Missionary Society Research Articles

Adam’s escape: Children and the discordant nature of colonial conversions

The article traces the fundamental incoherency that structured the Danish Missionary Society’s work at a boarding school for low-caste ‘heathen’ children in South India in the 1860s and 1870s. Through elaborate disciplinary methods, the missionaries set out to Christianize and civilize the Indian children’s morality, social behaviour and bodily comportment. Yet, the missionaries’ perceptions of ‘the Indian child’ also reflected the contemporary bolstering of racial thinking in Indian colonial society, resulting in doubts whether Indian children could in fact become true Christians. This paradoxical endeavour shows how children became a site for the production of difference that sustained colonialism.

Ein amharischer Atlas aus Malta

In August 2008 Professor Dr. Hans H. Kaminsky of the Institute of History of the University of Giessen, gave me an Amharic atlas, printed in Malta, which he had bought several years ago, at the Giessen flee-market. The atlas is now in the possession of the Hiob Ludolf Zentrum für Äthiopistik of the Asien-Afrika-Institut, Universität Hamburg. The article places the atlas into the historical context of the educational efforts of German protestant missionaries who worked under the auspices of the Church Missionary Society in Ethiopia, during the first half of the 19th century. It also sheds light on the Society’s printing activities in Malta.

The Reverend Dr Louis Giustiniani and Anglican Conflict in the Swan River Colony, Western Australia 1836–1838*

In 1835, the Western Australian Missionary Society appointed the Reverend Dr Louis Giustiniani to establish a Moravian‐style mission in the Swan River Colony. The land grant essential for such a mission was not forthcoming from the government but Giustiniani established a small mission farm employing Aborigines at Guildford and started ministry among the settlers. This change of mission focus set the stage for conflict within the Anglican establishment of the colony, conflict which destroyed Dr Giustiniani's ministry. Giustiniani was well qualified and exerted himself to achieve the mission's objectives and many accusations made against him were essentially false; they reveal much about the prevailing culture and prejudices of the colony. He was defeated, however, because his ideas of church and mission differed from those of the colonial Church and society and because he did not conform to their expectations of the behaviour of a clergyman.

Reversing the biblical tide: What Kuruman teaches London about mission in a Post-Colonial era<sup>1</sup>

Through a case study focusing on the shift from the London Missionary Society (LMS) to the Council for World Mission (CWM) this essay argues that there is a hermeneutical circle between the Bible and mission. A particular reading of the Bible led the missionaries of the LMS to Africa, and their concern to promote the Bible led to the translation and printingof the Bible in indigenous languages — most famously into Setswana by Robert Moffat at Kuruman. Inevitably, the availability of the Bible in indigenous languages led to new ways of understanding the church and mission from the perspective of the South. This post-colonial dynamic led to changes in the LMS and to the emergence of CWM in 1977. The essay then pursues the argument by showing how over the thirty years of CWM’s lifethere continues to be the development of a biblical vision for mission that takes seriously the perspectives of the post-colonial world.

Epistles to Emails: Letters, Relationship Building and the Virtual Age

Until the late twentieth century the letter was still a central form of communication within the private and public spheres and across their somewhat fluid boundary. Not all letters survive but they do have a tangible form and even the epistles of the very ordinary can turn up in a descendant's attic, ripe for socio-historical analysis. This paper explores the shift away from letters and towards email and mobile phone messaging as forms of communication. Two contrasting sources are examined. The first is letters of offer that some young Victorian women wrote presenting their credentials to missionary societies. Although these may have been written largely as statements of religious belief, it is possible to read them as constructions of self and relationship. The second source is interviews with contemporary couples in distance relationships, where the couples discuss their use of email and texting. In particular we examine how these sources illustrate changes in relationship building, some of which may be related to the seemingly more ephemeral nature of digital media. Such an examination questions what constitutes a letter and how important letter writing is as a technique of relationship-building. This technique has clearly been subject to significant change as social relations have become mediated in new ways via the ‘anywhere, anytime’ (as long as it is now) possibilities of new forms of communication.

