Missionary Authorities Research Articles

The same Origin and different Roads: the old and recent hatred between Catholicism and Protestantism in Modern China

In modern China, with the signing of a series of unequal treaties, there were constant disputes between Catholicism and Protestantism in order to fight for missionary authority, missionary regions and discourse power. As a modern Catholic Chinese Jesuit, Li Wenyu（1840-1911） had written many works on the relationship between the two denominations to defend for Catholicism. In the terms of the content, most of the works are the continuation of the sectarian argument triggered by the Reformation, concentrating mainly on the discussion of doctrines, rituals, the Bible and so on. However, few researches are concerned about new missionary issues such as Missionary cases or a type of inseparable connection between missionaries and Western Powers and they are just a kind of passive response to other people's queries. In the way of Apologetics methods, he once used traditional Chinese culture to explain the doctrines of Catholicism whereas it only occupied a little part. On most occasions, he interpreted doctrines through the Bible directly. By reviewing the relevant works of him, it can be seen that the modern Chinese Catholicism represented by Li Wenyu paid more attention to the enmities caused by differences in beliefs or doctrines instead of new problems arose in missionary work.

Possessing Christianity in Northeast India: Kelkang, 1937

AbstractIn 1937, a spirit moved in the mountains of Northeast India. It presented local villagers with a visceral anticolonial vision, laicized religious practices, and offered alternative definitions of expertise and literacy that sidelined colonial and missionary authorities. Its message pulled together a complex range of clans, pilgrims, and roadworkers, and reconciled them according to contemporary local logics. This article uses the ‘Kelkang incident’ of the Lushai Hills District (today: Mizoram) to reverse the polarity of conventional writings on prophetic rebellion in two ways. First, it asks not how the colonial state dealt with a prophetic rebellion, but how a prophetic rebellion dealt with the state. Second, it asks not what the moving spirit of Kelkang symbolized, but what it did and how people interacted with it. Placing upland spirits, humans, terminology, and concepts at the centre of the analysis, the article argues that a more open-minded approach to the history of religion can better reveal processes of mediumship and rapidly indigenizing Christianities as well as the much broader malleability of concepts like ‘conversion’, ‘revival’, and ‘Christianity’.

Extraterritorial Publication and American Missionary Authority about the ‘Opium War’: Contesting the Eloquence and Reciprocity of John Quincy Adams’s ‘Lecture on the War with China’

The US missionaries Elijah Bridgman and Samuel Wells Williams leveraged authority from extraterritorial printing in South China to rebut the oratorical eloquence of ex-President John Quincy Adams on the First Opium War. They did this by editing Adams’s ‘Lecture on the War with China’ (1841) for The Chinese Repository that they published monthly from Guangzhou, Macao, and Hong Kong. Adams presents the British as righteous Christians defending ‘free trade’ from pagan China. The missionaries’ editorial strategies challenged Adams on points of fact to signal disagreement with him over the moral implications of opium smuggling and China’s status under international law.

Western Establishment or Chinese Sovereignty? The Tientsin Anglo-Chinese College during the Restore Educational Rights Movement, 1924–7

The 1920s were a vital period for the evolution of Christianity in China, during which the Anti-Christian Movement of 1922–7 brought Christianity under serious attack. A new conception of nationalism, influenced by Lenin's theory of imperialism, dramatically changed the way in which Christianity (and especially mission schools) was regarded, from being viewed as a positive factor in China's modernization to being seen as a hated cultural imperialist invasion. The period from 1924 to 1927 featured the demand for the restoration of educational rights, during which the identity of mission schools was used to stir up nationalist hatred. This article takes Tientsin Anglo-Chinese College (TACC) of the London Missionary Society (LMS) as a case study. It examines how the TACC missionary authorities responded to nationalistic sentiments emerging within the college and in society, and how they reacted towards the compulsory registration and consequent abolition of compulsory school religious education. It explores key issues behind the interaction between mission schools and the socio-political context, such as how TACC reconstructed its identity during the process of school registration, and how it negotiated with the Ministry of Education under the tension between two divergent approaches of Christianizing and nationalizing mission schools, a tension which became acute as a consequence of the application of regulations making school religious education and practice optional.

