CHAPTER 48

Missionary Societies and the Fortunate Subversion of the Church

Andrew F. Walls

Andrew F. Walls worked in Sierra Leone and Nigeria and then taught for many years at the Universities of Aberdeen and Edinburgh, where he was director of the Centre for the Study of Christianity in the Non-Western World. He was professor of the history of mission in the Centre for the Study of African and Asian Christianity at Liverpool Hope University and senior research professor at the Akrofi-Christaller Institute in Ghana.

From The Missionary Movement in Christian history, 1996. Used by permission of Orbis Books, Maryknoll, NY. First appeared in The evangelical Quarterly no. 2 (1988): 141–55.

Part One: Formation of Missionary Societies

It is surprising how little attention voluntary societies have attracted in studies of the nineteenth-century church, considering how these societies immensely impacted Western Christianity and transformed world Christianity.

The origins of the modern voluntary society lie in the last years of the seventeenth century. It was put to new uses in the eighteenth century, and in the nineteenth century developed new ways of influencing, supplementing, and bypassing the life of church and state alike. Let the American missionary statesman Rufus Anderson describe its progress. Anderson identifies the characteristics particular to Protestant voluntary societies:

What we see in Missionary, Bible, Tract and other kindred societies, [is that they are] not restricted to ecclesiastics, nor to any one profession, but [they are] combining all classes, embracing the masses of the people; and [are] all free, open, and responsible It is the contributors of the funds, who are the real association the individuals, churches, congregations, who freely act together, through such agencies for an object of common interest. free, open, responsible, embracing all classes, both sexes, all ages, the masses of the people—is peculiar to modern times, and almost to our age.¹

Anderson here recognizes several important features of the voluntary association: its instrumental character, its relatively recent origin, and its special structure. It differed from all previous structures in that it was open in its membership, that lay people were as involved as ministers, and that its organization was rooted in a mass membership, who felt responsibility for it and contributed generously to its support.

Let us return to the instrumental nature of the missionary society. As Anderson puts it, individuals, churches, and congregations freely act together for an object of common interest in a voluntary society. It is essentially a pragmatic approach, the design of an instrument for a specific purpose. The first of the modern religious societies arose in sober high church congregations in London at the end of the seventeenth century. Companies of earnest people met to pray and read the Scriptures and visit the poor; others sought to “reform the manners” of the nation by rebuking profanity and seeking to keep prostitutes off the streets.²

They were seeking a practical response to serious preaching, answering the question “What shall we do?” They encountered a good deal of suspicion and hostility—why were certain people meeting together? Why were the meetings necessary? Were the church services not good enough for them? Against the background of the times any sectional meetings took on the appearance of political disaffection or ecclesiastical discontent. Yet societies for mutual support in the Christian life or for more effective expression of Christian teaching continued to grow more and more. They were important in John Wesley’s spiritual formation and essential to the development of his work.³

Meanwhile, the relatively few church leaders who thought seriously about evangelization outside the normal sphere of the church realized that nothing could be done without a new structure: hence the foundation of the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. These were not voluntary societies in the true sense of the term because they held parliamentary charters, and care was taken to link their management with the bishops of the Church of England.⁴ The visions of a wider missionary sphere caught by some of the founders were not realized until the nine-teenth century. Even a bishop of London who was anxious to see such enterprise started by the societies found himself utterly frustrated.⁵

The church structures could only do what they had always done; a new concept needed a new instrument. William Carey sought to identify this new instrument. The title of his seminal tract of 1792 is itself eloquent: An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens, In Which the Religious State of the Different Nations of the World, the Success of Former Undertakings and the Practicability of Further Undertakings, Are Considered.⁶

The crucial words are “the obligation to use means.” There is theology in Carey’s pamphlet, and there is history, and there is demography; but at the heart of it lies the responsibility of Christians to seek the appropriate instrument to accomplish a task which God has laid upon them.

