on prophesy and the mutually reinforcing platforms of Church and State,” but even more so from Butler’s “projection of the personally ethical into the corporate” (287). This was not a static concept, for the societies’ identities, understandings of their missions, and structures altered over the 110 years covered by this book, while differences both subtle and glaring developed among the three organizations “about the Church’s role in relation to detached...

The changes of nurse uniform style in Pakhoi Po Yan Hospital in recent hundred year

Nurse uniforms are the nurse's professional clothing, the main features of which are to keep clean and for easy identification. Culture consciousness has been added into nurse uniforms by people's behavior during the course of its application. Through the investigation on the historical materials of Pakhoi Po Yan Hospital (founded by Church Missionary Society in April 1886 in Pakhoi), it can be found that the nurse uniforms of different ages reflect the cultural background of the changes and the development of nursing career. This not only deduces the nurse culture and progress, but also reflects the continuation of nursing care, its responsibility and innovation.

Neurasthenia at Mengo Hospital, Uganda: A Case Study in Psychiatry and a Diagnosis, 1906–50

ABSTRACTThis article uses a case-study approach to examine the complex and contradictory nature of diagnoses like neurasthenia in colonial Africa. Drawing on the case notes of European and African patients diagnosed with neurasthenia at the Church Missionary Society's Mengo Hospital, Uganda, it argues that in practice, and outside the colonial asylum in particular, ideas about race and mental illness were more nuanced than histories of psychiatry and empire might imply. At Mengo, the tales of pain and suffering recorded by the doctors remind us that there is more to the history of neurasthenia than colonial anxieties and socio-political control. This was a diagnosis that was negotiated in hospital examination rooms as much as in medical journals. Significantly, it was also a diagnosis that was not always reserved exclusively for white colonisers—at Mengo Hospital from the early 1900s neurasthenia was diagnosed in African patients too. It became part of a wider discussion about detribalisation, in which a person's social environment was as important as race.

Mission, Politics and Linguistic Research

SummaryThis article investigates the ways local mission and national politics shaped linguistic research work in mid-20th century Australia through examining the case of the Church Missionary Society’s Angurugu Mission on Groote Eylandt in the Northern Territory and research into the Anindilyakwa language. The paper places missionary linguistics in the context of broader policies of assimilation and national visions for Aboriginal people. It reveals how this social and political climate made linguistic research, largely neglected in the 1950s (apart from some notable exceptions), not only possible, but necessary by the 1970s. Finally, it comments on the state of research into Aboriginal languages and the political climate of today. Until the 1950s, the demands of funding and commitment to a government policy of assimilation into white Australia meant that the CMS could not support linguistic research and opportunities for academic linguists to conduct research into Anindilyakwa were limited. By the 1960s, however, national consensus about the future of Aboriginal people and their place in the Australian nation shifted and governments reconsidered the nature of their support for Christian missions. As the ‘industrial mission’ model of the 1950s was no longer politically or economically viable, the CMS looked to reinvent itself, to find new ways of maintaining its evangelical influence on Groote Eylandt. Linguistics and research into Aboriginal cultures – including in partnership with secular academic agents – were a core component of this reinvention of mission, not only for the CMS but more broadly across missions to Aboriginal people. The resulting collaboration across organisations proved remarkably productive from a research perspective and enabled the continuance of a missionary presence and relevance. The political and financial limitations faced by missions shaped, therefore, not only their own practice with regards to linguistic research, but also the opportunities for linguists beyond the missionary fold. The article concludes that, in Australia, the two bodies of linguists – academic and missionary – have a shared history, dependent on similar political, social and financial forces.

Intertextuality as a Means of Negotiating Authority, Status, and Place—Forms, Contexts, and Effects of Quotations of Christian Texts in Nineteenth-Century Missionary Correspondence from Yorùbáland

From the early 1840s, Church Missionary Society agents were active in the Yorùbá mission in what today is Southwest Nigeria. Both European and African missionaries—often former slaves who had converted to Christianity—corresponded with the Society, and in their writing frequently used quotations from the Bible and other core Christian texts. These quotations were recontextualised (Fairclough 2003) in the missionaries’ writing and formed intertextual bonds (Blommaert 2005) between their correspondence and the original texts. For the missionaries these bonds provided solace and meaning in difficult situations, established their status and authority as proficient theologians in the face of their European audience, and explicitly linked them with the Christian narrative of ‘spreading the word’. Especially for the Yorùbá agents, this practice of creating intertextuality was a means of negotiating and affirming their African-Christian identity, thus establishing and expressing their new place in the Christian tradition.

