1 Andrew Walls Ralph D.

Winter Lectureship Lecture #5 A Tale of 3 Continents or Assumptions of a Contemporary Western Missionary Errand in the Wilderness: brought the Christian story into North America Great Revival: white and black in same spiritual discourse, repenting of sins, rejoicing in the Lord together. It presented slavery with its greatest challenge, but in the end slavery was stronger so black and white Christianity took separate streams of development. Revolutionary War: British offered freedom and land to blacks who would join them in rebelling against their masters. When the British didnt win the war they couldnt demobilize the African regiments without returning to slavery. So they sent them to colonies that had not revolted: some to Jamaica. One of these men, Lyle, began to preach to the slaves on the plantations: a largely unreached people at this point. The response was spectacular and before long he could not cope with it. He appealed for British Baptist to come to Macedonia and help. The missionary presence had started with the ex-slave and ex-soldier, not a European initiative. Other Caribbean islands had similar stories. But the soldiers never did seem to get the land they had been promised. In England at this time the movement against the slave trade was rising. Influential people in society were influenced by the evangelical movement and began to work against the slave trade. The Clapham Group (philanthropists): Wilberforce, the best known Parliamentary speaker. They were practical to realize the slave trade needed more than just preaching to end it. It needed an economic solution. They argued for a demonstration model in Africa: economically viable, reflect Christian civilization and form a base for missionary efforts in Africa as a whole. Sierra Leone: a piece of land purchased from the local inhabitants to form the basis of this colony. Black congregations in Nova Scotia were tired of endless promises that were never fulfilled. They sent a delegation to London. He was introduced to Wilberforce. The thought came that maybe the ideal inhabitants of this new land and demonstration model might be black Christians from Nova Scotia. Peters thought, maybe they could get the land in Africa. Sierra Leone became the province of freedom. The response was somewhat too large for the land available. In 1792, 1131 men, women, children (born in Africa or born of African parents in America), landed in Sierra Leone from the black churches of Nova Scotia. They marched ashore singing the song of Isaac Watts: Awake and sing the song of Moses and the Lamb. They felt they had crossed into the Promised Land.

2 This is the first missionary effort in Africa. It is not European. It is a ready made African church. No missionaries for the next 20 years. It had all the marks of the Great Revival. It was a boisterous black revival type of Christianity. The European evangelical Christianity was more sedate and this led to difficulties in getting along. Then some runaway slaves who had been fighting in Nova Scotia were also also sent to Sierra Leone. They were nominal Christians. They came to the new Promised Land but there wasnt much land available. The boisterous form of evangelical religion they expressed did not accord with that of the colony leadership. Relationships became frayed. Most of the missionary societies of the 1700s started their work in Sierra Leone as a base to move further into the interior. Most of the missions were not only failures but utter disasters. The Clapham Group thought of Sierra Leone as the morning star and the settlers believed this and thought of themselves as a light to the dark continent. The real transformation of Sierra Leone began after legal abolition of slave trade in 1807 (?). Patrols were set to confiscate ships carrying slaves. Those slaves who could not be repatriated were brought into Freetown. To facilitate this the British took over Sierra Leone as a colony. These freed slaves had never known America. They came from all over African with multiple languages. They were disabled, uprooted, unable to reconstitute their past, confused. It was the liberated Africans that became the core of the colony. Two influences at work: 1) missionary influence to oversee the settlement, produce a pastor and hopefully a school master for each area. Reputation of Sierra Leone as the white mans grave. This is the first serious movement toward the Christian faith that takes place in tropical Africa. Among broken people who were uprooted and had lost their identity. 2) Nova Scotia who took part in the evangelization of the liberated Africans, more than generally realized. The liberated Africans were settled in villages with English names with a church at the center with a Norman tower and a school at the heart of the village. Here is the first mass movement to Christianity in modern Africa. They had to reconstitute their identity with the materials at hand. This Christian community was to shape the future of West African Christianity. Sierra Leone produced more missionaries per person in the country than any other country in the world. Abolition of slave trade (1807), direct fruit of evangelical action, through influence of public opinion. Same people are arguing for new missionary movement. But the slave trade did not die. It actually increased. Buxtons book in 1800s: looking at African slavery; one of the first books to look at economic development. A people robbed and spoiled. Buxton had taken over from Wilberforce the abolition movement. By 1839 he calculated that the trade