Friends, Foes and Partners: The Relationship between the Canadian Missionaries and Korean Christians in North-eastern Korea and Manchuria from 1898 until 1927

At the start of the 1920s the Korean Christian community in Hamgyeong Province and Manchuria had little control over the financial and educational policies of the Canadian Presbyterian missionaries. By the end of the decade the Presbyteries determined how the home funds would be spent on evangelical work and Korean church leaders sat on a Joint Board with the Canadians to aid in the management of the mission. The Canadian decision to share power with the Koreans was made out of necessity. Throughout the 1920s, students, elders, ministers and a large segment of the laity vigorously, sometimes violently, advocated for a transformation of mission policies. The Canadians became extremely fearful and concluded that to save the mission they would have to reform their methods. In the literature published on the mission, the ‘positive side’ of the story, namely the Canadian ability to empathise with the Koreans and their denouncements of the Japanese colonial regime in 1919 as well as 1920, has been emphasised. This article focuses on the less seemly nature of the Canadian–Korean relationship. It will examine the temporal factors that contributed to the Korean acceptance of missionary authority before 1919, their rejection of it in the 1920s and the attempts of the Canadians to bring order back to the mission compounds. The ultimate purpose of this study is to demonstrate that the Korean Christians were active agents who through their protests during the 1920s came to assume a prominent position within the mission.

From Integration to Segregation: Government Education Policy and the School at Telegraph Creek, British Columbia, 1906–1951

This article explores the unique circumstances surrounding the provincial school at Telegraph Creek in northwestern British Columbia, which was initially established for white settler children by Presbyterian missionaries in 1906. Local public school trustees permitted the attendance of Indigenous (specifically Tahltan) children year after year to maintain the minimum enrolment required to receive provincial funding. Combined with an annual tuition grant from the Department of Indian Affairs for the schooling of status Indian children, the Telegraph Creek public school functioned as an integrated school until provincial, federal, and missionary authorities interfered in the 1940s. This paper demonstrates how decisions made by both provincial and Indian Affairs officials leading up to the 1949 cost-sharing agreement to build a new school at Telegraph Creek were far from benign. Indigenous children in northwest British Columbia became the objects of a post-war educational policy that promoted integrated schooling and, ironically, facilitated segregation.

“Christianity, Commerce and Civilization”: Child Labor and the Basel Mission in Colonial Ghana, 1855–1914

AbstractFocusing specifically on colonial Ghana between 1855 and 1914, this article aims to situate the history of child labor in colonial Africa within the larger historiography of African labor history. Relying primarily on the records of the Basel Mission, this article complicates the narrative of labor history by studying how the mission acquired and sustained the labor of children and youth at various mission stations as part of the greater “missionary project.” This article argues that childhood in colonial Ghana can be viewed as a site of contestation between the competing interests of patriarchy, race, and colonial and missionary authority, in which the labor of children was used to achieve a larger degree of control and influence in the region.

The Rastafari movement in South Africa: Before and after apartheid

Rastafari as a movement originated in the Caribbean Island of Jamaica during the 1930s. From Jamaica, it spread to other parts of the world including South Africa. It is argued in this article that the ideological foundation that formed the base upon which the movement emerged in South Africa was laid long before its formal introduction in 1997, comprising Ethiopianism1 and Garveyism.2 The ideology of Ethiopianism in South Africa gained its expression when groups of some Black Christians broke away from missionary authority during the late 18th century. Garveyism, on the other hand can be traced back to 1920, in the wake of the International Conference of Negro Peoples of the World. This article further traces the formalisation and spread of Rastafari in South Africa and argues that its development in the country took place through three phases, namely, Ethiopianism and Garveyism as the foundation period, the period of the apartheid government (i.e. between 1948 and 1994), and the post-apartheid era (after 1994). There are significant differences between the Rastafari that existed before 1994 and that of the postapartheid period. This article thus identifies these differences, explains why and how the transformation took place after 1994, and the current state of this Movement in South Africa. Their impact (“positive” and “negative”) certainly should be considered.