The Legacy of Tübingen I (1964)

People who do not remember are like trees with their roots cut and rivers with their feeders dried up. While there may still be water and foliage, neither river nor tree can sustain life for much longer; soon both will be gone. Humans need to remember--at least now and then--where they come from and what their calling is so to be able to stay human and act accordingly. While the day-to-day demands tend to swallow us up until nothing distinctive is left, remembrance makes us reconnect with the roots of our being and with what we have set out for to accomplish. Once we forget who we are and what we stand for, we not only lose focus and orientation, we lose ourselves. The consultation known as "Tubingen I" was held fifty years ago on account of a joint invitation by the World Council of Churches (WCC) and the Lutheran World Federation (LWF) and hosted by the German Institute for Medical Missions at Tubingen, Germany. Tubingen I was neither the first nor the biggest get-together of people working in medical missions concerned about the future of such engagement and something more. Tubingen I, rather, was a consultation of experts tasked to advise the LWF and the WCC on how best to grapple with the challenges faced by church-related hospitals and health-care programs notably in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Yet, despite the secluded week-long deliberations of 19 (1) consultants, Tubingen I turned out to blaze the trail of a new understanding of the churches' involvement in health-care and healing, leading over time to significant practical changes. While the then-acting secretary of the World Council's Division of World Mission and Evangelism Charles H. Germany was confident that the "statements of the Tubingen Consultation will surely find an echo in the thought of Christian medical people throughout the world," (2) this came as a total surprise to most of the other participants. As Lesslie Newbigin stated in the Preface of the consultation report, In the course of the week spent together, certain common convictions were given to the group, and they felt bound to express them in a statement. Although this statement was not immediately published, the offices in Geneva began to receive very large numbers of enquiries about it. Many thousands of copies have been distributed in response to requests.... In a way which was not expected [the statement] seems to have spoken to the condition of many who were wrestling with the problems of medical missions, and ... with the healing ministry in one form or another. (3) In order to better understand the impact of and the legacy left by that very event, I will first situate Tubingen I within its historical and institutional context; second, analyze its finding; and conclude by looking at what happened to the insights gained in those days during the half century passed since. Tubingen I within the context of its time As previously stated, Tubingen I was not the first nor was it the biggest consultation addressing the challenges faced by medical missions and church-sponsored medical programs in the middle of the 20th century. Already in 1948, that is three years after World War II, the Church Missionary Society in London (CMS) published an elaborate statement on its medical policy (4) calling for the realignment of medical missions: "Realignment is designed to meet recurring need as circumstances alter.... Realignment may involve the use of new methods and the abandonment or subordination of old ones." (5) The new methods the statement envisioned were recognized as being "of great simplicity and of outmost importance." (6) They anticipated nearly everything of what some thirty years later would become known as Primary Health Care (PHC), namely: to focus on "preventive medicine," on "proper ... sanitation, working, and housing conditions," on "food supply, (7) on child welfare, (8) on the training of nurses, midwives, and auxiliaries, (9) on refresher courses for lay workers,1" on intersectoral and interdenominational cooperation, (11) on hospital outreach, (12) and, last but not least, on "the compilation of regional statistics and reports. …

Missions and Aboriginal difference: Judith Stokes and Australian missionary linguistics

Judith Stokes had always hoped to be a missionary linguist and translate the Bible. But on her arrival at Angurugu, the Church Mission Society of Australia (CMS) Aboriginal Mission on Groote Eylandt in the Northern Territory in 1952 as a schoolteacher, she discovered that linguists were not required. By looking at the experiences of Judith Stokes, I shed light on the tensions embedded in the evangelical missionary project in mid-twentieth century Australia. Traditionally evangelicals claimed that global conversion would flow from translating Bibles into local vernaculars. In Australia, however, concerns to integrate Aboriginal people into Australian citizenship through assimilation rendered the traditional evangelical approach problematic. Aboriginal missions were “different” from others, the CMS claimed—so different that some were unsure whether they were even real missions. Stokes' story reveals the contradictions within Australian evangelical communities between their global mission and their commitment to what they envisaged as an anti-racist policy of assimilation. Moreover, her status as a woman translator challenged CMS gendered conventions for Aboriginal missions and conceptions of the missionary vocation.