3 was not only continuing, but it had not even been reduced. Legislation had not sufficed. Europe owed reparation to Africa for evils inflicted on it. He wanted African states to be equal trading partners with European states. When Buxton uses the term civilization he means what we mean by culture or development. Niger Expedition: Conclusion that life in inland Africa for Europeans was impossible. Development in Africa was thought to be impossible. 40 of the Europeans on the expedition died and all became sick. None of the Africans died and few became sick. Missionaries argued against this. They said the missionaries to spread the Christian faith in Africa needed to be African. They thought the salvation of Africa would be its economic development. NOTE: Walls is not just showing the preaching of the gospel in mission history. Christianity, commerce and civilization united against the slave trade. Sierra Leone continued to embody this ideal for a time. NOTE Walls shows the intertwined story of missions and abolition of slavery and attempt to make an African country able to operate economically without slaves. Company/syndicates: this started in the church: a group of people with something in common bonded together the raise capital that they could invest in property and business. They began to beat the European merchants at their own game in operating businesses in the country. Recaptives now sailed their own ships on trading voyages. In 1838 one group of Yoruba recaptives were able to go back to their own people. They missed the Christian services, so they requested missionaries. The mission followed the church, not the church following the mission. THIS IS A REPEATED PATTERN. NOTE: What does this say about church planting movements? Sierra Leone had its own lawyers, preachers, teachers, publishers, etc. High degree of literacy. High church attendance. Not many signs of traditional religion. Self-supporting secondary education supervised by African clergy. Not due to the English government, but a product of missions. In the response to the Niger Expedition there is no dissent from the lesson most drew that Europeans couldnt live in the interior. This didnt mean that evangelization of interior of Africa was impossible. It meant it had to be carried out by Africans. In Sierra Leone: a community of Christian that already speaks all the languages.

Lessons: 1. Language: Sierra Leone had operated in English. All the treasures of that language available to the people. The Sierra Leone people wanted both Greek and Latin in the grammar school even though the British had thought to omit Latin even though it was the language of higher learning in Europe. But the Niger Expedition proved the necessity of the languages of Africa. Its success was only due to the presence of Sierra Leone people who spoke one or more of the languages. The thought was that Sierra Leone and eventually Africa itself should produce the missionaries for Africa. Invest in language and training. First great study of African comparative linguistics was done in Sierra Leone, comparing over 100 languages all spoken in Freetown. Produced grammars for some of these. This is where the mission force was to come from. THIS IS A TURNING POINT comparatively early in the missionary story. You might say it was a false start because things moved backwards from this point. For a time the vision came and Sierra Leone was the morning star of Africa, pointing to the new birth of Christianity in which Africans, Asians, Latin Americas are the vanguard of the Christian movement for the time to come. Q&A Return to a consciousness of belonging together and explore the richness of diversity (which is specifically Christian). In Islam, the uniting features are those that come from a single dominant culture. Seventh century Arabia culture is what unites them. Christians go through the way of incarnation. It is the embodying of faith that causes the diversity. In the single body of Christ there is diversity. OUR DIVERSITIES BELONG TOGETHER: creating a new temple in the Spirit. There are different lifestyles and different congregational systems. But they belong together and it is a body. Organic metaphors point to something that really should be happening. Most important event in 16th century for Christianity was not the Reformation but its encounter with the non-western world. He showed the American model to show the contrast between the crusading mode and the missionary mode. He didnt have time to go into Asian Christianity. More lectures needed! Westerners are made by the 16th century. Other parts of the world didnt have a sixteenth century or a Middle Ages, i.e., Orthodox church. Its a totally different Christian history. One of the things we have to get beyond in the next stage of Christianity is the Enlightenment. We cant give it up ourselves because it is part of our identity. But we have to realize it is not part of everyones background. The instinct to compel is human; the crusading instinct. We have to be aware of

5 that and guard against it. There was no theological revolution in the initial missionary movement. You just know that the only way youre going to get into China is on their terms. But it is still a Christendom model: If you can move the emperor, high caste, people at the top, then youll produce Christendom, because thats the way it worked in Europe. The ideal: terms set by someone else; being prepared for discomfort, is still the heart of the missionary mode. If youre going to push it, youre taking part in the crusading mode. Crusades: Muslim historians did not spend much time on the Crusades. Very little harm was done to Muslim territory. It was Christians who suffered in the Crusades. It is a recent development to use the term crusade as a pejorative term.