In the final section of the Enquiry, having established the obligation of Christians to reach the nations, traced the history of former attempts to fulfill this mission, indicated its scope in the then contemporary world, and demolished the arguments for deciding fulfillment to be impossible, Carey sought to identify the appropriate means. The first of these is united prayer:

The most glorious works of grace that ever took place have been in answer to prayer, and it is in this way, we have the greatest reason to suppose, that the glorious outpouring of the Spirit, which we expect at last, will be bestowed.⁷

He wrote against the background of a movement for regular prayer which had been sparked off through the reading of Jonathan Edwards’s call for a “concert of prayer” more than forty years earlier.⁸ Edwards himself had been led to make his call after learning of the groups of young men meeting for prayer following the revival at Cambuslang in the West of Scotland in 1742.⁹ Carey goes on to illustrate his argument of united prayer as an efficient means. Since the monthly prayer meetings had started in Carey’s own Midland Baptist circle, “unimportunate, and feeble as they have been, it is to be believed that God has heard, and in a measure answered them.” The first evidence was that the churches involved had in general grown. There was no thought of distinction between home and overseas mission there—those praying for “the increase of Christ’s kingdom” were concerned for both.¹⁰

In like vein, Carey rejoiced at the first parliamentary attempt “to abolish the inhuman slave trade,” hoping this attempt would be persevered in, and he prayed for the establishment of the free Christian settlement of Sierra Leone.¹¹

Prayer, he went on, may be the only thing which Christians of all denominations could unreservedly do together; but we must not omit to look for the use of means to obtain what we pray for. Then he took an analogy from the contemporary commercial world. When a trading company has obtained their charter, the promoters will go to the utmost limits to put the enterprise on a proper footing. They select their stock, ships, and crews with care; they seek every scrap of useful information. They undergo danger at sea, brave unfriendly climates and peoples, take risks, and pay for it all in anxiety because their minds are set on success. Their interest is involved, and does not the interest of Christians lie in the extension of Messiah’s kingdom? And so he comes to his proposal:

Suppose a company of serious Christians, ministers and private persons, were to form themselves into a society, and make a number of rules respecting the regulation of the plan, and the persons who are to be employed as missionaries, the means of defraying the expense, etc., etc. This society must consist of persons whose hearts are in the work, men of serious religion, and possessing a spirit of perseverance; there must be a determination not to admit any person who is not of this description, or to retain him longer than he answers to it.¹²

From the members of this society, a committee might be appointed to gather information—just like the trading company—collect funds, scrutinize possible missionaries, and equip them for their work. All this sounds so trite today because we are used to the paraphernalia of committees and councils of reference and subscriptions and donations. It is hard to remember that the average eighteenth-century Christian was not used to such things at all. Most Christians thought in terms only of a parish church with its appointed minister. The “instrumental” society, the voluntary association of Christians banding together to achieve a defined object, was still in its infancy. It is significant that Carey—a man of the provinces and of humble station—took his analogy from commerce; organizing a society is something like floating a company. He looked for the appropriate means to accomplish a task that could not be accomplished through the usual machinery of the church. We could look at the other early missionary societies one by one; whether the Church Missionary Society, formed by evangelical supporters of the established Church of England, or the London Missionary Society, enthusiastically maintained by English Dissenters or the various enterprises in Scotland. They were all equally pragmatic in their origins. The simple fact was that the church as then organized, whether Episcopal, or Presbyterian, or Congregational, could not effectively operate missions overseas. Christians accordingly had to “use means” to do so.

The (Anglican) Church Missionary Society commenced at the insistence of devout pragmatists such as John Venn and Charles Simeon. They had trouble from some of their more doctrinaire evangelical brethren who feared that the Anglican Prayer Book might not always be adhered to on the mission field, while many Irish churchmen regarded the society as a distraction from the “real” work of combating Rome.