The Church Missionary Society and Architecture in the Mission Field: Evangelical Anglican Perspectives on Church Building Abroad, c. 1850-1900

The Gothic Revival occupies a central place in the architectural development of the Church of England in the nineteenth century, both at home and abroad. Within the expanding British colonial world, in particular, the neo-Gothic church became a centrally important expression of both faith and identity throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. From a symbolic and communicative perspective, the style represented not only a visual link to Britain, but also the fundamental expression of the Church of England as an institution and of the culture of Englishness. As such, it carried with it a wide range of cultural implications that suited the needs of settler communities wishing to re-established their identity abroad. Expansion during this period, however, was not only limited to the growth of settler communities but was also reflected in growing Anglican missions to the non-Christian peoples of annexed territories. The two primary organs of the Church of England in the field, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG) and the Church Missionary Society (CMS), actively employed the revived medieval style throughout the Empire as missions were solidified through infrastructure development. As a popular style with direct connotations to the Christian faith, revived medieval design became increasingly popular with Anglican missionaries abroad in the period between the early 1840s and the end of the century. Not only did its origins in ecclesiastical buildings make it attractive, but it was also stylistically distinctive, and set apart as a sacred style from both secular and ‘heathen’ structures.

The Authenticity and Authority of Islam

This paper examines the concept of Islamic authority in relation to early twentieth-century Protestant missionary writings on Islam and Muhammad Rashid Rida’s commentaries on mission publications in his Cairo-based journal, al-Manar. While Rida’s Salafi reformism has been the subject of much discussion, scholars have given little attention to the content of the missionary writings Rida engaged. Treatments of Rida’s work have also neglected to address the vision of Islamic authority that emerges from his responses to Christian polemics. This paper gives both subjects further consideration as it discusses Protestant missionary approaches to Islam, examines Rida’s writings on Christianity, and assesses his response to a widely circulated article on Islam by Temple Gairdner, a prominent British missionary with the Church Missionary Society in Egypt.

Plurality in the Capital: The Christian Responses to London’s Religious Minorities since 1800

On a late spring day in 1856 Prince Albert carried out one of the less routine royal engagements of the Victorian era, by laying the foundation stone of what was to become ‘The Strangers’ Home for Asiatics, Africans and South Sea Islanders’, located at Limehouse in the London docklands. The deputation receiving the prince was headed by the earl of Chichester, who was the First Church Estates Commissioner and president of the Church Missionary Society, and included Thomas Carr, formerly bishop of Bombay, Maharajah Duleep Singh, a Sikh convert to Christianity and a favourite of Queen Victoria, and William Henry Sykes, MP and chairman of the East India Company.

Longing for Community: Church, Ummah, or Somewhere in Between? A Review Essay

January 2015 Michael Nazir-Ali, a citizen of both Pakistan and the United Kingdom, is president of the Oxford Centre for Training, Research, Advocacy and Dialogue (OXTRAD) and formerly was bishop of Rochester (U.K.) and Raiwind (Pakistan) and general secretary of the Church Mission Society. —oxtrad@gmail.com T book on the theme of Christian witness in Muslim settings contains contributions from some twenty missiologists, sociologists, anthropologists, and linguists. It spans a huge range of mission involvement spread over several continents, and there is much practical wisdom to be found here. We need to remember that these were addresses presented to a mixed conference, and therefore we should not demand too much academic rigor from them. The chapters concentrate heavily on the questions of effective evangelism, conversion, and discipleship, but there is little here about the social, economic, and political dimensions of Christian mission. Given the disciplines of many of the contributors, there is a somewhat uncritical use of the social sciences and their jargon, without a sufficient amount of theological rigor being brought both to the use of the social sciences and to the description of various missionary situations in which the contributors find themselves. A glaring omission is ecclesiology. Individual stories are well told and groups described, but often with little information regarding how the authors view the significance of the church for mission, in both its local manifestation and its universal nature. A few of the contributors are from a Muslim background, one of whom does mention the church as being significant for converts as they transfer from one community to another. As so often today, the phenomenon of conversion is considered from anthropological and sociological perspectives, but we need more on conversion’s spiritual and theological aspects, as well as the priority of the missio Dei in this and other areas of mission. The issue of continuity and discontinuity is a complex one and needs to be examined in all of its aspects, with both the positive (as praeparatio evangelica) and the negative (the lingering on of the undesirable) meriting due attention. It is indeed useful, as in one of the contributions, to tabulate both what has attracted converts to the new faith (a sense of God’s love, security, freedom, guidance, and so forth) and what has turned them away from their old way of life (such as empty ritual, inflexible law and customs, and distance from the divine). In the entirely laudable project of seeking to communicate the Gospel in an Islamic milieu, there is always the lurking danger of lapsing into a dhimmi mentality which assumes the validity and priority of an Islamic worldview and value system. Some of the great heroes of the faith, mentioned by the only Longing for Community: Church, Ummah, or Somewhere in Between? A Review Essay