Elizabeth E. Prevost . The Communion of Women: Missions and Gender in Colonial Africa and the British Metropole . New York: Oxford University Press. 2010. Pp. x, 312. $120.00.

In 1874, the “Ladies' Association” of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG), a High Church Anglican mission, sent a woman named Emily Lawrence to Madagascar. In 1895, the Church Missionary Society (CMS), a Low Church Anglican mission, sent five British women to Uganda. Drawing on a wealth of letters and other records from mission archives, Elizabeth E. Prevost connects these stories. She succeeds in showing how professional, single, British women missionaries initiated schools and other social enterprises that incorporated Malagasy and Ugandan women into an Anglican “communion” that nevertheless was—and remained—fractious. Above all, this book sets out to consider “the impact of the mission encounter on British women, and … the role of missionaries and mission Christianity in forging a global Christian feminist movement” (p. 22). Yet while British Anglican women missionaries may have aspired to the promotion of “spiritual sorority” (p. 288), they manifested what Prevost calls their “missionary feminism” (p. 2) in quite different ways, as their experiences in Uganda, Madagascar, and Britain show. Moreover, like all missionaries of this period, they found themselves forced to revise goals and attitudes in light of local cultural values and the political circumstances of their imperial age.

“Little vessels” or “little soldiers”: New Zealand Protestant children, foreign missions, religious pedagogy and empire, c.1880s–1930s

How late nineteenth‐ and early twentieth‐century Protestant children supported and interacted with foreign missions is still a relatively undeveloped field of scholarly research. Missionary societies actively recruited children’s money, energy and sensibilities for the missionary cause. Sunday school pedagogy and rhetoric focused on cultivating a lifelong interest in missions. Children became a significant sector of support for ongoing missionary work. This article provides an introductory overview of how this process was played out in one particular British settler‐society context: that of New Zealand. In turn it begins to tease out the ways in which notions of imperial citizenship were entwined in the religious pedagogy and rhetoric associated with the missionary movement. The intention is to provide an introductory case‐study that builds a platform for a further comparative analysis of children, religious pedagogy and imperialism across British world settler societies such as New Zealand and Canada.

¿Morirán mis hijos o las frutas del monte se secarán si no canto y uso mi amuleto cada noche? Mujeres tobas (qom) y Misioneros Anglicanos en el Chaco Centro occidental (Argentina)

En este artículo abordo cómo fueron observadas y representadas las mujeres tobas del oeste (qom) por los misioneros anglicanos de la South American Missionary Society (SAMS) durante su labor en la Misión El Toba, en el Chaco centro occidental, en la provincia de Formosa (Argentina). También analizo algunas actividades promovidas por la misión durante las décadas de 1930 y de 1940 que buscaban generar cambios culturales en los roles, en las identidades y en los espacios de las mujeres y los hombres. Veremos también la participación y las resistencias de las mujeres a estos cambios instituidos por la labor misionera.

Pioneering British exploration and scriptural geography: The Syrian Society/The Palestine Association

This paper relates to a unique pioneering British association established in London in 1805, for the ‘philosophical, physical and biblical’ study of Palestine/the Holy Land. The short-lived Syrian Society/Palestine Association (PA) adopted the model of the African Association, founded by Sir Joseph Banks in 1788 for the promotion of travel and discovery in Africa. The PA was a predecessor of two important British scholarly societies: the Royal Geographical Society (RGS, founded 1830) and the Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF, founded 1865). We first consider the historical, religious and scientific contextual background to the period, following the Napoleonic Wars in the Ottoman Empire and the revival of Christian religious beliefs and biblical criticism in Britain and Europe. Based on primary archival sources not previously studied, we then analyse the declared objectives of the Association, its founders, membership, structure, mode of operation, interrelations with consuls, traders, bankers and organisations (such as the Levant Company, the East India Company and contemporary missionary societies), accomplishments, and possible reasons for its failure. We discuss its closure in 1834, the transfer of its funds to the newly founded RGS, and the later establishment of its ‘daughter in spirit’, the PEF in 1865.