GO TO THE BEGINNING OF LESSON 6: Expansion of the World Christian Movement

Part Two: Voluntary Societies and Church Government

Although the voluntary society did not develop due to theology, it had immense theological implications. It arose because none of the classical patterns of church government, whether Episcopal, Presbyterian, Congregational, or Connexional, had any machinery (in their late eighteenth-century form anyway) to do the tasks for which missionary societies came into being. By its very success, the voluntary society subverted all the classical forms of church government, while fitting comfortably into none of them. To appreciate this we have to remember how fixed and immutable these forms appeared to eighteenth-century men. They had been argued out for centuries, each on the basis of Scripture and reason—and still all three forms of government remained, putting Christians into classes and categorizing them unambiguously. People had spent themselves for the sake of the purity of these forms, had shed their blood for them, and had been on occasion ready to shed the blood of others for them. Then it suddenly became clear that there were matters—and not small matters, but big matters, matters like the evangelization of the world—which were beyond the capacities of these splendid systems of gospel truth. The realization removed some of the stiffness from the theological ribs. Here is Carey:

If there is any reason for me to hope that I shall have any influence upon any of my brethren, and fellow Christians, probably it may be more especially amongst them of my own denomination. I do not mean by this, in any wise to confine it to one denomination of Christians. I wish with all my heart, that every one who loves our Lord Jesus Christ in sincerity, would in some way or other engage in it. But in the present divided state of Christendom, it would be more likely for good to be done by each denomination engaging separately in the work, than if they were to embark in it conjointly. There is room enough for us all and if no unfriendly interference took place, each denomination would bear good will to the other, and wish, and pray for its success but if all were intermingled, it is likely that their private discords might much retard their public usefulness.¹³

Carey’s reasons for basing a mission denominationally are thus entirely pragmatic. He had no theological objection to a united mission; indeed, he invited all Christians to the work. To form a society, though, you must begin where you are, with people who already form a nucleus and have some cohesion, mutual trust, and fellowship. Let suspicion and lack of trust enter, and the society is doomed. It was, of course, possible to start from the same ecumenical theological premise as Carey and reach a different conclusion about the basis for the missionary society. So it was with the founders of The Missionary Society, called this because it was hoped that it would comprehend all men of goodwill, whether Episcopal, Presbyterian, or Congregational. As other societies appeared, however, it soon became known as the London Missionary Society. At its inauguration one of the preachers cried, “Behold us here assembled with one accord to attend the funeral of bigotry I could almost add, cursed be the man who shall attempt to raise her from the grave.”¹⁴ In witness to this the founders devised what they designated the “fundamental principle”:

Our design is not to send Presbyterianism, Independency, Episcopacy, or any other form of Church Order and Government (about which there may be difference of opinion among serious Persons), but the Glorious Gospel of the blessed God to the Heathen: and that it shall be left (as it ever ought to be left) to the minds of the Persons whom God may call into the fellowship of His Son from among them to assume for themselves such form of Church Government, as to them shall appear most agreeable to the Word of God.¹⁵

It would be possible to argue that this fundamental principle was in fact a Congregational principle, especially with that parentheses “as it ever ought to be left”; one might go further to give this as the reason why the LMS became substantially, though never in name or completely, a society supported by Congregationalists. However it is far more important to note that the foundation of the LMS demonstrated at the end of the eighteenth century something that would have been inconceivable at its beginning: a common ground of action for Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Independents, and Methodists. The common ground was a society, a common means for people who started from different bases but had a common aim.

The society became the vehicle for catholic spirit. It was not the source of that spirit, but it was a product of it and a means of expression for it. Carey proposed a denominational society for the most ecumenical reasons; the fathers of the London Missionary Society produced a nondenominational society for very similar reasons. In those days churchman and dissenter might meet at the dinner table or the coffee house and talk, but there was no means whereby they could ever act together till it was provided in the voluntary society. But the challenge of the society to the traditional structures went still deeper than this, and it was the missionary societies that presented the challenge most acutely. They were created for the spread of the gospel, which was one of the reasons for which parishes and congregations in principle existed. They were not parishes or congregations, however, and they worked in a quite different way. They could not be digested by any of the classical systems whereby parishes or congregations were linked—even when the societies were themselves explicitly denominational.

A new type of church government was growing up alongside the old. It is no surprise, then, that throughout the nineteenth century societies multiplied to deal with specific social abuses or meet special social needs. Nor is it surprising that in the wake of the 1859 Revival a new group of missionary societies arose, many reviving the old hope of a nondenominational structure for all of good will. The same period also saw many new societies for aspects of home mission and evangelism in sectors that were not noticeably covered by the regular church machinery.

