Missionary Enterprise Research Articles

A Perception of Cultural Dialogue Between the Missionary Enterprise of a Protestant Faith and Benin Indigenous People of Nigeria

The seeming issue of syncretism between Christianity and African traditions had rarely been viewed from an historical research methodology especially between the Benin people of Nigeria and their declaration for Christianity which needs urgent attention. Hence, this study explores the subject matter through cultural interactions between the contemporary travail of the Seventh-day Adventist missionaries’ enterprise and Benin indigenous People. This study employs historical research methods of data collection and collation. Findings reveal that Benin culture impedes the faith of the indigenous people on wholesome biblical faith. This study suggests that it is imperative, among others, for every Christian faith to develop a set of biblical lessons on Bible and traditions as a prerequisite for contemporary Missiological approach and to be studied in various denominations within their host communities to avert the influence of the indigenous traditions over biblical injunctions. Keywords: Culture, Missions, Protestant Faith, Nigeria DOI : 10.7176/JAAS/57-05 Publication date : August 31 st 2019

Mary Mitchell Slessor (1848 – 1915) and Her Impact on the Missionary Enterprise in the Cross River Region

Mary Mitchell Slessor (1848 – 1915) and Her Impact on the Missionary Enterprise in the Cross River Region

Fear, Empathy and Ambition: George Augustus Robinson’s Friendly Mission

Abstract Fear beset the settler community of Van Diemen’s Land throughout the 1820s as Aboriginal resistance to European dispossession intensified, a period referred to as the Black War. Representative of the emerging obligation into the 1830s to treat Indigenous people across the British imperial world more kindly, George Augustus Robinson presents a contradictory figure during this tumultuous period. Decrying the depravity of his fellow settlers and their servants, Robinson adapted the conciliatory agenda of Lieutenant-Governor George Arthur in forming the Friendly Mission, a roving missionary enterprise involving Aboriginal people in the task of their own pacification and exile. At once an insight to the sincere emotional connection he felt with his mission subjects, Robinson’s Friendly Mission journals also embody the deep contradictions of British humanitarian governance and its complicity in the logic of elimination it sought to challenge.

Działalność sióstr z anglikańskiego zgromadzenia Sisters of Bethany w Persji w latach 1890–1898 w kontekście relacji między Kościołem Anglii a Asyryjskim Kościołem Wschodu

Działalność sióstr należących do Society of the Sisters of Bethany w Persji wśród Asyryjczyków w latach 1890–1898 stanowiła część szerszego przedsięwzięcia misyjnego realizowanego pod auspicjami arcybiskupa Canterbury – The Archbishop of Canterbury’s Mission to the Assyrian Christians. Celem misji było wsparcie Asyryjskiego Kościoła Wschodu poprzez promocję edukacji oraz druk ksiąg liturgicznych. Artykuł, przedstawiając okoliczności wysłania sióstr, skupia się na wymiarze edukacyjnym prowadzonej przez nie działalności, ukazuje przy tym odmienność i unikatowość prowadzonych działań na tle prezbiteriańskich i katolickich inicjatyw misyjnych podejmowanych wśród ludności asyryjskiej w tym czasie.

Centre Stage and Behind the Scenes with the “lion of Katanga”

Abstract This article complicates the image of Benedictine missionary Jean-Félix de Hemptinne (1876–1958), a central figure of the 20th century Belgian colonial and evangelisation endeavour in the Congo, as a steadfast missionary with political, religious and economic power. It contextualises his ideas within wider debates on religion, civilisation and colonialism and looks at the strategies he employed to defend his authority. Through the figure of the Apostolic Vicar of Katanga, this article rethinks the ideas and the power mechanisms, in particular the “trinity” between church, state and capital and the church-state alliance, which underpinned the Belgian colonial and missionary enterprise.

‘The River Between’: Negotiating Dual Identities in the Anglican Churches of Kenya

The double identity of missionaries acting as both Christian and Western representatives carried a burden for their enterprise, resulting in the continuous inquiries by Africans as to whether an individual is an African Christian or a Christian African. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o in his novel The River Between depicted these two worlds using Kameno and Makuyu, communities in the mountainous regions of Agikuyu land, as they tried to negotiate their religio-cultural identities amidst the tension between the missionary enterprise and irua practice (the puberty rite of passage among the Gikuyu community). Nevertheless, the river between – the river Honia – acted as a conciliatory agency for the two communities. This article focuses on the inter- and intra-dependence of irua practice and confirmation practice in the Anglican Church of Kenya in their negotiation of religio-cultural identities. Through a historical account of indigenous rites of passage, the development of confirmation practice and their encounters, the article explores the resurgence of irua practice and ‘Christianisation’ to find ‘the river between’. Using examples from three Nairobi Metropolitan Anglican Cathedrals that have adopted the various forms of ‘Christianised’ irua practices, the article will show how they act as recipes for this dual religious identity construction, contestation and negotiation.

