Missionary Society Research Articles

The RLDS Church, Global Denominations, and Globalization: Why the Study of Denominations Still Matters

The RLDS Church, Global Denominations, and Globalization: Why the Study of Denominations Still Matters

Inculturation in Roman Catholic and Anglican Churches in Igboland, 1857 to 1960

The Roman Catholic and Anglican Churches have stayed for more than a century, yet the gospel had not taken root in Igboland. These churches were selected for this study owing to the fact that they were the foremost churches that evangelized Igboland. The legacies laid by the Roman Catholic Mission (RCM) and Church Missionary Society (CMS) on inculturation have created problem for the present churches and other denominations. This problem is the negative attitude of these churches to inculturation. The work examined the negative attitude of the RCM and CMS to inculturation and proffered solution to the problem for the gospel to be more relevant for the people. This work used primary source like observation and secondary sources which included books, Internet materials and newspapers. It used historical approach. The data collected were described and analyzed. It was discovered that the RCM and CMS’ nonchalant attitude to inculturation had deprived the people the opportunity of receiving the gospel that was more relevant to their situations and context. It was discovered that the negative attitudes of the RCM and CMS on inculturation are still affecting the contemporary Roman Catholic and Anglican Churches. The work recommended that the Roman Catholic and Anglican Churches should expedite action in employing inculturation as a strategy for evangelization in Igboland which would make the gospel to adapt to their situations and cultural context.

Echoes of Victorian Hellenism in Mid‑Nineteenth‑Century China Joseph Edkins’ Recurring Column “Western Literature” (Xixue shuo 西學說) in the Journal Liuhe congtan 六合叢談 (Shanghae Serial)

In the mid‑nineteenth century, the missionaries of the London Missionary Society founded the journal Liuhe congtan 六合叢談. Its varied contents included a recurring column titled “Western Literature” in English and Xixue shuo 西學說 (Explanations on Western learning) in Chinese. The section’s editor, Joseph Edkins, used it to inform Chinese readers about Greco‑Roman antiquity and its most important thinkers and writers. The role of literature in the spread of Western learning to China has not yet received much attention. This paper will analyse Edkins’ columns, his motives for writing them, and the topics he considered worthy of publication. This will give us insight into the cultural strategies the missionaries adopted in the era between the Opium Wars and also shed some light on the development of terms like Western Learning, philosophy and literature.

Appropriating and Exploiting Dreams as Technology in Kgašane’s Narrative of Conversion

The study of mission history is seldom reported through imaginative literature, drama in particular, and dreams as a technique to justify conversion into Christianity. This article is based on a literary work, Kgašane, named after a Molobedu kinsman who is credited with sowing the seeds of Christianity in Bolobedu and the establishment of the Medingen Mission station of the Berlin Missionary Society. The article examines how the writer, Makwala, uses dreams as a divine revelation; an agency used to convert Kgashane. Though fictional, the narrative concerns itself with a factual tale that has dominated the Lutheran Church in the Northern Transvaal. The dreams represent various instances of multivocality and heteroglossia that this article hopes to unravel. The article uses an Afrocentric approach to the study of dreams, with touches of Jung as part of the theoretical framework. The design of the article is qualitative, using purposively selected literary works as secondary data. The choice of the work, Kgašane, is informed by the topical nature of its content within the Berlin Missionary Society and its application as the first written narrative to explain the story of a local martyr within the Medingen Mission.

Expanding the Bounds of Christianity and Feminism

Abstract As headmistress of the London Missionary Society’s Girls’ Boarding School from 1915–1940 in Mbereshi, Zambia, Mabel Shaw (1889–1973) created an innovative educational programme that embraced local culture and empowered women. Shaw drew from theological, anthropological, and feminist perspectives to guide her understanding of Bemba culture. Shaw built upon fulfilment theology with its premise that all religions had an element of God’s truth in them. In doing so, Shaw differentiated Western culture from Christian culture, creating space to accommodate practices such as ancestor veneration and polygamy. While scholars have been reluctant to label Shaw as a feminist, this author argues she must be recognized as one. Shaw actively collaborated with Bemba women and raised them as Christian saints. Moreover, Shaw was unique in that she urged her British audiences to listen to African voices and to consider the value of adopting aspects of African worship.

