Hugh Morrison

Little vessels or "little soldiers": New Zealand Protestant children, foreign missions, religious pedagogy and empire, c.1880s¿1930s

How late nineteenth‐ and early twentieth‐century Protestant children supported and interacted with foreign missions is still a relatively undeveloped field of scholarly research. Missionary societies actively recruited children’s money, energy and sensibilities for the missionary cause. Sunday school pedagogy and rhetoric focused on cultivating a lifelong interest in missions. Children became a significant sector of support for ongoing missionary work. This article provides an introductory overview of how this process was played out in one particular British settler‐society context: that of New Zealand. In turn it begins to tease out the ways in which notions of imperial citizenship were entwined in the religious pedagogy and rhetoric associated with the missionary movement. The intention is to provide an introductory case‐study that builds a platform for a further comparative analysis of children, religious pedagogy and imperialism across British world settler societies such as New Zealand and Canada.

“It’s Really Where Your Parents Were”: Differentiating and Situating Protestant Missionary Children’s Lives, c. 1900–1940

This essay focuses on early twentieth-century missionary British world missionary children and their families to provide a point of comparison with an existing body of work on nineteenth-century missionary children. Through a case study approach, focusing on two Presbyterian missionary families (Scottish and New Zealand) and using both written and oral sources, it asks how we might usefully historicize their lives. The case studies indicate that early twentieth-century children’s historical lives were primarily framed within the religiously defined narratives of the missionary family—albeit narratives that varied depending on geographical, cultural, theological, and temporal contexts or with respect to points of family origin—and that these narratives were articulated differently from children’s and parents’ perspectives. While family is central to the analysis, the article makes a case for attending to the voices of both children and parents, within broader historiographical and historical contexts.

Settler Childhood, Protestant Christianity and Emotions in Colonial New Zealand, 1880s–1920s

In November 1880 Protestant settler children and their teachers gathered in the southern New Zealand city of Dunedin to celebrate the centenary of the British Sunday school movement. The first event was a ‘mass meeting of children’ that incorporated hymns from Bateman’s Hymn Book ‘sung with very great spirit by the children’, Bible readings and a series of addresses.2 One speaker lamented that many children thought that being a Christian meant they had to become a ‘parson’ or ‘very old men and women’. That was a mistake; to be true disciples of Christ, they ‘must get to be like Christ was when he was at their age’. He then observed that: It would not be a very desirable thing that the clergymen on the platform should go away playing leapfrog all down Princess street [sic], but he would not think it at all a wrong thing for the boys to do it, but would think they had enjoyed the meeting and were in really good spirits. He wished boys and girls to understand that they had not to give up play, but to be like Christ when He was a child. They were not asked to be Christ’s men and women, but Christ’s boys and girls, and they had Christ’s example as a boy, and would have His help.3

Theorising missionary education: the Bolivian Indian Mission 1908‐1920

Purpose – Education was an enduring feature of the modern Protestant missionary movement. Historiographically, however, scholarship on the subject is often fragmented geographically and focused on the micro contexts in which missionary education occurred. The purpose of this paper is to explore the nuances of the missions‐education relationship, using a particular case study, in order to indicate alternative ways of conceptualising that relationship. It focuses on a small New Zealand evangelical mission working in Bolivia from 1908 and utilises the concept of “sites” to indicate the complexities that need to be considered in any particular study of missions and education.Design/methodology/approach – Educational activities and explanatory factors pertaining to the Bolivian site of missionary education are re‐constructed from missionary archives. Different voices, agendas and readings are acknowledged in this re‐construction. In this way the article moves from a plain narrative about the mission and its ed...