지구촌과 난민 : 한국사회와 교회의 역할

The refugee issue is a hot one in South Korea as well as the Global Village. How do Christians feel about refugees? According to one source, “Christians are twice as likely to fear refugees as help them.”Why do Christians react this way when the history of our faith has been deeply immersed in the story of migration from the very beginning? Adam and Eve were forcibly displaced from the Garden of Eden. Noah was a migrant. Abraham, Moses, and Joshua spent much of their lives on the move. Jesus, himself, was a refugee. BR How should we respond to the refugee issue today? The Bible assures Christians that “God has not given us a spirit of fear and timidity, but of power, love, and self-discipline”(2 Timothy 1:7). The Bible is clear about what we should do: welcome the stranger, or as Jesus called them in Matthew 25, “the least of these”. Thus, this essay aims to address how to deal with the issue from a biblical perspective. Based on biblical teaching, the current refugee issue is not a problem, but a possibility and opportunity for missionary enterprise. Migration including refugees, whether forced or voluntary, should be viewed not as accidental, but as part of God’s sovereign plan.

The Canadian School–A School in Sichuan for Missionaries’ Children

This paper aims to study the historical context, evolution and characteristics of the Canadian School, a school established in Sichuan, China by the Canadian Methodist Church West China Mission for its missionaries’ children. Located at Chengdu, Chongqing, and Renshou respectively at different times, the School provided hundreds of western pupils with quality primary and high school education that matched the Canadian standards, but to our regret, exercised a separation policy during its operation. A study of the School will help illustrate the Christian missionary enterprise in China and facilitate China-Canadian relationship.

General Conference Secretariat and the Mission Enterprise of the Seventh-day Adventist Church

General Conference Secretariat and the Mission Enterprise of the Seventh-day Adventist Church

Protestants Abroad: How Missionaries Tried to Change the World but Changed America

In Protestants Abroad David Hollinger reminds us of the vital role of missionaries in American history. The book explores how overseas missions, though often linked with imperialism, produced a counterreaction against it in the course of the twentieth century. As a result of the “cascading self-interrogations” from the mission field, both the missionary enterprise and churches in America were challenged and changed. Missionaries, their children, and missionary-connected Americans helped their country come to grips with the traditions and modern realities of Asia, pioneered in the development of academic studies of Asia, and left distinct, cosmopolitan marks on America’s national life.

Long-term effects of access to health care: Medical missions in colonial India

Health outcomes in India vary substantially across regions. Motivated by mounting evidence of the historical persistence of institutions and behavior, this paper studies the historical origins of this health variation. We examine the long-term consequences of the Protestant medical missionary enterprise that spread throughout India in the nineteenth century. Protestant mission medicine sought to place itself within non-European social and institutional milieus, contributing to the diffusion of Western medicine among the local population. We construct a novel fully geocoded dataset that combines contemporary individual-level data with historical information on missionary activities. We document a robust positive association between proximity to a Protestant medical mission and current individuals' health outcomes. Our analysis indicates that this long-run link is not driven by religious conversion or persistence of infrastructure, but possibly by improvements in individuals' health potential and changes in hygiene and health habits.

Missionary Photography: The Liberian Archive of Doctor Georgia Patton

This article focuses on the personal missionary experience of an African American woman physician, Dr Georgia Ester Lee Patton (1864–1900), later known as Georgia Washington. Patton worked in Liberia, a unique setting for missionary activities, being a colony established by former American slaves. The primary resource materials used here are missionary photographic archives, which comprise a distinct category of colonial cultural production. Photography assisted missions in promoting western achievements, disseminating Christianity, and advancing progress, by exposing Africans to western civilization. Such imagery was largely created by European photographers working within the social milieu of missionary organizations. Missionary photographs, therefore, functioned as an official public record of the missionary enterprise; today they are invaluable records of the histories of Christian missions around the globe. Missionary archives exist as both public and private archives. Private archives, as opposed to the images planned for a public audience, were compiled by individual missionaries and intended for private viewings. For this case study I use the private archive Patton compiled after she worked as a medical missionary in Liberia between 1893 and 1895. Patton later returned to Tennessee, where she became the first woman physician in the city of Memphis. This article seeks to determine how Patton’s perception of herself as an African American, as a woman, as a Christian, and as a physician influenced her unusual experience as a medical missionary in late nineteenth-century West Africa.