Locating the real William Colenso: reviewing a thirty year research journey

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the importance of ongoing conversations between researchers and librarians. Without such conversations followed by the active purchasing of manuscripts, the important contributions of individual first settlers would likely remain untold. The research review that unfolds here is of one of New Zealand's significant first settlers, William Colenso (1811-1899). Yet, 30 years ago William Colenso was mostly regarded as a local rather than a national figure, renowned and ridiculed for his being dismissed from the Church Missionary Society for moral impropriety in 1852. By 2011, however, a conference dedicated to his life and work attracted both national and international scholars raising awareness and contributing unique knowledge about Colenso as missionary, printer, linguist, explorer, botanist, politician, author and inspector of schools. It is argued that such scholarship was enabled through the purposeful collecting of Colenso's papers over 30 years. Design/methodology/approach – The historical analysis draws from original documents and published papers chronicling the role and the views of one of New Zealand's first inspector of schools. A self-reflective review approach will show how new knowledge can enhance earlier published works and provide opportunities for further analysis. Findings – It will be demonstrated that as a result of ongoing conversations between librarians and researchers purposeful buying of archives and manuscripts have added fresh perspectives to the contributions William Colenso made to education in provincial New Zealand. Originality/value – This work is perhaps the first critical re-reading and review of one's own scholarship undertaken across 30 years within New Zealand history of education. It offers unique self-reflections on the subject focus and analyses of it over time.

'"A habit of walking with God": The Books of Alfred Nesbit Brown'

This article aims to contribute to the growing body of scholarship about reading communities in New Zealand by reconstructing the reading lives and reading tastes of Alfred Nesbit Brown (1803-1884), his family, and his missionary contemporaries from the books they read, collected and preserved. Brown’s library, which remains intact at the Elms Mission Station in Tauranga, is a material reminder of Brown’s spiritual life, mission work, and reliance on book knowledge to assist with the practical tasks of colonial life. The library also speaks of Brown’s relationship with a larger community of readers: his family, his Church Mission Society (CMS) colleagues, his Catholic competitors, and the Māori iwi he worked among.

Swaraj, the Raj, and the British Woman Missionary in India, c. 1917–1950

This article explores the complex position of British women missionaries under the Raj at a time of rising Indian nationalism in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. By 1920, 311 unmarried female recruits were serving the two leading Anglican societies in India – the high-Church Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG) and the evangelical Church Missionary Society (CMS) – as opposed to 270 men. Although they transgressed imperial norms of ‘pukka’ female behaviour, these single women had numerous ties to the British regime. Missionary and imperial ideals of service intertwined, and mission institutions frequently enjoyed imperial patronage. Sometimes, as at the Criminal Tribes Settlement in Hubli, women missionaries were even employed in direct government service. Using letters and reports, this article examines women missionaries’ negotiation of their complicated status, traversing the gap between the ruling race and its awakening subjects. It highlights their reticence with regards to all-India nationalist politics and their concentration on immediate, local affairs, arguing that such apoliticism and parochialism were consequences of their distinctive, gendered position within mission and imperial hierarchies. Their responses to nationalism and Independence were also conditioned by their Christianity, in particular their ultimate aim to ‘Indianize’ the Mission, promoting swaraj – not necessarily for India as a nation – but for the indigenous Indian Church. After Independence, this ongoing work, and the ambiguities of women missionaries’ connections to Empire, legitimated their continued presence in the subcontinent.