Brian Stanley

The Bible and the flag: Protestant missions and British imperialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

A scholarly examination of the relationship between Protestant missions and imperialism in the past 200 years.

“Defining the boundaries of Christendom: the two worlds of the World Missionary Conference, 1910,”

October 2006 “E 1910” is remembered as the conference that set the course of the twentieth-century ecumenical movement. Its delegates spanned the theological spectrum of the non–Roman Catholic Western missionary enterprise. Catholic Anglicans and those who would soon be known as fundamentalists sat together in apparent harmony. But this united front had been created only after a period of intense controversy in the preparations for the conference. The arguments rehearsed in this controversy raised fundamental questions of enduring relevance: Is there any theological validity to concepts such as “Christendom” or “the Christian world,” and, conversely, “the non-Christian world”? What are the goals of Christian mission when it is conducted within a traditionally Christian society? Most fundamental of all, how do we define Christian identity? Just what is a Christian? The Edinburgh conference was originally designated as the Third Ecumenical Missionary Conference (the first two being in London in 1888 and New York in 1900). It would be “ecumenical” in the sense that it would include the whole human race in its scope and discuss “problems of supreme moment for the missionary future of the world.”1 The first of the eight preparatory commissions set up in July 1908 originally bore the title “Carrying the Gospel to all the World.”2 In September 1908 the title of the conference itself was changed to “World Missionary Conference, 1910” to avoid any misunderstanding arising from the fact that “the word ‘Ecumenical’ has acquired a technical meaning”—in other words, its modern meaning, associated with the very movement for church unity to which Edinburgh gave birth.3

African-American Christianity

The story of African-American Christianity is intimately entwined with the larger narrative of African-American history. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries Christianity became deeply rooted among people of African descent in North America and the Caribbean, and the black church emerged as the bedrock of African-American culture. In the years between the American Revolution and the Civil War, Afro-Christianity provided spiritual sustenance to many enslaved thousands in the American South while serving as the focal point of black community life and antislavery mobilisation in the North. After emancipation in both the South and the Caribbean, African-American congregations multiplied rapidly as millions of newly free people found an anchor in the church. In the USA, the black church was a locus for domestic and overseas missions, for protest against discrimination and violence, for black nationalism, and for debate over the relationship of African Americans to a dominant white culture that considered them second-class citizens. ‘The study of Negro religion’, concluded W. E. B. DuBois in The souls of black folk in 1903, ‘is not only a vital part of the history of the Negro in America, but no uninteresting part of American history.’ By the early nineteenth century, Christianity was just becoming entrenched in African-American society. Fuelled by evangelical revivals, Protestantism had made strong inroads among the enslaved and free black populations of colonial British North America and the West Indies during the second half of the eighteenth century. In many denominations from Georgia to New England, black and white Christians worshipped together in interracial congregations, and a growing number of white evangelicals believed slavery to be incompatible with the Bible.

Christian Responses to the Indian Mutiny of 1857

In an article published over a decade ago, Olive Anderson demonstrated the major contribution made by the Indian mutiny to the growth of Christian militarism in Victorian Britain. The Crimean war had accustomed the British public to the view that Britain’s soldiery had spiritual needs which could and should be met by the exertions of voluntary subscription, but it was the mutiny which established the more ambitious claim that Christian soldiers were the best ones. The military exploits of Henry Havelock and others of similar piety in stemming the tide of the sepoy rebellion enshrined Christian faith of an evangelical stamp as an almost indispensable ingredient in the constitution of the Victorian hero. The intention of this paper is to endorse and amplify Anderson’s conclusions by examining the responses of Christian opinion in Britain to the mutiny at its most alarming stage in the later months of 1857. Specific attention will be given to the reactions of nonconformists, in the light of the generally accepted view that early Victorian nonconformist attitudes to foreign affairs were characterised by a firm commitment to pacific principles and a disinclination for imperial entanglements.

The missionary and the rainmaker: David Livingstone, the Bakwena, and the nature of medicine

The dialogue between the missionary and the rainmaker found in various forms in David Livingstone’s writings needs to be interpreted against the background of Livingstone’s relationship with the Bakwena during the late 1840s, a time of severe drought and one in which chief Sechele’s repudiation of his rainmaking functions after his baptism threatened the displeasure of the ancestors. Livingstone’s recording of the dialogue reveals his indebtedness to the moral philosophy of the Scottish thinker, Thomas Dick, but also suggests that Livingstone remained fascinated by the very African cosmology that his Christian faith and Scottish scientism led him to repudiate.