Frances Ridley Havergal (1836-79)

Frances Ridley Havergal (1836-79) Krista Lysack (bio) If literary critics have only recently begun to recall that France Ridley Havergal was "among the best known and most popular religious poets of her day" (Armstrong and Bristow 581), there are some communities for whom such a reminder is unnecessary. Since her own day, Havergal's compositions have been in continuous print in Protestant hymn books on both sides of the Atlantic, where hymns like "Take my Life," "Like a River Glorious," "Who is on the Lord's Side," and "I Gave my Life for Thee" have never gone out of style. Her music and lyrics have even found a home in the digital age in NetHymnal, a web-based archive of sacred song that includes Havergal's compositions along with those of a number of other nineteenth-century hymnodists. Havergals's almost 850 pages of verse and seventy-five or so hymns (Huttar 307) can seem quaint, or even alienating, to many other audiences today, as this work is often premised on submission to God in gestures that verge on self-abnegation. Havergal's evangelical fervour, however, was not incompatible with her role in public life. Havergal maintained daily involvements in the religious print marketplace through which her poems and hymns circulated and re-circulated, and she kept up a prodigious correspondence with a multitude of adoring fans. Indeed, her "ministry of song," as she termed her writing and publishing practices, made her into a saleable commodity, both in her own lifetime and perhaps even more afterwards, when dozens of posthumous biographies vied to sell the story of this devout hymn-writer and poetess. Havergal's significance for contemporary readers, then, is that she offers a model of religious duty that is not incommensurate with fame. As such, her life and work reminds us of intersections often neglected in Victorian studies, ones that existed between celebrity, print culture, and religious discourse. Havergal's life began in what might well be considered ideal family circumstances for the formation of a gifted and saintly spinster. The youngest of six children, she was born on 14 December 1836 at Astley, Worcestershire, to Jane Head Havergal and the Rev. William Henry Havergal, an evangelical Anglican clergyman. Following her mother's death, Havergal, then thirteen, began attending school but returned home following an attack of erysipelas only a couple of years later.1 This episode touched off the beginning of a lifetime of ill health for Havergal and was preceded by a period of acute psychological unrest, or what Havergal would identify as the onset of her spiritual conversion, in 1850 (Memorials 31). In part influenced by a former schoolmistress whom Havergal adored, her conversion marked a turn away from the precociousness and religious indifference of her childhood toward an adolescence of self-renunciation: a transformation that, as Leighton and Reynolds aptly observe, recalls that of Christina Rossetti at a similarly impressionable age (415). [End Page 17] The intensity of Havergal's self-denial was matched by her determination to develop her emerging poetical and musical talents. Havergal showed promise as a poet and hymn-writer as a teenager, by which time she was writing melodies and "poems, enigmas, and charades" (Memorials 46), entering contests under the name "Sabrina" or "Zoide," and then giving her prize money to the Church Missionary Society. These early attempts were followed by publishing success as a young adult. In 1860, her first hymn was accepted by Good Words (53), the first of many to appear in evangelical magazines. This was followed by The Ministry of Song (1869), her debut collection of poems. However, Havergal was careful to qualify this achievement. A poem from this volume, also entitled "The Ministry of Song," sums up her conception of poetry as one among many forms of religious service to which God calls certain individuals: In God's great field of labour All work is not the same;He hath a service for each one Who loves His holy name.All you to whom the secrets Of all sweet sounds are known,Rise up! for He hath called you To a mission of your own.And, rightly to fulfil it, His grace can...