Catherine Carté, Religion and the American Revolution: An Imperial History

Carté, associate professor of history at Southern Methodist University, has provided to church historians an invaluable resource in her definitive narrative of what she terms “British imperial Protestantism” and its role in colonial North America and the subsequent shape of religion in the American Revolution and the newly independent United States. She has replaced the often disjointed and narrowly focused histories of the established churches in England and Scotland, the dissenting Congregationalists, Baptists, and Moravians, along with their missionary societies and colleges and the international rise of pietism (including the Evangelical revival of the eighteenth century). Finally, she provides the broad context out of which American denominations arose after the Revolution. This grand narrative comes together in a single volume of manageable size that once required a small library to pull together.What the author calls imperial Protestantism developed out of the British Act of Union (1707), which brought together the Church of England and the Presbyterian Church of Scotland, and the Toleration Act (1689). which categorized dissenters into a mixed system rather than a single established church. In the eighteenth century an interlocking network of societies from each group further included the Pietistic movement, which Carté calls “awakened Protestants.”The empire stumbled toward the American Revolution in the 1770s, but the religious system was not a cause. Religious leaders were primarily reactive, but they were drawn into the conflict nevertheless. Religious establishment survived on the state level but was omitted in the new American federal system. The war left churches and international organizations in tatters. Even anti-Catholicism was a victim of the war, since the American government had depended so strongly on the French and their allies.In the United States a new generation began to create denominations. The Episcopal Church created itself apart from the Church of England and the Wesleyan movement established its own Methodist Episcopal Church in America. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, American denominations created, separate from the state, an agenda in concert with temperance, abolitionist, and global missionary societies.Methodist church historians should read this study with great interest, finding the roots of their movement clearly intertwined with the general narrative and providing the background for the emergence of the Methodists in America as the dominant expression of denominationalism prior to the Civil War.

A Tale of Two Missions: Illinois Choices and Conversions at the Turn of the Eighteenth Century

AbstractThe Illinois, particularly the Kaskaskia, are well known to have converted in large numbers to Catholicism under the guidance of Jesuit missionaries in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. However, another lesser-known missionary society, the Missions Étrangères, also evangelized among the Illinois. The juxtaposition of these two French Catholic missionary societies working among the same Native nation provides an ideal case study to understand what aspects of Catholicism Native people appreciated and rejected. Converted Illinois people chose a specific practice of Catholicism that upheld fundamental values, enhanced gender roles and kinship connections in Illinois society, and strengthened their relationship to the secular aspects of the French empire.

The Urban Culture of the “Model” Christian Settlement at Abokobi, Ghana, 1854–1929

Although the built spaces created by the Basel Evangelical Missionary Society (the Basel Mission) at Abokobi, Ghana, prioritized missionary ideals, these designs also demonstrated striking similarities with existing Indigenous Gã patterns of sociospatial organization, including both the patrilineal household (weku shiã) and the neighborhood (akutso). In The Urban Culture of the “Model” Christian Settlement at Abokobi, Ghana, 1854–1929, E. Sasu Kwame Sewordor describes how, beginning in the late nineteenth century, the members of an emerging Gã middle class projected and redefined Gã Christian ideas of “modernity” through architectural forms that enabled them to negotiate and sometimes contest the Basel Mission’s domination of the built environment in Abokobi. Drawing on material and archival evidence as well as oral testimony, Sewordor explores how Abokobi converts to Christianity reconfigured Indigenous domestic spaces, spatial practices, and cosmological notions to accommodate and also transform the religious and cultural framework imposed by the Basel Mission.

The Globalization of Methodist Hymnody

ABSTRACT The growth of Methodism into a global movement after the Wesleys’ lifetimes resulted in a greater global awareness and participation in the Protestant missionary movement beginning with the establishment of the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society in 1818. Correspondingly, the supplements and changes introduced to John Wesley’s 1780 hymn book and the production of new hymn books by seceding Wesleyan groups show an increase in songs devoted to the theme of missions. These hymn books demonstrate a shift in theology from a focus on intercession and millennial expectations to exhortations to use human agency and other means to accomplish the evangelization of the world.