‘Lausanne 1974’: The Challenge from the Majority World to Northern-Hemisphere Evangelicalism

The International Congress on World Evangelization held in Lausanne, Switzerland, in July 1974 was a seminal event in the history of Evangelicalism. This article considers the significance of the congress as an arena for the emergence of challenges from Latin America and Africa to the social and political conservatism that characterised much of the Evangelical movement in the northern hemisphere. These challenges demanded that Christian mission should be defined as a broader process than evangelism alone, and made their mark on the ‘Lausanne Covenant’, a document adopted by the congress which has had normative status among Evangelicals ever since.

‘From “the poor heathen” to “the glory and honour of all nations”: vocabularies of race and custom in Protestant missions, 1844-1928’

January 2010 Brian Stanley, a contributing editor, is Professor of World Christianity and Director of the Centre for the Study of World Christianity in the University of Edinburgh. —Brian.Stanley@ed.ac.uk Delivered in July 2009 as the Day Associates Lecture at Yale Divinity School and published as the Yale Divinity School Library’s Occasional Publication no. 21 (October 2009). Printed here by permission. I if you can, that you are a child in England in 1844. You belong to a middle-class and pious evangelical family. You worship at the local Congregational chapel, and you save your spare pennies to place in a missionary box supplied by the London Missionary Society (LMS). Your parents have eagerly devoured a best-selling book by Robert Moffat, Missionary Labours and Scenes in Southern Africa, published two years previously, in which Moffat described his mission work among the Batswana people at Kuruman in what is now the Northern Cape Province of South Africa. On this particular evening your bedtime story is read to you by your mother from the Juvenile Missionary Magazine, the newly launched children’s periodical of the LMS, 100,000 copies of which are circulating through the denomination and wider afield.1 Are you sitting comfortably? Then I shall begin:

The World Missionary Conference, Edinburgh 1910: sifting history from myth

The World Missionary Conference, held in Edinburgh in June 1910, will be widely celebrated this year as a milestone in both ecumenical and missionary history. This article seeks to delineate more precisely in what respects the conference did mark a new departure. Whilst some of the claims made for its significance are inaccurate, it remains the case that participants in the event returned home captivated by a more expansive vision than was allowed for in the conference’s original terms of reference.

The Church of the Three Selves: A Perspective from the World Missionary Conference, Edinburgh, 1910

Commission II of the World Missionary Conference held at Edinburgh in 1910 undertook a survey of the condition of the churches planted by western Protestant missions in Asia and Africa. The evidence submitted to the commission and the commissions report to the conference suggest that progress towards the Protestant ideal of a self-supporting, self-governing, self-extending indigenous church was extremely uneven: quite rapid in Korea, Japan and parts of China; decidedly patchy in Africa; and extremely slow in India. The commission explained these differences in part by appeal to ‘racial characteristics’, yet the reports use of the category of race was loose and ambiguous: the commission both deplored the failure of the indigenous churches to develop their own distinctive ‘racial’ character and blamed racial deficiencies for the failure of churches to advance more rapidly to autonomy.

History and the Bible

The defeat of Napoleon in 1815 marked the end, from a British point of view, of a significant episode in world history that had apparently been foretold in the Bible. According to Daniel 7:23–7, a fourth kingdom would arise which would war against the saints of the Most High for ‘a time, two times, and half a time’, after which it would be destroyed and be replaced by the everlasting kingdom of the saints of the Most High. British Protestant interpretation of Daniel 7 identified the fourth kingdom with the papacy, and its war against the saints of the Most High with the persecution of movements such as the Waldensians and the Hussites. On the view that ‘time’ meant a year of 360 days, the period of domination of the fourth kingdom would be 1,260 years, and depending on when it was believed that papal power began to be exercised in an anti-Christian way, the ending of the period of 1,260 years could be seen as 1798, when the French republican army took possession of the city of Rome. The events of the French Revolution and the defeat of Napoleon gave rise in Britain to intense speculation that biblical prophecies had been fulfilled and that the second advent of Jesus was imminent. Such speculation had several consequences. First, there was renewed interest in missionary work among Jews and in assisting the return of Jews to Palestine. Second, conferences were convened by Henry Drummond in 1826–9 at his home at Albury Park in Surrey, whose purpose was to identify biblical prophecies that were yet to be fulfilled. Third, adventist speculations and in some cases charismatic phenomena marked the formation of new churches such as the Catholic Apostolic Church and the so-called Plymouth or Christian Brethren.