Exploring Nineteenth‐Century Haida Translations of the New Testament

Although a considerable amount has been written about the missionaries who were based on the Pacific Northwest Coast during the nineteenth century, many aspects of their life and ministry still await detailed consideration. This article seeks to contribute to an ongoing process of elucidation by examining the scripture translations produced by Church Missionary Society representatives stationed on the Haida Gwaii archipelago (off the West Coast of Canada) from 1876 onwards. In particular, a careful assessment of the Haida gospel translations that were published by William Collison (1847–1922), Charles Harrison (d.1926), and John Keen (c.1851–1950) reveals the complex genesis of these texts. Drawing upon previously neglected primary source material, this discussion explores such topics as the linguistic training the missionaries received and the use they made of informants who spoke Haida as a first language. Most importantly, though, a close reading of the gospels indicates how the translators attempted to negotiate with indigenous notions of power and servitude, and this in turn provides remarkable insights into the theological and socio‐political concerns of the missionaries involved.

Collecting cultures: Institutional motivations for nineteenth-century ethnographical collections formed by Moravian missionaries

As proto-ethnologists, missionaries represented an important source of ethnographical material, collecting for many museums and displays. It is contended here that European missions affected the collecting habits of their missionaries through actively encouraging or discouraging collecting on behalf of certain institutions. The motivation behind the endorsement of certain collecting habits and not others was linked to the missionary societies’ perceptions of themselves. This paper examines both religious and secular ethnographical collections, in Herrnhut, Paris, and Berlin, to which missionaries of the Moravian Church were asked to contribute from the mid-nineteenth century; it evinces the tensions between the Church's collecting habits and the religious goals established for missions. Moreover, the examination of this one group leads to broader conclusions about the motivation behind the ethnographical collections of missionaries and of museums in the nineteenth century.

A Brief History of the Berlin Mission Society in South Africa

AbstractThe Berlin Mission Society (BMS) was one of four German Protestant mission societies active in 19th and 20th century South Africa. Born out of the tradition of Pietism in Germany and at the time of evangelical revival after the Napoleonic wars, the BMS sent its first missionaries to South Africa in 1834; it was formally disbanded in 1972. After an initial period of hardship and disappointments, it experienced an upsurge in its activities after 1859, which lasted up to World War One. In the latter half of the 19th century, the BMS was moderately represented in the Free State, the Eastern Cape and Natal and had a very strong presence in the northern and eastern parts of the Transvaal Boer republic. Events in Europe between 1914 and 1945 affected mission work negatively and made contact between the Board in Berlin and the missionaries in South Africa difficult, at times even impossible. The post‐1945 period was fraught with problems resulting from the division of Germany and its former capital, Berlin; global challenges resulting from the Cold War and decolonisation in Africa; and lastly, the racial policies of the apartheid government. The BMS was part of the broad evangelical mission movement and was thus barely distinct from other societies. Yet, both its Pietist and Lutheran heritage and its relative distance from the colonial powers that be resulted in its characteristic emphasis on spiritual inwardness, its uncompromising stand on puritanical values such as morality, hard work and self‐discipline and its difficulties with urban cosmopolitanism – and ultimately also in its inability to speak and act decisively against injustice and racial discrimination.

Singing it ‘Local’: The Appropriation of Christianity in the Vula'a Villages of Papua New Guinea

The Vula'a people of south-eastern Papua New Guinea have been Christians for more than a century. Through a phenomenology of the transformation of their song and dance styles, this paper sheds light on the nature of the engagement between globalising religions and localised practice. It draws attention to the importance of the appropriation of the Polynesian prophet songs (peroveta), initially as part of the process of conversion undertaken by the London Missionary Society, and presently as an expression of local Christian identity that is shaped by ‘traditional’ exigencies. Song connects the living community and extends the bounds of that community to the non-living, promoting an existential plenitude. I argue that the Christian song styles which replaced traditional dances reproduce a distinctly Melanesian ontology. Further, the instrumental position of early Polynesian mission teachers, both as agents for the new religion and their self-representation as geographically distant ‘kin’ of the Vula'a problematises any easy division between the local and the global.

