Missionary Society Research Articles

Douglas William John Radcliffe

In 1939 Douglas William John Radcliffe joined the Church Mission Society (CMS) and moved to Egypt, where he worked as a principal medical officer and surgeon in the CMS Hospital...

Missionary pedagogy and Christianisation of the heathens

The Basel Evangelical Missionary Society came to India in 1834 and established its first school two years later. Through the formation of a carefully structured and disciplined pedagogic community at its mission school, the Basel Mission hoped to insert its version of Protestant Christianity into a society that already possessed its own well-entrenched religious traditions. In the years to follow, the Basel Mission Schools increased in number and diversified in structure and curriculum. This article studies how this resulted in unforeseen socio-religious restructurings of the local people, even as it recontoured the Christianity brought by the missionaries.

Manifestations of Ecumenism in Africa Today: A Study of the Mainline and Pentecostal Churches in Cameroon

There are two types of churches in Cameroon today: mainline churches and other churches. The former are churches that were founded in Africa, for Africans, by missionary societies. These churches – Reformed-Lutheran, Anglican, Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian – were run initially by western missionary societies such as the Basel Mission, the London Baptist Mission and Paris Evangelical Missionary Society, in the case of the Protestants, and are now independent. Among the other churches are the new Pentecostal churches. This article focuses first and particularly on the mainline churches: the manifestation of ecumenism among them, the way they live this out with other African churches, and their relation to western churches. These churches have inbuilt ecumenical characteristics that can be of universal benefit to other Christian churches in the search for ecumenism worldwide. Secondly, the article focuses on the relation between the mainline churches and the Pentecostal churches. Here a brief reading of Acts 10.1–11.18 helps to suggest a way in which mainline churches might improve their practice of Christian ecumenism.

‘A position of usefulness’: gendering history of girls’ education in colonial Hong Kong (1850s–1890s)

Girls’ education has been considered a site of struggle where ideals of femininity and domesticity are translated into curricula and practices that seek to shape and regulate. In colonial Hong Kong, British mission societies had a significant share in providing girls’ education, which was predominantly in the hands of European missionaries in the nineteenth century. The dual mission of evangelising and civilising colonial subjects in the Victorian era of empire expansion constituted a pertinent focus of inquiry in the writing of history of girls’ education. Drawing on selected texts on missionary literature and government reports, this article examines in what ways a domestic ideology framed within evangelical beliefs and the imperial gaze interplayed with the politics of race and class in shaping girls’ education. It challenges the presumed impartiality in education policies and practices concerning both sexes, and discusses women’s agency in re‐defining identities and boundaries in a colonial society.

Book Review: China's Millions: The China Inland Mission and Late Qing Society, 1832–1905

Book Review: China's Millions: The China Inland Mission and Late Qing Society, 1832–1905

The May Fourth Era at Yale-in-China, 1917-1921

In 1906, Yale University founded a missionary middle school in Changsha, the capital city of China’s Hunan province. Long regarded by foreigners as China’s most conservative and anti-foreign province, Hunan, only five years previous, had been the last Chinese province to open its doors to foreign settlement. In this new and seemingly fertile field, the Americans of the Yale Foreign Missionary Society cultivated their middle school (Yali) and, by 1916, had greatly expanded their presence by also opening a School of Nursing, a College of Arts and Sciences, and a Medical School. As with most missionary educational enterprises of this period, the primary objective of the Yale educational missionaries was to inculcate their students with Western Science and knowledge, and, most importantly, Christian values. With the anti-traditional and pro-democracy message of the New Culture movement that erupted amongst China’s youth both before and after the May Fourth incident of 1919, the Yale missionaries, like others, believed that their efforts were being fulfilled. However, after this rising student consciousness turned increasingly nationalistic and anti-foreign, the Yale missionaries eventually not only had to address its implications within the context of the greater missionary enterprise in China, but, even more importantly, had to confront its manifestations amongst the students in their own institution.

Migration, missionaries and contact: recent archaeological research in the Khwebe Hills, Botswana

Field survey and excavation in the Khwebe Hills of Botswana form part of a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship project on the Archaeology of Migrations in Africa. Here, the BA Postdoctoral Fellow describes the first two seasons of fieldwork, which concentrated on the investigation of two sites, one associated with the BaTawana, who migrated into the area in the early 19th century and the other a missionary establishment of the London Missionary Society that was occupied during the 1890s.