Part Three: Unconventional Leadership

According to Anderson, part of the special significance of the voluntary society is that it is not restricted to ecclesiastics. This points to another way in which the voluntary society subverted the old church structures: it altered their power base. It was the voluntary society that first made the laymen (except a few who held office or special position in the state) of real significance above parish or congregational level. As the societies developed, people—whether clerical or lay, who had previously been of no particular significance in their churches—came to be of immense significance in the societies. This is well illustrated in the history of the church Missionary Society. The CMS was begun by a group of clerical nobodies. They were a handful of London ministers, a fellow of Cambridge College, a few people from the country. From the point of view of influence, their only strong point was that they had the support of some notable laymen, prominent members of Parliament like William Wilberforce and Henry Thornton. Indeed, when it became necessary to speak to the Archbishop of Canterbury about the society, the layman Wilberforce had to do it; there was no clergyman in the group with sufficient weight to talk to an archbishop.¹⁶ In the whole of the nineteenth century, however, did any archbishop hold a more extensive or more important episcope than Henry Venn? Venn, the secretary of the CMS for thirty years in the middle of the century, never held more than a small prebend in the church, but no bishop had so wide a diocese. Few can have had more clergy, and none had nearly so much direct influence on his clergy.¹⁷

As the century proceeded, still more dramatic developments took place. Medical and other specialists in certain societies came to take the executive places once thought the sphere of the minister and the theologian. Women then followed, to take place in the leadership and organization of societies, far earlier than they could decently appear in most other walks of life. A mother-in-Israel such as Mrs. Grattan Guinness was not just a patroness but an animator, a motivator, an organizer. The vision of the need which led to the Mission of Lepers (now the Leprosy Mission) came to the missionary Wellesley Bailey, but the organizer and the focus was the redoubtable Miss Pym of Dublin. Thus another quiet revolution took place in the church; because the society never became properly digested within the systems of the church, no one raised difficulties about the ordination of women or even about their being silent in the church.

Part Four: Local Involvement

Anderson speaks also of the voluntary society “embracing the masses of the people.” This points to another vital feature of the voluntary society. It depended for its very existence on regular participation; it developed means of gaining that participation at a local level.

The Church Missionary Society illustrates the point best of all. It began as a result of discussions in a ministers’ fraternal, and for a long time it was a congeries of ministers who met in London and corresponded with their evangelical clerical friends around the country. For nearly fifteen years it could get hardly any candidates from within Britain. Almost all their employable candidates came from Germany, as a result of correspondence with the Continental missionary societies.

From about 1814, the situation slowly changed, and one reason must surely be that the CMS had put into practice a new form of organization already pioneered by the Bible Society: a network of locally organized auxiliary associations. Local Church Missionary Associations could vary from large cities like Bristol, where they might be supported by prominent noble and civil figures, to quite small rural parishes or other natural units (there was, for instance, a Cambridge Ladies Association from 1814 before there was any general association for the city or the university).

The CMS was transformed. It ceased to be a committee of clergymen meeting in London; it became the group of people meeting in the parish to learn of the latest news from India or West Africa and the eager readers of the missionary magazines. Its lynchpin was no longer a distant distinguished secretary but the collector in the parish who went around collecting—perhaps only a penny a week from some—and promoting the sales of the Missionary Register. People of the most modest position and income became donors and supporters of the overseas work, as they felt themselves to be sharing in it. The recruiting pattern of the society also changed. It began to get offers for missionary service from within the nation. This was at the very point when missionary work was becoming visibly dangerous, when the missionary mortality in certain fields was at its height. The reason must surely be related to the development whereby the society was rooted locally among Christians all over the country. The society took a local embodiment, developed a broad spread of participants, and gave scope to lay commitment and enthusiasm.

Part Five: Missionary Magazines

The part played by the missionary magazines in this process has not yet received sufficient attention from scholars. The voluntary societies and the missionary societies in particular created a new reading public and used it to sensitize public opinion. The roots of the process lay in the slave trade abolition movement, which was, of course, promoted by many people who also actively supported missionary societies. The abolition of the slave trade was perhaps the first victory won by modern propaganda methods, by the use of the media to educate and mobilize public opinion. The missionary societies gradually took over the same role.