Joshua Pulumo Mohapeloa and the heritage of African song

Joshua Pulumo Mohapeloa (1908-1982) came from a third-generation Basotho family converted in the nineteenth century by the French-Swiss protestant SociA©tA© des Missions A‰vangA©liques chez les peuples non-chrA©tiens Ai Paris (SMEP; or Paris Evangelical Missionary Society, PEMS) (see Mohapeloa and Phakisi 2009; Gill 1993; Couzens 2003; Legassick 2010). The first three missionaries from PEMS had entered the world of the Basotho in 1833, one of them, Eugene Casalis, a “child of the Revolution and defender of the rights of man [who] helped build up the barricades in the revolution that overthrew the Bourbons” in Paris (Couzens 2003: 77). They were supposed to join a mission on the border of present-day Botswana, but John Philip of the London Missionary Society (LMS) under whose sway PEMS and other protestant missions fell, warned them of unrest, so they journeyed into the interior knowing that their plans might have to be changed upon their arrival at the LMS mission at Philippolis. Here, the unrest and upheaval further to the north was confirmed, and thus the PEMS missionaries were very open to Adam Krotz who directed them towards Basotho Paramount Chief Moshoeshoe (Couzens 2003: 80). He had been fending off the gunrunning and cattle-stealing Korana, and to help his task had already “sent to Philippolis to ‘buy’ a missionary”, as historian Martin Legassick puts it (2010: 235). Missions have played a long and complex role in the history of southern Africa, their impact still not fully understood in relation to the development of music in the region. PEMS became the most important mission in what is now called Lesotho, its culture enormously influencing Mohapeloa as he grew up. This article traces some of the ways in which he managed to embrace its influence as a composer while retaining the integrity of the Sotho music that was the basis of his style, in the process laying down an archive of African song.

Creating Central Sulawesi. Mission Intervention, Colonialism and ‘Multiculturality’

Creating Central Sulawesi: Mission Intervention, Colonialism and ‘Multiculturality’Central Sulawesi provides an example of how, under colonialism, non-state bodies contributed to the creation of new political identities in the Indonesian archipelago, and how the modern Indonesian state came to be based on these. Arguably, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the region was poised to be incorporated into the structure of one or other of the existing powerful Central and Southern Sulawesi political entities. As such, as just another ‘region’ in the sprawling archipelagic colony subjected to standard colonial policy, it should have been readily incorporated into the Indonesian state, albeit through the ‘Sulawesi Permesta’. Instead, in seeking to establish what one writer has described as a ‘volkskerk’ [people’s church], the ‘Poso mission’ established with colonial support by the Nederlandsche Zendinggenootschap [Netherlands Missionary Society] in 1892, was instrumental in defining new religious, cultural and linguistic boundaries. These acted to effectively isolate the Pamona people from adjacent Christian communities established by other missionary endeavours; from their Islamic neighbours and, arguably, from the ‘nation’. As elsewhere in the archipelago, the subsequent process of this region’s reintegration has formed part of the difficult postcolonial legacy inherited by the Indonesian nation.

Book Review: The Presbyterian Church of East Africa: An Account of its Gospel Missionary Society Origins, 1895–1946

Book Review: The Presbyterian Church of East Africa: An Account of its Gospel Missionary Society Origins, 1895–1946

Damper and fish, tea and sugar: post-contact changes in resource use and residence on Groote Eylandt

A number of the archaeological sites located and studied on Groote Eylandt were occupied during the very recent past covering the time of contact with Macassans and missionaries. Historical sources relating to the early period of the Church Missionary Society Mission from the 1920s to the 1950s are used in this paper to examine the material record and processes of cross-cultural interaction and change, rather than to recreate a generalised ethnographic past located at some unspecifi ed point in the late Holocene.