Overseas Mission, Voluntary Service and Aid to Africa: Max Warren, the Church Missionary Society and Kenya, 1945–63

At the end of the Second World War the Church Missionary Society (CMS) embarked upon a retrenchment programme. Its general secretary, Canon Max Warren, wanted the CMS to adapt to post-war conditions, in Britain and overseas. However, it proved difficult to implement change especially in Kenya: local representatives of Protestant missions and churches were determined to contribute to government plans for African education. Subsequently they also encouraged church and mission participation in official programmes for the ‘rehabilitation’ of Mau Mau detainees. At the same time those representatives, with their counterparts in the UK, planned and implemented a major fund-raising and aid initiative to support both ‘rehabilitation’ and detainees' dependants. Warren meanwhile became involved in the founding of Oversea Service, a lay Christian initiative that attracted interest and support within the Colonial Office. With particular reference to contemporary ideas about mission, voluntary service and overseas aid from Britain, this article examines the complex interplay between missions, church and government in an African colony and in the imperial capital, London.

The Part Played by Chinese Women in the Formation of an Indigenous Church in China: insights from the archive of Myfanwy Wood, LMS missionary

The personal letters of Myfanwy Wood, at work in China with the London Missionary Society in the first half of the twentieth century, provide invaluable glimpses of the lives of individual Chinese Biblewomen and Christian teachers. The archive illustrates the role played by such women in the growth of Christianity in China, especially in the period 1908–39, and frequently offers greater insight into individuals than do official missionary records. This article aims, by means of its deliberately restricted personal focus, to showcase some of the rich material to be found in these letters. It also illustrates the major shift which was taking place across these decades, from the evangelism of keen but rudimentarily educated Biblewomen to the Christian higher education and professionalisation of women converts involved in vital outreach and church growth.

Teaching The History Of Chinese Christianity

Beginning in the sixteenth century, European Catholic orders, including Jesuits, Franciscans, and Dominicans, introduced Christianity and established mission outposts in China. Protestant missionary societies arrived in the middle of the nineteenth century. Despite the Eurocentric view of Christianity conveyed by Western missionaries, many Chinese believers successfully recruited converts, built churches, and integrated Christianity with traditional values, customs, and social structure. This pattern of Chinese church growth represents a large-scale religious development comparable in importance to the growth of Catholicism, Protestantism, and orthodoxy Christianity in continental Europe, the rise of Islam, and the Buddhist transformation of East Asia. The story of the Chinese church is an important chapter of the global history of cross-cultural interactions. The knowledge and insights gained from the China story throw light on the emergence of Christianity as a fast-growing religious movement in the non-Western world.

‘Splendidly Leading the Way’? Archbishop Fisher and Decolonisation in British Colonial Africa

As Archbishop of Canterbury from 1945 to 1961, Geoffrey Fisher devoted considerable time to colonial and imperial affairs, including in British Africa. This involvement took a variety of forms, but included overseeing the devolution of Church authority to local structures through the creation of new African provinces in what could be described as the Church's own ‘decolonisation’ project. At the same time, Fisher engaged closely with political issues in colonies including Kenya and Uganda, in ways that were naturally informed by the interests and priorities of Anglican missionary societies, but which also reflected the particular domestic constitutional position of the Anglican church. His actions also bore the mark of Fisher's own conception of state authority and preference for discretion: somewhat contradictory impulses that underlay the essentially ambiguous nature of Fisher's response to colonial questions. While personally inclined to trust the state to put its own affairs in order, Fisher's confidence in its capacity to police its own management of colonial policy had been eroded by the mid-1950s. As a result, Fisher found more of a voice as the ‘nation's conscience’. By focusing on Fisher, this article seeks to bring into sharper focus the place of the church in Britain in debates around British decolonisation.