Role and influence of Andrew Murray Jr in missions within the Dutch Reformed Church and in wider context

When assessing Andrew Murray Jr’s role in missions, it should be done in the light of various factors, such as the particular spiritual and evangelical background of Scottish ministers who came to South Africa in the 1820s, the influence of Andrew Murray Sr on his children and descendants, also, regarding missions, a growing missionary awareness in the Dutch Reformed Church, and the advent of Societal Missions. The life and ministry of Andrew Murray Jr within the church and in the wider Christian community demonstrates the significance of the multifaceted role he played. This included his leading role in promoting missionary awareness and involvement within the church, establishing societies such as the Women’s Mission Society and the Ministers’ Mission Union, developing missionary training facilities for women and men, maintaining an ecumenical openness, initiatives in extending missions into various other parts of Africa and, added to all this, his extensive literary contribution, much of which was aimed at promoting the cause of mission, coupled to a growing emphasis on the importance of prayer and personal devotion.

MANUSCRIPT XXXVII: Personal Narratives and Letters of Cook Islands ‘Orometua Trained at Takamoa College

ABSTRACT About 450 Cook Islander missionaries (‘orometua) and their wives worked in Melanesia and elsewhere in the Pacific between 1830 and 1926. Reproduced here are a selection of edited transcripts extracted mainly from the London Missionary Society’s (LMS) Juvenile Missionary Magazine and its Missionary Magazine and Chronicle illustrating the experiences and attitudes of Cook Islander missionaries and their wives deployed by the LMS from 1853 to 1901. Testimonies of various kinds have been included from the following people: an unnamed teacher’s wife on Maré; Teavae on Maré; Piri, his wife Maki and daughter Vaiola in Sāmoa and Papua; Ruatoka and his wife Tungane in Papua; Maka in Tokelau; and Isaako in Sydney bound for Papua. Taken together, they provide a valuable window onto this largely forgotten world.

Prisons in Anglophone Cameroon: Rehabilitation and Reintegration of Prisoners

The Prison Service in British Southern Cameroons had a constitutional mandate to provide rehabilitation programmes with the goal of transforming the conduct and welfare of prisoners. To deliver this mandate, the Prison Service this article explores the transformation and rehabilitation of prisoners in the British Southern Cameroons prison service which incorporates various types of social and economic activities. The main focus is on the rehabilitation programmes which existed within the prison service between 1922 and 1992. The changes in the laws which necessitated these activities as well as how the prisons were organised to carry out these very important activities are examined. Because of the need to instill inmates with skills and entrepreneurial capacities aimed at facilitating their re-insertion into the society, the correctional institutions moved away from a punitive approach to rehabilitation. This paper discusses the various innovative transformation and rehabilitation programmes that were implemented and designed to enhance the offender’s skills and to encourage their creativity and potentials. In collaboration with missionary societies and other agencies, the government rehabilitated prisoners through various programmes: skills development, psychological services, social work services, and spiritual care. The paper argues that while prisoners left the prison with development skills and knowledge that reduced reoffending and facilitated their reintegration into the community, the increasing number of inmates became over bearing on the resources that the government earmarked for the implementation of rehabilitation programmes.

Clarifying the typification of the name Kalanchoe orgyalis (Crassulaceae subfam. Kalanchooideae)

When describing Kalanchoe orgyalis Baker (1882: 110) [Crassulaceae subfam. Kalanchooideae, Kalanchoe Adanson (1763: 248) subg. Kalanchoe] (Figs 1 & 2), Baker cited two collections, “Baron 105! 249!”, both of which were therefore collected by Reverend Richard Baron (1847–1907), with both presumably originating from “West Betsileo, on stony ground and about woods” (Baker 1882: 110), in Madagascar. Baron, at the time a missionary with the London Missionary Society, spent about 35 years in Madagascar and, apart from his evangelical work, was also a proficient naturalist (Dorr 1997: 28–29, Smith & Figueiredo 2021a). Herbarium material that Baron collected in Madagascar mostly made its way to the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, from where the novel material was described (Smith & Figueiredo 2021a: 195).