Cultural Innovation and Translation in the Eastern Cape: Jan Tzatzoe, Xhosa Intellectual and the Making of an African Gospel, 1817–1833

This article describes the construction of a truly African Bible on the London Missionary Society's Eastern Cape Buffalo River mission station in the early years of the colonial encounter. Largely unacknowledged in the historical record, the isiXhosa translations were made in an intellectual partnership involving Jan Tzatzoe, a cultural and intellectual intermediary and innovator, and two European missionaries, John Brownlee and Friedrich Gottlob Kayser. A particular focus is Tzatzoe's breakthrough in moving the depiction of Jesus Christ towards Christ as Xhosa healer or ‘physician’. The article builds upon the renewed scholarly attention directed towards intermediaries by examining African involvement in the creation of crucial discourses and the conditions under which colonial texts were produced. It is suggested that Tzatzoe and other African linguistic intermediaries might be thought of as the vanguard of an African intellectual tradition born in the colonial encounter.

From 1910 to 2010: A Post Edinburgh 2010 Reflection1

Relevance of Edinburgh 1910 The 1910 conference in brief The world missionary conference held from 14 to 23 June 1910 in Edinburgh, Scotland, assembled leaders and representatives of missionary societies based in Europe and North America, as well as missionaries active in the so-called fields. The number of delegates of each society had been attributed according to the importance of the budget dedicated to foreign mission. There were 1,215 official delegates, of which 207 were women (17 percent). Of the 1,215, only 19 came from what we would today call the global South, most of them from Asia. Only one participant came from Africa and none from Latin America. (2) The conference had been carefully prepared, with the publication prior to the conference of eight reports of commissions that had worked on the basis of correspondence with missionaries and mission leaders in mission. I want in the beginning of this presentation to state my admiration for the excellence of the work both in organization, political negotiation and study done prior to, at and after the Edinburgh conference. I am amazed at what was possible within a few years under the conditions of that time. Although I will, as many others have done, commit the sin of simplification, I must admit that the reports and discussions testify to a much more subtle missiological reflection than is usually summarized. Although the overall world view seems unacceptable today, many contributions show really profound theological perception and missiological sensitivity. When addressing the question of the relevance of the 1910 conference, we must first remember that it had not been planned as a missiological conference. Dogmatic issues on which contradictory debates could be expected had been excluded from the agenda, in particular all matters related to ecclesiology. The conference was primarily concerned with practical and strategy questions, but one can estimate that some key themes highlighted in 1910 did bear consequences for the development of 20th-century missiology. Mission general We must acknowledge important differences between the theology and context of 1910 and those of today. We must not continue to interpret mission in terms of military conquest of the pagan rest by the Christian West. The evangelistic enthusiasm of many attendees of Edinburgh 1910 bore the mark of the technical and civilizational optimism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, linked to and justifying the colonial enterprise. Although the famous watchword evangelize the world in this generation had been coined by the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions and was not the official Edinburgh theme, it reflected well the mood of the conference. There was even a kind of apocalyptic expectation of the near end, as can be illustrated by the references both in the opening speech of the Archbishop of Canterbury, as well as the closing address by John Mott, that some of the attendees might not die until He comes back. (3) The selection of issues by the organizing committee was significant, however, and, in my view, influential for the developments in the last century. In addition to the matters specifically related to the sending of missionaries from the home bases to the mission fields, we can list the following themes as relevant for the development of contemporary missiology: Evangelism (commission I) Church in developing countries (commission II) Education (III) Christian faith and other religions (IV) Church and state (VII) Cooperation and unity (VIII). Since I have to limit my reflections, I will not go into details on all matters. Let me just point to the continuous importance of education and theological formation throughout the last decades, influencing the quality of witness and of ministry in and by the churches. In the 1950s the International Missionary Council (IMC) launched the Theological Education Fund (TEF), which later was integrated into programmes of the World Council of Churches (WCC). …