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner: American Missionaries, Racism, and Decolonization in the Congo

Wheaton College graduate Vera Thiessen sailed to the Belgian Congo as a missionary nurse in 1946 with high hopes for saving souls and saving lives (Figure 1). She remained in Africa for three decades, and from the late 1940s until 1976, she described her difficulties in weekly letters home. Her days at the Africa Inland Mission (AIM) medical station at Oicha, in the Kivu province near the Ugandan border, were frustrating and often exhausting. In the early 1960s, as newly independent Congo's political crises intensified, she experienced struggles to get basics such as flour and milk, the fear of soldiers who set up roadblocks, the continuing, physically demanding routines of assisting in an operating room (with fewer and fewer supplies), and the requirements of hosting a remarkable number of guests who came through the station. But relative to her Congolese neighbors, Thiessen's missionary wealth and privilege were unmistakable. Her letters describe the strawberry jam and the dumplings and the chicken salad that she and her colleagues ate, and comment unselfconsciously on the work of the “medical boys” and the “house boy” and the “laundry girl” who were employed around the mission. Frequently Thiessen complained about their failure to work properly. From the late 1950s to the mid-1960s, she mentioned only one Congolese person by name, a young man named Benjamin whom she described as her “son”—the quote marks are hers. He is a loyal Christian who trusts her, she said. Thiessen wrote too about the task she took upon herself, to train Benjamin's young wife in the rudiments of appropriate childcare and wifeliness—how to properly wash the baby and put clothes on the line (1). As much as the Congolese in Thiessen's mission station may have been attentive to her “lessons” about domesticity, they were also beginning to challenge missionary authority. Even before the official date of political independence—June 30, 1960—Thiessen reported that the Congolese in her station “were becoming quite independent already.” The “medical boys” had taken it upon themselves to claim rights to a Catholic holiday: “they stuck one of the fellows on duties for emergencies and went off.” Thiessen was despairing at the affront: “What is ever going to become of this land?” (2).

Sekhukhune II and the Pedi Operations ofthe Anglo-Boer War, 1899-1902

In this paper an attempt will be made to demonstrate how the Pedi under the leadership of Sekhukhune II took advantage of wartime conditions during the Anglo - Boer War to reshape the pattern of colonial relations imposed on them by the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek, to attempt to re-establish the dominance of the Sekhukhune House in the eastern Transvaal and to negotiate favourable terms with the occupying British military forces once the ZAR was defeated.It will also be shown that often Sekhukhune II deliberately followed a policy of not eliminating republican govemment officials, Boer farmers and their families as well as the Berlin missionaries in order not to antagonise the British and Boer military authorities against him. However, Sekhukhune II subjected all these groups to frequent harassment. Another primary aim of Sekhukhune II was to concentrate on punishing sell-out usurpers of the Pedi paramountcy who had betrayed the Pedi polity by pledging allegiance to Abel Erasmus, the Native Commissioner, who had represented Boer hegemony over the Pedi between 1881 and 1899.Again, Sekhukhune II punished Pedi Christian converts of the Berlin missionary society who had abandoned and undermined Pedi traditions and culture by converting and adhering to Christian principles. In this respect, a number of Berlin mission stations became battlefields of the warring Pedi factions. In the process these mission stations were neutralised as centres of the Berlin missionary activities. It was only after 1902 that attempts were made by the missionary authorities to rebuild these mission stations.

