It is part of current missiological orthodoxy that newly created churches should obtain independence from cross-cultural missionaries as soon as possible. It is not often realised that much Victorian missionary thinking shared that objective. This important new work examines the ideal of the self-governing church in the Victorian period through a study of the official mind of the Church Missionary Society.
The study begins with an examination of Henry Venn's, the famous CMS Secretary, commitment to self-supporting, self-propagating and self-governing churches. Was he a lonely figure...

This is a socio-historical study of schooling at Chikuni, a Jesuit mission station in Southern Zambia. It includes an examination of the dynamic processes operative at the mission over a 75 year period. During these years, the Jesuits interacted with successive generations of students and converts and with the representatives of successive political regimes, all of which were secular but each willing to use the mission as a means to its own ends.
For many years Chikuni was the major representative of the Catholic church in southern Zambia. The emergence of a Catholic community is of its...

Bishops are to be understood primarily as representatives of cultures regardless of where their people are territorially located. The vindication of this thesis has implications also for ecumenical reconciliation between episcopal and non-episcopal communions occupying the same geographical territory.
The author compares the approaches and insights of both Vatican II and Lambeth 89 on this issue, and then proceeds to a historical and theological analysis of the development of the threefold Order in the early centuries, which he illuminates with the aid of contemporary sociological and...

Apart from the mainline, Pentecostal, and Zionist churches, there are different types of African Independent/Indigenous Churches (AIC). The greater part of the more than four thousand denominations and eight million adherents came into the AIC during the past three decades, mainly from the traditional African religious background. The important role of the diviner in the traditional society has been replaced by the prophet in the AIC; the prophet understands the worldview of his/her people, especially the cultural diseases. In some churches the office of prophet cum diviner is...

This is a pioneering study of the impact of Christianization among the Chinese. Focusing primarily on the minority peoples of Yunnan province, it nonetheless fully mirrors the historical development of the Protestant mission in China.
Drawing on many years of observation in the field and upon a comprehensive consultation of official documents relating to Christians on the mountain peaks, the study chronicles how the early foreign missionaries, thanks to their self-sacrifice and the examples they set of religious zeal, cemented the hitherto segregatory and leaderless tribes together,...

This study presents a history, based on original archival and primary source material, of the Baptist mission educational situation of Cameroon province from 1922 to 1945. The provisions of the League of Nations' mandate, under which Great Britain administered the province in this period, included 'complete freedom of conscience and the free exercise of all forms of worship', yet from the beginning of the Mandate clear tensions existed. The missions desired education to serve evangelical purposes, while the colonial government strove for a uniform adaptionist program, suited to European...

This work is concerned with the civil authorities' and missionaries' project of the emancipation of Madarε women in the west of Burkina Faso between 1900 and 1960. The work deals successively with the place of women in the pre-colonial village community, the beginning of contacts with European civilisation, the project's initiators' assessment of the women's living conditions and their willingness to change them, the means and methods used to this end and the limitations of the project at the time of independence in 1960. The fruit of several years of research by a historian, who is a...

The expansion of Christianity is often described from the viewpoint of the western missionaries. This book, however, focuses on the large group of indigenous teachers and their pupils at the mission schools in Batakland. These educational activities in fact provided the most important incentive for the birth and growth of the Lutheran Batak Church since 1860. With 3 million members this is the largest protestant church in Indonesia, a Southeast Asian country with 190 million inhabitants, 85% of whom are Muslim. The study is based on archival sources in German, Dutch, Indonesian and Batak, as...

Missionnaires au quotidien a Tahiti immerses us in the everyday life of Catholic missionaries sent out to the Tahitian islands in the period 1834 to 1914. Using the correspondence of the 167 members of the order of the Congregation of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and Mary, an attempt is made to define the social and geographic origins of the Picpucian people. Priests and friars are followed in their education, from the apostolic school to the first Pacific vicariates. Right from the first days of established contact, we see the management of the day-to-day affairs of these eternal...

This volume presents the 25 years correspondence of a Roman Catholic missionary, Fr. Francois Laydevant, who worked in Lesotho from 1905 to 1954, with a Roman Catholic missiologist, Fr. Albert Perbal, based in Rome, Italy. The exchange of letters was provoked by the missiologist who needed direct information from the mission field for his own research and teaching, and first of all in order to fulfil his role of consultant with the Institute for the Study of African Languages and Cultures in London and the Conference Romaine des Missions Catholiques d'Afrique in Rome. The main result of the...