Post-classical history

V

Apart from the faith missions a new impetus in missionary strategy emerged from high-church Anglicans. The UMCA, launched with Bishop Charles Mackenzie’s consecration at Cape Town in 1861, moved significantly beyond the earlier model of the SPG and the Colonial Bishoprics Fund. The UMCA prided itself on re-creating a model of the apostolic church held together by episcopal authority and ecclesiastical discipline. It was also committed to preserving traditional communities and local custom threatened by Islam and the ‘debased civilization’ of East Africa’s coastal towns. In the practice of the UMCA, the importance attached to the possibilities of blending Anglo- Catholic Christianity with African ways intensified their theologically informed emphasis on community, authority, obedience, and discipline.

Other adaptations of Britain’s high-church traditions were the Oxford Mission to Calcutta (1881) and the Cambridge Mission to Delhi (1877). The Cambridge missionaries constituted themselves the Brotherhood of the Ascended Christ and led a communal life revolving around pastoral work, evangelical preaching, and St Stephen’s College. A larger number of unmarried women were drawn together into their own St Stephen’s Community, initially engaged in zenana missions among secluded Indian women and later in social and medical work. The Oxford Mission, styled the Brotherhood of the Epiphany, considered there to be a surfeit of ‘bazaar’ preaching in Calcutta and therefore concentrated on their own schools and hostels. Increasingly they worked directly as a mission to the rapidly growing numbers of Calcutta University students. It was difficult for either mission to attain the comparative detachment from state and colonial authority achieved by the UMCA in Africa. From their beginnings they were closely connected to the SPG, which continued to play a major role in appointing and funding India’s Anglican episcopate. In 1891 Henry Whitehead, already Principal of the SPG-run Bishop’s College in Calcutta, was also appointed superior of the Oxford Mission, while in Delhi the Cambridge Mission took over the SPG’s missionary work. Both communities began to furnish bishops for India’s dioceses. Following T. V. French’s appointment to Lahore in 1877, bishops and brotherhoods developed intimate ties. The Oxford Mission’s policy under Bishop Johnson (1876-98) was defined by its historian as ‘Do nothing without the Bishop’. The missions’ acquisition of city-centre sites confirmed their social position and role as frequent visiting places for representatives of the Raj. They showed no sign of UMCA misgivings about the onrush of ‘civilization’. Absence of obvious hostility to their activities disinclined them to question the fact of their influence. Lefroy thus commented, ‘we are here to upset by God’s grace their old faiths and customs, and to recreate the country in Christ Jesus; and it is only logical to suppose that we should be very much hated and objected to; only logical, but somehow hopelessly the reverse of fact’. The universality of the faith was matched by belief in the utility of Oxbridge teaching transplanted to Bengal and Punjab.

This assessment was not as far removed from the UMCA’s belief in missionary identification with local peoples as it might at first seem. Anglo-Catholics brought ideas of ‘sympathy’ and practical ‘consideration’ to both South Asia and Central Africa—linked to the possibility of insights the West might derive from close encounters of the religious kind. These were present in the Cambridge Mission from its foundation as a result of the influential teaching of Professor Westcott. That they lent themselves to expressions of paternalistic self-congratulation should not disguise either their novelty in the missionary world as a whole or their capacity to subvert the language of dominance and imperial control in India. In the world of Hindus and still more of Muslims, the willingness of Anglo-Catholic missions to treat the beliefs of others with some seriousness was rare. It was an assessment at the same time widely separated from the world of the UMCA. Colonial rule in India at the point ofthe high-church missions’ arrival in the 1870s imposed far greater constraints on missionary ambitions than did those prevailing in Central Africa at the same time. The authoritarianism at the heart of the Anglo-Catholic tradition, buttressed by its social connections, could assert itself more readily under the Raj than in circumstances where colonial rule had yet to be established.

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