The year 1812 saw the birth of the first of the great missionary magazines, Missionary Register. The Register printed news from all over the world and in the catholic spirit of missionary endeavor, from all agencies. It was eagerly read all over the country. The circulation of such magazines was much wider than that of other prestigious journals like the Edinburgh Review and the Quarterly Review, which went into the libraries of the country houses of the gentry. The missionary magazine went to many people who had never previously been periodical readers at all. The magazines helped to form opinions, developed images and mental pictures, and built up attitudes. Their effect on popular reference books in the nineteenth century was considerable. The average reader of the Missionary Register or the other missionary magazines knew exactly what he thought the British government should do about the temple tax in Bengal, or about the sati of Hindu widows, or the opium trade, or slave running. A mass readership was produced, a readership concerned and informed about the world outside their own country as perhaps no other group in the nation.

One example must suffice. In the middle of the century the CMS became involved in one of the first modern churches in inland Africa, in the Egba state of Abeokuta in Yorubaland. When the Egba looked in danger of being overwhelmed by the Kingdom of Dahomey and the interests of the slave trade, the CMS used its influence in government circles to gain moral and a degree of logistical support for the Egba.¹⁸ The mighty Dahomian army withdrew, and Henry Venn noted universal satisfaction in Britain “from the ministers of Her Majesty’s government to the humble collector of a penny a week.” He was not exaggerating; Her Majesty’s ministers had acted because of evidence marshaled by the missionary society, and no doubt countless penny-a-week collectors followed the events in Africa with bated breath and gave thanks with the missionaries for the deliverance of Abeokuta and its church. How many people in Britain in the 1850s would have heard of Abeokuta or been able to distinguish the King of Dahomey from the Queen of Sheba? Most of those that could do so would have gained their knowledge from the window on the world provided by the missionary magazines.

Part Six: Today’s Missionary Societies

The later years of the nineteenth century saw the development of a multitude of new missionary societies. Many of them belong to the new category of “faith missions,” of which the China Inland Mission was the pioneer and proto-type. They represent a development of the voluntary society rather than a totally new departure. They embody and take to their logical conclusion principles which were already present in the older societies. They continued the revolutionary effect of the voluntary society on the church, assisting its declericalization, giving new scope for women’s energies and gifts, and adding an international dimension that hardly any of the churches, growing as they did within a national framework, had any means of expressing. After the age of the voluntary society, the Western church could never be the same again.

The missionary society was, as Carey indicated, a use of means for a specific purpose. The original purpose was what Carey called “the conversion of the heathens.” The purpose of both the older and the newer societies was essentially evangelistic; in as far as it was formulated, the theory was that when the church was founded, the mission would move on. In practice it did not and perhaps could not happen that way. As new churches appeared, the society remained as a natural channel of communication through which flowed aid, personnel, money, materials, and technical expertise. The societies, as we have seen, developed other roles as educators of church and public, and as a conscience for peoples and governments. All these roles were already established in the missionary societies before 1830, and they are all there still.

But neither the fears of nineteenth-century churchmen nor the hopes of nineteenth-century missionaries comprehended a situation so soon in which Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans would form the majority of Christians, and that on them would lie so soon the main responsibility for the evangelization of the world. It may now be appropriate to reexamine the “obligation to use means” and the purpose for which our “means” is directed. Societies established for an evangelistic purpose may produce strictly bilateral connections so that churches formed as a result of “our” work have relations only with “us.” Is this a measure of the fullness of the body of Christ? And relationships so easily become finance-dominated; it is hard to keep relations on an equal footing when the regular topic of conversation is money, and how much. Furthermore, the societies were designed for oneway traffic; all the assumptions were that one party would do all the giving and the other all the receiving. Now our desperate need in the West is to be able to receive, and we have also an “obligation to use means” for the sharing of all the gifts that God has given to all his people.