Bonded: Elite Marriage and Slavery in Nineteenth-Century Lesotho

ABSTRACT Missionary societies working in Southern Africa established a connection between ‘native marriage' and slavery as part of their initial contacts with so-called ‘Bantu' societies. During the nineteenth century, bridewealth and polygamy were strongly criticized and marriages were commonly defined in terms of the ‘purchase' of women by African men. Modern scholarship has questioned these simplistic arguments and made a strong case against reducing bridewealth to an exclusively economic transaction. It has become increasingly clear, however, that not all marriages were the same. Archival sources also speak of marriages which did not involve bridewealth or which featured other atypical transactions. This article focuses on the meanings and practices of bohlanka as found in the Sesotho- and Setswana-speaking societies of the Highveld. On some occasions, bohlanka was seen as ‘clientship', on others it resembled enslavement via captivity in war. The article analyses marriages of captive women and of women whose bridewealth was provided by Lesotho's king. The king then claimed the children from these marriages as his own. The women involved became low-ranking wives within a polygamous marriage, referred to as the ‘brooms' and ‘heels’. Their experiences shed new light upon areas of intersection between marriage and slavery, and bridewealth and captivity.

Indigenous Responses to Protestant Missionaries: Educational Competition and Economic Development in Ottoman Turkey

AbstractIn recent years, a growing literature has claimed that there is a strong and consistent association between the presence of historic missionary societies outside Europe and positive long-term socio-economic outcomes. Yet, most of these studies fail to specify whether this finding is the result of missionary investment in human capital or of local actors stepping up their educational efforts in reaction to missionary activities. This article uses the example of Protestant missionary activity in Ottoman Turkey to separate these two mechanisms. The Ottoman state and the Armenian population responded to missionary incursions by modernizing and expanding their educational efforts. However, after the foundation of the Republic and of modern Turkey, most of the missionary schools were closed and the Armenian population was dramatically reduced. Using the blockage of direct effects, this study confirms the role that indirect effects or emulation has played in Ottoman Turkey. Results show that places with historically heightened competition between missionary schools and native educational institutions are more likely to have a higher income, as measured by night-time light density.

1820: Dawning of the Restoration

1820: Dawning of the Restoration

Missionary Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century British Literature by Winter Jade Werner

Reviewed by: Missionary Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century British Literature by Winter Jade Werner Cheri L. Larsen Hoeckley (bio) Missionary Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century British Literature Winter Jade Werner The Ohio State University Press, 2020. xi + 210 pp. $79.95 cloth, $24.95 paperback. Missionary Cosmopolitanism surprises in the most satisfying ways. While drawing broadly and deeply from religious, imperial, and literary archives, Winter Jade Werner resists relentless condemnation of nineteenth-century missionaries for their occasionally enthusiastic complicity in colonialism's exploitation and oppression. Yet she also avoids an apologia for the missionary project's participation in empire. As Werner recounts her early research questions, she found herself drawn in by missionary claims to cosmopolitanism, asking what would happen if she "commenced a study of imperial history and literature not with a presumption of missionary backwardness but rather with a careful consideration of those values that missionaries [End Page 224] themselves claimed to be central to their work? What might history tell us about how religion and imperialism together influenced cosmopolitanism in the nineteenth century and beyond?" (3). Forging a meticulously researched path in scholarship prompted by these questions, her argument explores the interweaving of Enlightenment humanist ideals with Christian doctrine and practice as these ideologies cross to undergird missionary activity across the empire. Along the way, Werner offers fresh analyses of some of the most frequently read Victorian novels and recovers forgotten works that bear re-reading in our current moment. Readers expecting umbrage for missionary complicity in colonial exploitation will quickly note Werner's minimal usage of terms like "racism" or even "xenophobia," though her attentive readings persistently highlight power structures that missionaries supported, often to the detriment of indigenous populations. Her summary of Robert Southey's Tales of Paraguay, for instance, might be encapsulated as the narrative of the Jesuit-induced death of a Guarani family. Reading Southey through missionary society publications, Werner offers nuanced support for her conclusion that by "adopting the language of natural theology, proto-ethnography, and cosmopolitanism…missionaries distinguished their Christianity as 'rational,' painting a flattering portrait of their own faith as uniquely 'enlightened' when compared to superstitious 'heathen'" belief systems (81). When Werner combines her reading of Southey's defense of empire with her argument for his secularization of Christian education in Sir Thomas More, we see white supremacy's early roots that are better remembered in literary texts, such as Kipling's "White Man's Burden." Throughout, Werner stays fruitfully in conversation with previous scholars on both empire and cosmopolitanism, from Patrick Brantlinger to Amanda Anderson, James Buzard, and Tanya Agathocleous. Taking her scholarly strategies into consideration, it is not surprising that Missionary Cosmopolitanism opens with the words of missionary John Williams and his claim that the missionary is "the only true cosmopolite" (1). Werner grounds her argument by considering Williams's statement in the context both of missionary society documents and of Kant's writings on cosmopolitanism. From that foundation, she turns to literary texts, seeking "to complicate the often under-examined binaries that govern understandings of religion, imperialism, and cosmopolitanism in literary scholarship" (37). Her analysis of Bleak House builds convincing parallels between Mrs. Jellyby's renowned telescopic philanthropy and Harold Skimpole's "dangerous moral indifference" (61) as two sides of the cosmopolitan coin that emerges from the mint of Kantian philosophy. Werner concludes that the [End Page 225] similarities of these two apparently disparate characters reveal "the novel's keenly historic sense of cosmopolitanism: its savvy recovery of early nineteenth-century conservative fears of missionaries' (supposedly) depoliticized, re-Christianized cosmopolitanism in order to critique the 'cosmopolitan' fervor surrounding the Great Exhibition" (43). The mid-century missionary movement, that's to say, plays its part in a broader Dickensian turn toward the domestic, bolstering conservative anxieties about more secular forms of cosmopolitanism. Attuned as she is by her attention to missionary tracts and letters alongside Kantian discourse, when Werner turns to Jane Eyre, she shifts the focus of the novel's racial discourse from its debasing representation of creole Bertha Mason. Instead, Werner examines mid-century missionaries' racial controversies that ground St. John's impassioned demand that Jane marry him. Werner's analysis of what is arguably the Victorian period...

