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This chapter addresses the myth of Western Christianity and outlines the true origins and development of Christianity, as opposed to those presented in the history books. Accounts are given of the early Eastern churches, particularly those in Ethiopia and Armenia, and of the survival of Christian traditions in Asia and Africa through the Middles Ages, and under Islamic (Muslim) rule. Next, an analysis is presented of the size of Christian communities that survived under Muslim rule in ancient and medieval times and up to the early twentieth century, and the question addressed as to why, when Christians survived Muslim conquests so successfully, they form such a small minority in the modern Middle East. Further sections of the chapter discuss the Catholic missions that took place from about 1500 and the different ways in which Christianity developed in countries beyond the reach of the European empires, where missionaries where not able to enforce their will politically, and in those countries where this was not the case; and the adaptation of the gospel to local cultures, customs, and practices in countries where there was no imperial backing is described, with particular reference to the “silk strategy” in Japan (where the priests dressed in silk in preference to cotton and thus identified themselves with the social elite, who were able to assist in the spread of Christianity), and Jesuit missions to China. The last part of the chapter looks at Protestant missions from the late eighteenth century in Africa and China.

This introductory chapter explains the coverage of this book, which is about the relations between the Christian missions and the British Empire during the period from the 17th century to the 1960s. This book examines the connections between the explosive expansion of Christianity in Africa and Asia and the spread of European economic and political hegemony during this period. It also analyses the contributions of Christian missions in the field of medicine, anthropology, language and decolonization.

This chapter examines the relations between Christian missions and the British Indian Empire or the British Raj. When missionaries gained access to East India their efforts brought counter-currents of religious renewal, social reform, and the eventual rise of nationalism. The Christian missions often attracted their greatest followings where their connection to imperial authority was least in evidence. Thus, dissenting and non-British Christian missions succeeded while missions that were closely associated with the Anglican establishment faltered.

This chapter looks at the nature of the religious changes involved in successful Christian missions and the resulting expansion of Christianity in Asia and Africa: success that is impossible to understand if the new Christians were only responding out of fear or envy of imperial conquerors. The chapter starts by examining the view developing in the West in the mid-twentieth century that the Christian mission venture was solely misguided imperialism and an attempt to export Western culture. It goes on to analyse the reasons for Southern Christian expansion, and the synthesis of this Christianity into local cultures. The last two sections investigate the newer autonomous (independent) Christian churches in Africa; these are one of the most notable aspects of Southern Christianity and can be expected to play an increasing role in world Christianity.

This chapter examines the role of non-European evangelists in Great Britain's Christian missions. It analyses the first-hand accounts of the missionary experiences of five evangelists. They are Tiyo Soga, a Xhosa man from the South African war zone; Arthur Wellington Clah, a Tsimshian who lived in British Columbia; Maretu and Ta'unga, Rarotongans of the Cook Islands in the South Pacific; and Moses Tjalkabota, a western Arrernte from central Australia.

This chapter examines the negative impact of decolonization on the works of Christian missionaries. By the mid-1950s, the global prospects for mission Christianity started to look bleak and gloomy. This is attributed to the rise of anti-colonial movements in India and China, which appeared to have ended all hope for establishing self-sustaining national churches. The situation in Africa, where missionary personnel were most numerous, is the same as those in Asia.

This chapter provides an overview of the connection between the British Empire and Christian missions overseas during the period from 1700 to 1914. From the beginning of the eighteenth century Christianity expanded as part of British culture and activities overseas on an unprecedented scale. Home and colonial governments supported ecclesiastical and missionary expansion wherever they can assert their authority and promote social order. However, the dynamics of religion were unpredictable and often inconsistent with imperial needs. This led to the negative relationship between imperial control and the missionary movement.

The study of Christian missions has not developed as a recognized and coherent branch of British Imperial and Commonwealth history. In many places, the advent of British missionaries preceded colonial annexations by decades. There is a problem in the ambiguity of the term ‘mission’. The story of missions is also a longer story than the chronicle of empire. The turn of the 20th century approximates the high-water mark of Christian missionary prosperity and activity. Throughout the British Empire, penny-pinching colonial administrations avoided welfare responsibilities by allowing missions to become the principal providers of educational and medical services to subject peoples. Political developments after the Second World War accelerated the trend towards missionary rapprochements with local cultures and religions. The implications for missionary history were considerable. The study of the religious aspects of Britain’s Imperial experience has not featured prominently in mainstream secular journals, but there are indications of change in Africa and South Asia.

This chapter examines the areas where the Christian missionary movement ran ahead of the colonization efforts of the British Empire. In the 1790s newly formed British mission societies began sending evangelists to the far corners of the world and within 30 years missions had become firmly established in the Pacific Islands and Africa. This chapter also examines the developments in missions to the Pacific Islands with some comparative notes on Africa in order to highlight the key interactions that shaped the early reception of Christianity on a frontier where indigenous peoples retained autonomy over their lives.

