The powerful conventional picture of nineteenth-century missionary enterprise as a two-pronged secular and religious civilizing mission crystallized in the years 1840-65. As conceived by the influential theorists Henry Venn in Britain and Rufus Anderson in America, the Bible, plough, and local economic growth would fuel the development of self-supporting, self- governing, and ultimately self-extending churches. The career of the missionary explorer David Livingstone and the consecration in 1864 of the liberated slave Samuel Ajayi Crowther as Bishop of the Countries of Western Africa beyond the Queen’s Dominions signalled its success.
Alongside chronicled achievements, however, there was a different story to be told of frustration and lost momentum. In India, where the first systematic statistical charting of missionary progress was established in the 1850s, the upheavals of 1857 brought home the limits of evangelical endeavours. In the West Indies enthusiasm for local ecclesiastical independence was swamped by poverty and violent rebellion in 1865. In Central and southern Africa even Livingstone’s efforts ended in his abandonment of attempts to link Christianity and civilization. The movement’s own historians agreed that its impetus was failing. Eugene Stock amply illustrated the declining fortunes of the missionary societies and linked them to the undermining of biblical authority by rationalism, ritualism, and Rome. ‘Such a time, he wrote, ‘is never a time of missionary advance.’ In 1872, ‘for the first time in many years... not one single University man had offered for missionary service’, and the number of missionaries maintained in India by the five largest societies fell by 12 per cent. Slogans and rhetoric could neither hide the diminishing returns associated with the framework of‘Commerce, Civilization, and Christianity’, nor fend off mounting criticism of missions’ unjustifiable extravagance.
As in the 1790s, critics urgently demanded new ways forward. Simplicity was the keyword. The term ‘missionary society’ should be abandoned in favour of ‘mission’, and much of the societies’ home organization should be dismantled. Divine provision made orchestrated fund-raising unnecessary and undesirable; subscribers should not expect dramatic visible results in return for their giving. Missions required only a small committee of referees to vet missionaries sent out, to receive donations as they were freely given, and to dispatch them to a designated head in the field with power to make decisions based on local knowledge. Links with commerce should be abandoned in favour of direct evangelization by lay preachers and teachers, both native and European. Any association of Western culture with Christianity should be minimized. Freed from the trammels of direction by home committees, and wholly non-denominational in approach, missionaries should assimilate themselves as far as possible to native ways of living. Only then would a serious impact be made on the heathen world.
This shift in strategy was not simply a response to circumstances in the mission field. It reflected developments in long-running metropolitan debates about effective evangelization, as well as a resurgence of millennial thinking. Enthusiasts began calling for a reversion to apostolic models of evangelization and enunciating pre-millennial eschatology. The dominant pattern of Protestant millennial thought before 1860 had been rooted in Enlightenment ideas of progress. In missionary terms, it expected conversion of the world to usher in the millennium of peace, happiness, and plenty, at the end of which Christ would return to earth. The programme of ‘Christianity and Commerce’ was clearly aligned with this outlook. In contrast to these optimistic post-millennialist expectations, pre- millennialists matched the apocalyptic chronologies of Daniel, Isaiah, and Revelation with troubling events on earth, and concluded that very soon the world would end and Christ would deliver the Last Judgement. Only then would the millennium dawn. Pre-millennialist missionaries advocated pushing ahead with evangelism on the widest possible front, so that as many sinners as possible might have the opportunity to repent before the Second Coming. These ideas eventually found systematic expression in the China Inland Mission (CIM) established by J. Hudson Taylor in 1865, which rapidly became the second largest British missionary venture and prompted adaptations in the practice of the long-established societies.
The new ‘faith missions’ deliberately sought isolated and unfamiliar territory, far from European colonialism and other missions. Like inland China, many parts of Africa represented a major challenge. Despite Livingstone’s expressed enthusiasm for civilization and commerce, his own example of evangelical nomadism provided ammunition for the reformers. He saw the Tswana, for example, as ‘retailers of news perpetually on the move from one spot to another... This nomadic life is very favourable to the spread of the Gospel, although it is opposed to the spread of civilization’.
In this spirit, Mr and Mrs H. G. Guinness launched the Livingstone Inland Mission in 1878. Other African faith missions followed in the 1880s and 1890s: the Sudan Interior Mission, the North Africa Mission, and the Congo Balolo Mission. Older societies, too, began trying the new methods. G. W. Brooke led a special Sudan Mission party supported by the CMS, modelled on the CIM and propelled by an apocalyptic pre-millennial vision.
I see no hope [he said] given in the Bible that wickedness in this world will be subdued by civilization or preaching of the gospel—until the Messiah the prince come. And to hasten that time is... the function of foreign missions... I therefore should be inclined to frame any missionary plans with a view to giving the simple gospel message to the greatest number possible of ignorant heathen in the shortest possible time.
And it was not just ‘ignorant heathen’ that caught the eye of pre-millennial evangelists; Muslims and Jews again became targets.
Visible changes in the Muslim world encouraged eschatological speculation about ‘the signs of the times’ and stimulated study of the Bible’s prophetic books. Mounting fear of Islam’s alternative civilizing mission spurred on volunteers for Christian missionary work. Like the ‘faith’ movement, rivalry with Islam assisted the revival of missionary enthusiasm after the 1870s as the Ottoman Empire struggled for survival. A major conference on ‘missions to Mohammedans’ was convened at CMS House in Salisbury Square in October 1875 to plan a general forward strategy. Delaying ‘new aggressive measures’ in Turkey itself until the immediate crisis was over, the conference planned initiatives in Sierra Leone, Lagos, and among the Hausa. Noting the recent conference of Indian missionaries in Allahabad in 1873, the gathering asked the Missionary Conferences in Bengal and the North West Provinces to make further plans.
Although ‘out of our province to discuss prophetical questions’, wrote the editor of the Church Missionary Intelligencer, ‘we cannot refrain from a passing notice of the wonderful manner in which the whole question of Mohammedanism is now absorbing public attention’. Regular meetings of the Mission Secretaries Association reviewed Islam’s expansion and how to combat it. More unusual were the two opportunities its members gave the Revd W. J. Adams of the London Jews Society to speak on prophetic studies and their fulfilment. Finally, Gordon’s death at Khartoum in 1885 brought Christian-Muslim confrontation to the forefront of imperial politics.
The faith missions had been the most striking response to the mid-century decline in missionary support and enthusiasm. For other evangelicals the future lay less in rejecting the past or mounting new kinds of missions than in reviving and adapting existing traditions. Nevertheless, the influence of the faith missions can be seen at almost every turn—in the authoritarianism and concern to protect indigenous society present in the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa (UMCA); in the devastating Niger Crisis of 1888-92 and the subsequent revival of the CMS in the 1890s; in the internal conflicts of the Wesleyans over the cost of their Indian operations; and in the Scottish Presbyterians’ review of educational strategies in north India.