List of Contributors

James Butler(PhD, Durham University) is the Assistant Coordinator and lecturer of the MA Programme at Church Mission Society, Oxford, UK and Post-doctoral Researcher at the University of Roehampton, London, UK. His PhD explored how Small Missional Communities sustain their social action.Rachel Iwamony(PhD, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, the Netherlands) is a staff member of the faculty of theology at Indonesia Christian University in the Moluccas and now serves as the director of Graduate Program. She teaches courses in theology of religions and Christian spirituality.E.J. David KramerE.J. David Kramer is Lecturer in Systematic Theology at the

Medical Missionaries and the Invention of the “Serai Hospital” in North-western British India

Abstract This article sets out to challenge the assumption that the pavilion plan hospital became an international standard by the late nineteenth century. This assumption is based on evidence of just a few, mainly British, state and military hospitals. Hospitals constructed by non-British European empires and those by North Americans in the colonised world have been excluded. Moreover, indigenous people in many parts of colonial territories encountered so-called Western biomedical services for the first time in Protestant mission hospitals rather than in state or military hospitals. The article examines several case hospitals built by the Church Missionary Society (cms) in north-western British India and offers a framework for analysing the architecture of Protestant mission hospitals that goes “beyond” a postcolonial approach. Drawing on conceptual tools offered by the field of the history of emotions, the article argues that the missionaries remade the pavilion plan and invented a new form, namely the Serai hospital, to gain local people’s “trust” and “affection”. This strategy was less about “pacifying” the patients and more about increasing their numbers. Indeed, medical missions were “emotional set-ups” that served to change the sensory relationship between missionaries and local people.

MANUSCRIPT XXXIX: Mamae of Mangaia: Nineteenth Century Pastor and Tribal Historian

ABSTRACT Mamae of Mangaia was a nineteenth-century pastor of the London Missionary Society, and a tribal historian whose significant collection of oral traditions forms the foundations of present day knowledge of pre-Christian Mangaian society, as disseminated through the scholarship of the missionary-ethnographer, William Wyatt Gill, and Māori anthropologist, Te Rangihīroa (Peter Buck). Amongst Mamae’s many literary works is a collection of letters that forms the basis of this paper. Letters bring us closer to a writer’s personality and to their experience of a particular social and cultural world. Mamae’s letters relate incidents from his early life prior to Christianity and his service as a pastor, community leader and spokesperson, tribal historian and planter. By also drawing on other contemporary sources a more complete portrait can be painted of Mamae as a leader and scholar who helped sustain the ancestral knowledge underpinning Mangaia’s society as it faced the challenges of the colonial era.