The voluntary society—and its special form in the missionary society—arose in a particular period of Western social, political, and economic development and was shaped by that period. It was providentially used in God’s purpose for the redemption of the world. Though, as Rufus Anderson noted long ago, it was but the modern, Western form of a movement that has periodically reappeared from an early period of Christian history. In one sense, monasteries were voluntary societies, and “it was by means of associations such as these that the gospel was originally propagated among our ancestors, and over Europe.”¹⁹ From age to age, it becomes necessary to use new means for the proclamation of the gospel beyond the structures which unduly localize it. Some have taken the word “sodality” beyond its special usage in Catholic practice to stand for all such “use of means” by which groups voluntarily constituted labor together for specific gospel purposes. The voluntary societies have been as revolutionary in their effect as ever the monasteries were in their sphere. The sodalities we now need may prove equally disturbing.

Notes

1. This tract has been published several times since it appeared in the Religious Magazine, Boston, 1837–38. It is most recently reprinted in R. Pierce Beaver, ed., To Advance the Gospel: Selections from the Writings of Rufus Anderson (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1967), 65, and since this is also the most accessible version, the references given are to it.

2. On the background, see W. K. Lowther Clarke, Eighteenth Century Piety (London: SPCK, 1946); N. Sykes, Edmund Gibson, Bishop of London 1669–1748: A Study of Politics and Religion in the Eighteenth Century (London: Oxford University Press, 1926).

3. See e.g., J. S. Simon, John Wesley and the Religious Societies (London: Epworth, 1921), and John Wesley and the Methodist Societies (London, 1923).

4. See W. K. Lowther Clarke, A History of the S. P. C. K. (London: SPCK, 1959); and H. P. Thompson, Into All Lands: The History of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel 1701–1750 (London: SPCK, 1951). It is significant that Thompson’s first section after his account of SPG origins deals with “The American Colonies 1701–1783,” and the first four sections of “The Years of Awakening, 1783–1851” deal with the home scene and with Canada. The primary tasks of the SPG were with English colonists. Thomas Bray, the moving spirit in its formation, had a much wider vision (cf. Thompson, Into All Lands, 17); but in practice men like Thomas Thompson (cf. Thompson, 67ff.), a chaplain in Maryland who traveled to West Africa in the 1750s to visit the place of origin of the plantation slaves, were rare. The young John Wesley hoped to preach to the Native Americans when he became a missionary in Georgia; in fact he was able to see little of them.

5. Cf. G. D. McKelvie, The Development of Official Anglican Interest in World Mission 1788–1809, With Special Reference to Bishop Beilby Porteus (PhD thesis, University of Aberdeen, 1984).

6. Published in Leicester, 1792, and several times reprinted. A facsimile edition with introduction by E. A. Payne was published by the Carey Kingsgate Press (London, 1961).

7. Carey, Enquiry, 78f.

8. An Humble Attempt to Promote Explicit Agreement and Visible Union of God’s People in Extraordinary Prayer for the Revival of Religion and the Advancement of Christ’s Kingdom on Earth, Pursuant to Scripture—Promises and Prophecies concerning the Last Time (Boston, 1747).

9. A. Fawcett, The Cambuslang Revival: The Scottish Evangelical Revival of the Eighteenth Century (London: Banner of Truth, 1971).

10. Carey, Enquiry, 79.

11. Carey, 79–80.

12. Carey, 82–83.

13. Carey, 84.

14. David Bogue. The sermon is summarized and quoted in R. Lovett, The History of the London Missionary Society 1795–1895 (London: Oxford University Press, 1899), 1:55f.

15. Lovett, 21f.

16. See Michael Hennell, John Venn and the Clapham Sect (London: Lutterworth, 1958), ch. 5.

17. Cf. W. R. Shenk, Henry Venn, Missionary Statesman (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1983).

18. S. O. Biobaku, “The Egba and Their Neighbors 1842–72” (Oxford: Clarendon, 1957); cf. J. F. Ade Ajayei, Christian Missions in Nigeria 1841–1891: The Making of a New Elite (London: Longmans, 1965), 71–73.

19. Beaver, To Advance the Gospel, 64.