This chapter examines the concept of religious vocation. In Christian history, vocation has become bound up with the category of work in three different ways. The chapter explains these three ways. The chapter also discusses the typical conceptions of Christian mission that have emerged over the last century or so. Evangelicalism and certain strands of Roman Catholicism have emphasized personal evangelism while Liberal Christianity has taken up another form of gospel service and tried to save society.

The Christian Mission was part of a broad evangelical missionary effort to reach the urban working class. Its theology drew on Methodism, American revivalism, and the holiness movement. William Booth's open-air preaching was similar to the work which had been carried out by evangelicals for decades. The Mission, however, differed from other home missions. The authority it granted women, its emphasis on holiness theology and revivalist methods, its growing independence, and its strict hierarchical structure were all features that sharply distinguished it from its contemporaries. As the movement grew, William Booth determined that the democratic system borrowed from the Methodists for the first fourteen years had to be abandoned in favor of an autocratic and hierarchical structure. Under the banner of the Salvation Army, disciplined and faithful soldiers and officers fought the enemy in the streets, music halls, and gin palaces of England's urban working-class communities.

This chapter examines the effects of the evangelical concern for Christian missions for language, translation, and literacy. It analyses the Yorubaland in Nigeria and Kikuyuland in Kenya to demonstrate how colonized people used Christian-inflected languages in their nationalist projects. It also explores relevant conditions in Oceania and suggests that comparative impulse in Christian missionaries' scholarship could enfeeble subject peoples. And in multi-confessional and urbanized Bengal in India, the literate elites played off one another in competing translational projects.

Elijah Cadman and Adalaide Cox took paths that were, in many respects, similar. Like all Salvationists, they adopted a special form of dress and relinquished tobacco, drink, and many of the leisure activities their neighbors enjoyed. Their days were filled with God's work. Their choices set them apart from their respective families and neighborhoods albeit for different reasons. The Christian Mission, and later the Salvation Army, adopted a structure and practice that combined submission to God's will and discipline with an unusual degree of authority and responsibility to evangelism. The Salvation Army was a part of wider changes in evangelical culture, but it offered a distinctive response to the dilemmas facing Victorian Christians. The relationship among what Salvationists believed, their social, culture, and religion, and the work they did is the subject of this article.

This chapter examines the “language war”—the effort to establish Hebrew as the language of instruction in Haifa's Technion and its high school—as a defining struggle for the Yishuv's national culture. Together with the fight against missionary institutions that preceded it, this was a battle for institutional and organizational autonomy (in particular, from the German‐Jewish Hilfsverein), for the hegemony of the Hebraist nationalizing elite in Jewish Palestine, and for the supremacy of that group's vision of national culture. Bearing quasi‐religious overtones of cataclysmic conflict, the undertaking was incorporated into new holidays such as “Flower Day” and transformed traditional celebrations. Frequent conflations of educational struggle with escalating national conflict and the fallen of Ha‐Shomer* proved formative for new Hebrew masculinities and femininities. By the outbreak of WWI, a distinct culture had emerged in which an altered distribution of power between the Yishuv and the Diaspora was an essential component.

This chapter studies two notable missionary novels, Alice Tisdale Hobart's 1936 Yang and Yin and Claude McKay's Banana Bottom. The first novel is considered to be the best fictional account of an American Protestant medical missionary placed in China during the first quarter of the twentieth century. The other novel is a result of its author's experience with Baptist missionaries prevalent in the British colony of Jamaica. Both the novels engage the subject of Western imperialism. The main point of view of Yang and Yin is the rigid theology of the Christian mission, which is highly misdirected and counterproductive. On the other hand, Banana Bottom treats missionary evangelicalism with respect to post-colonial slavery legacy in the Americas.

This chapter discusses the beginning the conflict between the British Empire and the Christian missionary movement. Missionaries often saw themselves as an anomalous element of the British Empire because they were simultaneously struggling to acquire authority over indigenous people and resisting aggressive colonial forces. The most notable struggles between missions and secular forces was during the period from the late 1820s to the mid-1840s when missionaries proposed their model of Christian, humanitarian imperialism as an alternative to the practices prevailing in the settler colonies.

This chapter discusses three groups of missionaries who were part of the missionary fervour that led men to bring their families to China. These groups were the English Nonconformist Union Church Missionaries, the American Missionaries, and the Karl Gutzlaff's Christian Mission. The latter paved the way for the arrival of the Basel Mission, the Berlin missionaries, and the Mission of the Rhenish Church.

Philippa believed that the future of Africa and its salvation lay in Christianity. Over the past few years, she had become an intensely religious person, a turn that could not have been predicted because Philippa grew up to share her mother's fascination with the supernatural and even her belief in reincarnation. Philippa worked hard at being a Catholic and she would sit in front of her piano, reading aloud passages from the Bible. While travelling in Africa to perform, report to the news media, gather knowledge about the continent's music, the most significant collateral activity for Philippa was getting acquainted with the work of Christian missions.