Ruth, Miss Mackintosh, and Ada and Rose Marris: Biblewomen, zenana workers and missionaries in nineteenth‐century British missions to North India

In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, locally‐hired women were the front‐line workers in both the London Missionary Society stations in North India and the Scots Presbyterian mission to the Eastern Himalayas. However, throughout this period their roles remained sharply demarcated from those of their British ‘colleagues’ in several respects. This article compares the criteria by which workers in both missions were employed in the field and also characterised in mission literature. While inequalities based on race stand out in the mission field, it is argued that in fact maintaining racial difference was only one part of the complex negotiations men and women joining the mission profession at the end of the nineteenth century had to engage in. As was the case in wider British society, professional identity was defined only in part through structured training, although formal education came to be of increasing importance. Being marked out as a member of the professional classes meant a heavy reliance on a variety of intangibles; race was but one of many social markers that came to denote degrees of respectability. Distinctive personalised naming practices and job titles in published mission literature help illustrate how relevant social distinctions among different categories of workers might be subtly signalled to the reader.

Missionaries and Tonic Sol-fa music pedagogy in 19th-century China

In the 19th century, Christian missionaries in China, as elsewhere, used the Tonic Sol-fa method of music instruction to aid their evangelizing. This system was designed to improve congregational singing in churches, Sunday schools and missions. The London Missionary Society and other evangelical groups employed the method. These missionaries took their message and their music throughout the world. The missionaries were generally convinced of the superiority and efficacy of their religion, their teaching methods and their music. Songs designed as didactic tools were and continue to be employed to impart moral and religious messages. Words sung were often deemed to have more effect than mere words. Music was implicit in missionary teaching and practices — no service was complete without a hymn. For this reason, finding an effective way to teach hymns became a priority. Music continues to be employed to carry messages considered significant and music educators are often expected to support such endeavours.

A. R. D. Fairburn, 1904–1957

A. R. D. (Rex) Fairburn was one of the most influential poets and independent thinkers of 1930s, 40s and 50s New Zealand. He engaged fiercely with the political, social and economic issues of his day, often using sharply rendered parody and satire to attack points of view with which he disagreed. He was a central part of the group of writers sometimes referred to as the ‘Phoenix generation’. He contributed to all of the significant literary and cultural magazines of his day, from Phoenix (Auckland) to the New Zealand Listener, often taking his place among their editorial staff. While his political beliefs were sometimes at odds with those of his collaborators, and his overtly physical masculinity and unconventional lifestyle tended to alienate the more conventional sectors of society, his delight in argument for argument’s sake and his capacities as a poet overrode any reservations which might have arisen about his place in the literary and cultural life of the nation. Rex Fairburn was born in Auckland on 2 February 1904. His paternal ancestor William Thomas Fairburn, a lay-preacher with the Church Missionary Society, arrived in the far north of New Zealand in 1819, two decades before the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi and the beginning of organised settlement by the British. William’s son Edwin, born in 1827, became a land surveyor, one of the crucial occupations of colonisation, and is credited with writing New Zealand’s first novel, an inchoate vision of the future entitled The Ships of Tarshish (1867). His son Arthur, the poet’s father, was more conventional, spending his working life as a clerk and then accountant for a sugar manufacturer and in his leisure hours cultivated a reputation as a music critic. Arthur married Teresa Harland in 1902; she was a musician of some talent, the daughter of recent immigrants from the north of England, and possessed of increasingly nonconformist religious beliefs. Rex was their first child. He was followed by two brothers, Geoffrey in 1905 and Thayer in 1909. A quiet child, Fairburn grew into a tall and athletic youth with a predilection for sport, particularly tennis and golf, and for roaming the hills of the Auckland isthmus and the fringes of its attendant harbours, Waitemata and Manukau. The region’s forests, farmlands and beaches form a backdrop for much of Fairburn’s poetic output, poetry which is also imbued with the energetic physicality of the outdoor life he loved. He was as much at home swimming in the sea as walking the land, and until his untimely death was never happier

Good Intentions Gone Awry: Emma Crosby and the Methodist Mission on the Northwest Coast , and: The Letters of Margaret Butcher: Missionary Imperialism on the North Pacific Coast (review)