A century ago: The first and only large scale education survey in the German colonial empire

The following essay wants to remind international researchers of the 1st of June, 1911 - the date at which questionnaires for each and every educational institution in all the German colonies around the world had to be completed by the relevant governmental or missionary authorities responsible for them. The numerous questions touched upon quantitative and qualitative data such as enrolment data, numbers and status of teachers, school compound and classrooms, school attendance, curricula and syllabus, learning achievements, teachers' attitudes towards the abilities and motivation of the 'native' children and youths and other variables. This data collection was conducted under the auspices of the Hamburgisches Kolonialinstitut, the founding stock of today's University of Hamburg. It aimed at covering all institutions of elementary, further and practical learning in the German colonial empire. More than 2,200 questionnaires were returned to Hamburg, where they were analysed by Martin Schlunk, Inspector of the Norddeutsche Mission in Bremen, who also published the findings in 1914. Even though this kind of educational research did not measure attainments in the form of validated tests, its scope and aims come near to recent scale data collections and surveys like e.g. the Global Monitoring Reports of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) in that it tried to achieve a total coverage and include a broad scope of educational variables in order to measure the status and achievements of education in the German colonies. It is therefore called a large scale education survey in this essay. Although follow-up studies to the 1911 research had actually been envisaged, they never took place, because the German colonial era ended in the First World War. Hundred years later, scholars of Comparative Education may nevertheless benefit from the detailed information and numerical data which were collected in the 1911 research as well as critically examining their interpretations in the published reports. (DIPF/Orig.)

Sexual Misconduct and Church Power on Scottish Mission Stations in Xhosaland, South Africa, in the 1840s

Tensions over the control of improper sexuality were a key concern of African converts and Scottish missionaries in Xhosaland, South Africa, in the first part of the nineteenth century. Missionary preoccupations with sexual behaviour meant that sexual acts became key sites for the negotiation of status and identity. Reading the case of Jan Beck, which is represented in unusually rich detail in the mission archive, allows us to see how converts used European understandings of sexual morality to gain access to mission resources as well as to exclude other converts from them. In the process, male converts were mediating between Xhosa and missionary evangelical sexual mores and identities. Their ability to do so reveals both the power of local figures to influence colonial outcomes, and the relative fragility of missionary authority in these contexts.

The Millennium Comes to Mapumulo: Popular Christianity in Rural Natal, 1866–1906

There was more to African religious life in rural colonial Natal than mission orthodoxy, traditionalism, or independent Christianity. Many people became involved in mission Christianity without fully submitting to missionary authority. The story of these ‘adherents’ has yet to be written, for historians have focused on the prosperous, westernised, orthodox African Christians who lived on Natal’s most famous mission stations. In districts like Mapumulo, however, where colonial evangelism seemed to the missionaries to be struggling most, many Africans sought the material and spiritual benefits of colonial evangelism without becoming church members themselves. In fact, missionaries spent more time keeping Africans out of Christianity than dragging or luring them in, as is evident in three episodes in the history of Christianity in colonial Mapumulo. The first episode concerns the first independent church in Natal, which emerged in Mapumulo around I890, not as a rejection of the missionaries, but rather as a response to their inflexibility. The second episode is about the most successful white evangelist in Mapumulo, who worked on behalf of a mission organisation without being officially involved in it. The mission organisation therefore had no control over his activities, so that he could practice a heterodoxy that, ironically, in a short period aroused among Africans more interest in missionary Christianity than more conventional missionaries had been able to provoke. The third episode is the Poll Tax Rebellion of 1906, in which the missionaries’ narrow definition of Christianity obscured the depth of Christian participation and the rebels’ appropriations of colonial evangelism. In each case, a world of African Christian activity emerged outside of, but not necessarily in opposition to, the domain of missionary authority. This is not surprising, given the fact that in Mapumulo white missionaries were absent, or at least outnumbered by, black preachers, even in the churches linked to overseas mission organisations.