Sisters and Brothers Abroad: Gender, Race, Empire and Anglican Missionary Reformism in Hawai‘i and the Pacific, 1858–75

British Anglo-Catholic and high church Anglicans promoted a new set of foreign missionary initiatives in the Pacific and South and East Africa in the 1860s. Theorizing new indigenizing models for mission inspired by Tractarian medievalism, the initiatives envisioned a different and better engagement with ‘native’ cultures. Despite setbacks, the continued use of Anglican sisters in Hawai‘i and brothers in Melanesia, Africa and India created a potent new imaginative space for missionary endeavour, but one problematized by the uneven reach of empire: from contested, as in the Pacific, to normal and pervasive, as in India. Of particular relevance was the Sandwich Islands mission, invited by the Hawaiian crown, where Bishop T. N. Staley arrived in 1862, followed by Anglican missionary sisters in 1864. Immensely controversial in Britain and America, where among evangelicals in particular suspicion of ‘popish’ religious practice ran high, Anglo-Catholic methods and religious communities mobilized discussion, denunciation and reaction. Particularly in the contested imperial space of an independent indigenous monarchy, Anglo-Catholics criticized what they styled the cruel austerities of evangelical American ‘puritanism’ and the ambitions of American imperialists; in the process they catalyzed a reconceptualized imperial reformism with important implications for the shape of the late Victorian British empire.

The Value of Money: Funding Sources and Philanthropic Priorities in Twentieth-Century American Mission

At the turn of the twentieth century, Western missionaries and mission organizations sought to develop financial strategies that would facilitate the further expansion of the Western mission enterprise. Three such strategies emerged: an increasingly sophisticated, corporatized approach to fundraising by mission boards; faith missions that shifted the economic risks associated with fundraising from mission agencies to missionaries; and self-supporting missions that cultivated economic funding available in the mission field. Each of these strategies had different implications for power configurations in the mission enterprise and allowed the values and views of different groups to prevail. The board approach empowered mission executives and large donors. The faith mission approach empowered missionaries and supporters with a conservative theology. The self-supporting mission approach made missionaries arbiters among a variety of competing interests. This economic approach to the study of mission provides new insights into the complex and contested power arrangements involved in Western foreign mission that extend beyond those gained from traditional political and cultural analyses.

Transferring Sinosphere Knowledge to the Public: James Summers (1828-91) as Printer, Editor and Cataloguer

AbstractJames Summers occupied the professorship of Chinese for two decades at King’s College London. He was also a trailblazer in promoting the study of Japanese culture in Victorian Britain, but he has been an underrated and understudied figure in British history.Summers was an ardent supporter of modern printing. He believed printed media was the most effective medium to transform British perceptions of Asia, which in turn would help support Britain’s foreign political, commercial and missionary enterprise. He also orchestrated the printing of catalogues and journals in his capacity as library assistant to the British Museum and the India Office Library. He even set up his own press to print a newspaper in order to disseminate knowledge of East Asia to a broader readership. Based on primary materials that have rarely been used before, this paper positions Summers in the study of book history, material culture and print mediums in order to reassess his pioneering efforts in Sinological studies.

War, Exilic Pilgrimage and Mission: South Africa's Dutch Reformed Church in the Early Twentieth Century

The main subject of inquiry here is the interrelationship between war, mission and exile in South Africa's Dutch Reformed Church at the turn of the twentieth century. The first setting of note is the Anglo—Boer War (1899–1902) when a group of Boer soldiers decided to form the Commando's Dank Zending Vereniging (Commando's Thanksgiving Mission Society) after visiting a Swiss missionary station in the northern Transvaal. Next follows Boer experiences of exile on the islands of St Helena, Ceylon and elsewhere as prisoners of war. A number of these POWs were evangelised and recruited for mission through revivalist sermons preached by their chaplains. After their return, a substantial number of ex-POWs signed up for the DRC's missionary enterprise into wider Africa, most prominently Nyasaland. The missionary experience itself often lasted for several decades. These missionaries did not refer to their life contexts as pilgrimages as such, but they often described the mission field as a place of danger and adventure populated by wild and dangerous people and animals. This article therefore suggests that the missionary careers of the Anglo—Boer War recruits approximate voluntary sacred exile, which in having originated from their forced exile as POWs acquires a pilgrimage-like character.