Reviewed by: Good Intentions Gone Awry: Emma Crosby and the Methodist Mission on the Northwest Coast, and: The Letters of Margaret Butcher: Missionary Imperialism on the North Pacific Coast Susan Neylan Good Intentions Gone Awry: Emma Crosby and the Methodist Mission on the Northwest Coast. Edited by Jan HareJean Barman. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2006. Pp. 344, illus., $85 The Letters of Margaret Butcher: Missionary Imperialism on the North Pacific Coast. Mary-Ellen Kelm. Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2005. Pp. 300, illus., $29.95 While books about the Native-missionary encounter in Canada have attracted their fair attention from historians and other scholars, only recently have critical re-evaluations taken into account the less documented roles of missionary women in such endeavours. Good Intentions Gone Awry, edited by Jan Hare and Jean Barman, is a collection of previously unavailable and unpublished letters written by Methodist missionary wife and teacher Emma Crosby. Between 1874 and 1897, Crosby lived in Fort/Port Simpson (Lax Kw’alaams) on the north coast of British Columbia in the heart of Tsimshian territory. While the editors include a few excerpts from mission literature, the core of the book consists of letters Crosby wrote to her mother, Eliza Douse, between 1874 and 1881. Mary-Ellen Kelm’s book is similarly an edited series of letters penned by another woman in the mission field of bc’s north coast, in the village of Kitamaat at the head of Douglas Channel. Between 1916 and 1919, Englishwoman Margaret Butcher was a missionary nurse, midwife, and teacher at the Elizabeth Long Memorial Home, a residential school for Haisla girls sponsored by the Methodist Church of Canada’s Women’s Missionary Society (wms). Collectively these works offer insight into the daily minutiae of mission life and how missionary imperialism was understood and manifested from the female perspective. Both women were constrained by the [End Page 281] gendered assumptions of their times and largely confined to duties deemed suitable to their sex – primarily the conversion and teaching of women and children. It is not surprising, therefore, to find that the kind of colonial discourse revealed by their writings is firmly located at the domestic and educational intersection of Euro-Canadian authority. The editors have taken distinct approaches in the balance between the letters and their interpretative commentary. Both approaches prove effective for different reasons. Hare and Barman intersperse their analysis throughout the text, introducing and assessing clusters of Crosby’s correspondence chapter by chapter, highlighting stages in mission work. Kelm’s book includes a substantial introduction and conclusion, but beyond explanatory endnotes, the letters themselves are offered uninterrupted by interpretation. This approach serves to emphasize Butcher’s unique voice. The organization of Emma Crosby’s letters is basically chronological, with divisions based on distinctive phases of her adult life and mission work on the north coast: chapters 1 and 2 cover her courtship and marriage to Thomas Crosby and subsequent arrival at Fort Simpson in 1874. Chapters 3 and 4 explore her work in establishing the mission home, when she took in Aboriginal girls, believing they needed her protection, and came increasingly to rely on those girls and the wider Aboriginal community as her own family grew. Here, by ‘reading across the grain’ (254), the contributions of the Tsimshian themselves to mission life and work is particularly evident. Chapters 5 and 6 trace Emma’s expansion of the Girls’ Home, her role as ‘mother of the mission’ in the face of frequent absences of her husband, and coping with family deaths, including her ‘lifeline’ to the wider world, her mother, and four of her own daughters. A new public persona of Crosby emerges in the correspondence featured in the last chapters, marking the final transition of the Girls’ Home from a place espousing ‘protection’ and then confinement for Aboriginal girls, to one of outright incarceration when the administration of the Home was taken over by the WMS in 1891 and then by the federal government. The personal tone of her earlier writings to her mother shifted in these later letters that were ‘intended for public consumption and were written for strategic purposes being directed towards audiences that lacked any sense of the Tsimshian...

National Anglican Identity Formation: An African Perspective

ABSTRACTAfrica played a prominent role in the formation of earliest Christianity not least in the persons of Cyprian of Carthage and Augustine of Hippo. The Anglican heritage is considered through the experience of the Yoruba people in south-west Nigeria through whom christian faith came to the rest of Nigeria. The Anglicanism which came to the Yoruba was evangelical through the Church Missionary Society, though a key role was played by liberated slaves from Sierra Leone. Contexts in which the gospel is proclaimed and the way it is expressed may change, yet the contents of the gospel do not. A contextualized curriculum thus includes key courses such as biblical studies and systematic theology. It also includes contextual subjects such as African traditional religions and Islam and Christianity. The Church of Nigeria has thus undertaken a thorough review of the curriculum to adequately represent this kind of contextualized theology.

