The Missionary Era · 1793-1906 · India, W. Africa, Pacific, China
The Missionary Movement's Native Churches (Serampore India; Sierra Leone & the Niger; Pacific Islands; China Coast & CIM)
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About This Movement
Between 1793 and 1906 European and American missionary societies planted churches across India, West Africa, the Pacific and the China coast. And almost immediately those churches began to be run, staffed and spread by local Christians the societies had not planned for. Samuel Ajayi Crowther, enslaved as a boy in Yorubaland and freed by an anti-slavery patrol, translated the Bible into Yoruba and in 1864 became the first African Anglican bishop, only for the next generation of the same society to force him aside in 1890. In the Pacific it was hundreds of Polynesian teachers, not Europeans, who carried Christianity from island to island, often at the cost of their lives. In China the preacher Liang Fa wrote a tract in 1832 whose stray reading by Hong Xiuquan helped set the Taiping upheaval in motion, and the former opium addict known as Pastor Xi built a network of his own converts inland. What holds these four wings together is a single problem. Nearly everything written about them was written from the mission's side, and the native voices that do survive are what any honest telling has to be built on.
Sources
- Samuel Ajayi Crowther: journals (incl. the 1841 Niger Expedition journal), his 1837 enslavement-and-rescue narrative, letters, Yoruba translation work; WITH the 1890-91 Niger crisis record in the CMS archives (primary) — A Black bishop's own pen — the century's fullest African episcopal self-record. It also documents, in his own words, the Church Missionary Society's own late-century betrayal of him under real colonial and racial pressure.
- Pacific island teachers' narratives: The Works of Ta'unga (ed. Crocombe, 1968); Joeli Bulu, The Autobiography of a Native Minister in the South Seas (1871); the islander-teacher corpus as a class (primary)
- India and China inside voices: Krishna Pal's hymns and letters (Serampore, 1800-); Liang Fa, Good Words to Admonish the Age (1832); Pastor Hsi (Xi Shengmo) - hymns and accounts via Mrs Howard Taylor's CIM biography (primary)
- The societies' archives WITH flags: Carey's Enquiry (1792) and Serampore Form of Agreement (1805); Sierra Leone Native Pastorate records; CMS/LMS/WMMS station diaries; CIM records and China's Spiritual Need and Claims (1865); women's missionary society records (zenana missions, women's boards) (primary) — Worth noting plainly: this material is weighted toward the missionary's own pen, and entangled with empire. Women's missionary societies are represented here too, not just the men's.
- Lamin Sanneh, Translating the Message (Orbis, 1989; 2nd ed. 2009), with Brian Stanley, The Bible and the Flag (1990) and Andrew Porter, Religion versus Empire? (Manchester, 2004) (secondary) — The translation-agency thesis (native appropriation) plus the current mission-empire standards.
- Cambridge History of Christianity vol. 8, chs. 27 & 34 (Stanley), with regional chs. 29 (Frykenberg), 30 (Bays & Grayson), 33 (Piggin & Davidson), 35 (Kalu) (reference)