Returning African Christians in Mission to the Gold Coast

The transatlantic slave trade created an African diaspora in the Western world. Some of these diaspora Africans encountered and embraced the religion of their Western masters. Life in the Caribbean diaspora provided an opportunity for the nestling of ideas that were to shape the establishment of the Christian faith in Africa. Following the failures of European missionaries to make an impact in Africa in the early nineteenth century, freshly emancipated Christians from the Caribbean became agents of social transformation in the Gold Coast, Cameroun and Nigeria. Using archival records from Basel in Switzerland and Ghana, this paper explores the missionary initiative of Jamaican Christians who worked under the aegis of the Basel Evangelical Missionary Society from 1843 to 1918. It provides evidence that these Jamaican Christians became principal agents for the success of the Basel Mission's enterprise in the Gold Coast in the nineteenth century. The paper argues against a Eurocentric approach to mission historiography that has obviated the roles of Africans in the nineteenth century and demonstrates the legacy which these returning Africans have left the church in Africa.

Negotiating Palestinian Womanhood: Encounters between Palestinian Women and American Missionaries, 1880s–1940s

Enaya Hammad Othman makes a welcome contribution to scholarship exploring the American Protestant missionary enterprise in the Middle East. She introduces Quakers (the Society of Friends) to the mix of denominations operating in the region and focuses her narrative on the Friends Girls School (FGS) in Ramallah. The school managed to enroll students, mostly urban Arab Christians, during the period of the late Ottoman Empire and the British Mandate. Yet Quakers were successful in promoting their ideas only where students, and the larger Palestinian community, were already open to change. As Othman argues, Quaker views about peace, pacifism, and internationalism set them apart from other missionaries and made an important contribution to shaping their students' gender and national identities. Rather than seeking to convert students to their religion, Quakers sought to imbue them with ideals of pacifism and neutrality, and encouraged them to become mediators in the struggle for women's rights and the national Palestinian movement. With access to student essays from the era of the British Mandate and interviews with former students conducted in 2006, Othman highlights the challenges students faced as they attempted to reconcile Quaker teachings with their domestic Arab Christian culture and the political realities of British-supported Zionism. Many essays gave voice to a view that Palestine could be home to Jews, Christians, and Muslims and a space where Arab culture could flourish.

British Imperial Wars and the Strengthening of the Dutch Reformed Church’s Mission: Mashonaland in the late 19th to early 20th Centuries

This focus is on conflicts in which the British South African Company (BSAC) had a direct hand, and in which British forces were victorious. Three specific conflicts will be highlighted: the First Matabele War (1893–1894), the First Chimurenga (1896–1897), and Second Anglo Boer War/South African War (1899–1902). It is argued that the Cape Dutch Reformed Church’s (DRC) missionary enterprise directly and indirectly benefited from these wars. The personal letters and other writings of A. A. Louw, pioneer DRC missionary to Mashonaland reveal a relatively good relationship with Cecil John Rhodes and the BSAC. The weakening of powerful local polities through the colonial suppression of African uprisings might have helped mission stations such as the DRC’s Morgenstêr to attain surrogate status as centres of power in the affected areas. After the South African War, a number of Boer prisoners of war were recruited for the DRC missionary campaigns, including Mashonaland. A contextualising feature to this narrative of Afrikaner mission in British Colonial Africa is the fact that two of the foremost recruiting agents were direct family members of A. A. Louw.

British Imperial Wars and the Strengthening of the Dutch Reformed Church’s Mission: Mashonaland in the late 19th to early 20th Centuries

This focus is on conflicts in which the British South African Company (BSAC) had a direct hand, and in which British forces were victorious. Three specific conflicts will be highlighted: the First Matabele War (1893–1894), the First Chimurenga (1896–1897), and Second Anglo Boer War/South African War (1899–1902). It is argued that the Cape Dutch Reformed Church’s (DRC) missionary enterprise directly and indirectly benefited from these wars. The personal letters and other writings of A. A. Louw, pioneer DRC missionary to Mashonaland reveal a relatively good relationship with Cecil John Rhodes and the BSAC. The weakening of powerful local polities through the colonial suppression of African uprisings might have helped mission stations such as the DRC’s Morgenster to attain surrogate status as centres of power in the affected areas. After the South African War, a number of Boer prisoners of war were recruited for the DRC missionary campaigns, including Mashonaland. A contextualising feature to this narrative of Afrikaner mission in British Colonial Africa is the fact that two of the foremost recruiting agents were direct family members of A. A. Louw.