Anglican High Churchmen and the Expansion of Empire*

Postcolonial history has taken a great deal of interest in the missionary endeavours of the church throughout the Empire, especially the work of Protestant/evangelical mission societies. Apart from attention to organisations like the Universities Mission to Central Africa (UMCA) and to some extent the work of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG), the work of Anglican High Churchmen has sometimes been overlooked.1 In fact, High Churchmen were very concerned about the role of the Church of England in the expanding empire during the mid‐nineteenth century. They were keen to bring the extension of the church under institutional control and to co‐operate with the imperial parliament as closely as possible. The activity of the SPG and the foundation of the Colonial Bishoprics Fund (CBF), which provided clergy, schoolmasters, catechists, and bishops as agents of Anglicanism and Englishness, can be seen as part of this strategy.

Diffusing useful knowledge: the monitorial system of education in Madras, London and Bengal, 1789–1840

This paper addresses some fundamental aspects of the circulation of knowledge connected with the spread of the first global model of school management and classroom organisation in the early nineteenth century: the so‐called “monitorial system of education” or, as it was named after its “inventors”, the “Bell–Lancaster Method”. By looking at the communication of educational ideas between England and the early British possessions in India, this paper first analyses the actors involved in this process, especially their agendas and means. Inspired by the widespread belief in the powers of education to improve both society as a whole and individuals, educational activists gathered in a number of committees and organisations – among whom the “British and Foreign School Society” proved most influential. Protestant missionary societies also became active in the field of popular education. The monitorial system of education attracted social reformers, British as well as Indian, and missionaries to whom it appeared to be a technology with civilising powers, a rational instrument to morally uplift and, at the same time, subject individuals “to their respective places” in society. Second, the paper looks at the processes of hybridisation and transformation of the pedagogical knowledge that was communicated between India and England: the origins of the monitorial system in an orphanage school at Madras, its export to London, where it was developed into a standardised model, and its subsequent “re‐import” into India. Finally, reports about the implementation of the monitorial system in India again had an impact on English public discourses on education.

La collecte comme iconoclasme

Durant la premiere moitie du xixe siecle, de nombreux objets importants de Polynesie furent collectes par la London Missionary Society et exposes dans son musee de Londres. Plusieurs sont abordes dans cet article. L’acquisition de ces objets, souvent references comme des idoles, etait un processus plus complexe qu’on l’a souvent imagine, qui impliquait des choix strategiques pour les Polynesiens comme pour les missionnaires. On suggere que la preservation de ces objets a ete faite sous l’emulation du chef tahitien Pomare en 1816, et que differents types de pratiques iconoclastes eurent lieu, depuis l’iconoclasme par destruction jusqu’a l’iconoclasme par neutralisation et preservation. Polynesiens et missionnaires avaient des raisons evidentes de preferer l’iconoclasme par preservation, les premiers dans le but d’obtenir des trophees de leurs victoires sur leurs rivaux et de fournir des preuves materielles de leur conversion, les seconds afin de fournir des preuves materielles des succes de leur evangelisation et d’obtenir des fonds a travers les expositions au musee de la London Missionary Society. Ces operations permirent la survie d’objets aujourd’hui reevalues comme une part importante du patrimoine et comme des œuvres d’art majeures.

American Indians, the Irish, and government schooling: a comparative study

For centuries American Indians and the Irish experienced assaults by powerful, expanding states, along with massive land loss and population collapse. In the early nineteenth century the U.S. government, acting through the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), began a systematic campaign to assimilate Indians. Initially dependent on Christian missionary societies, the BIA later built and ran its own day schools and boarding schools for Indian children. At the same time, the British government established a nationwide elementary school system in Ireland, overseen by the commissioners of national education, to assimilate the Irish. By the 1920s, as these campaigns of cultural transformation were ending, roughly similar proportions of Indian and Irish children attended state-regulated schools. In the first full comparison of American and British government attempts to assimilate problem through mass elementary education, Michael C. Coleman presents a complex and fascinating portrait of imperialism at work in the two nations. Drawing on autobiographies, government records, elementary school curricula, and other historical documents, as well as photographs and maps, Coleman conveys a rich personal sense of what it was like to have been a pupil at a school where one's language was not spoken and one's local culture almost erased. In absolute terms the campaigns failed, yet the schools deeply changed Indian and Irish peoples in ways unpredictable both to them and to their educators. Meticulously researched and engaging, American Indians, the Irish, and Government Schooling sets the agenda for a new era of comparative analyses in global indigenous studies.