The Missionary Societies
We heard earlier on how the Bishops of the Church of England, and principally the Bishop of London, managed church life in the colonies through the work of commissaries. The most famous, able, and influential of these commissaries was a Shropshire Boy, Thomas Bray, who was born in 1658. A bright boy from a boy family, Bray went to Oxford, became a school master and then was ordained, being presented to a series of livings by lay patrons who heard him preach and were impressed by his learning and good sense. By 1690 he was Rector of Sheldon in Warwickshire.
Bray took his legal responsibilities seriously, especially that laid down in the 59th Canon of the CofE’s Canon Law: the young of the parish were to be catechetized on Sunday afternoons. Bray realised that teaching the faith required resourcing, and so published his own system of teaching under the catchy title Catechetical Lectures. It was a best seller, selling 3000 copies and making a profit of £700 (equivalent to more than £100,000 today!). Even more importantly it got him the attention of the bishop of London, Henry Compton.
When in 1695 the Governor of Maryland requested the Bishop of London to provide an able clergyman as commissary for the colony, Compton knew exactly who to send.
As he was preparing to leave for the Americas Bray surveyed the clergy who would be prepared to travel as missionaries with him. Unsurprisingly he found that it was the poor, unbeneficed clergy who were prepared to go (they had no fat living to lose in England), and yet they were the clergy without libraries of their own, and the learning Bray felt was necessary for such an important task. He petitioned the Bishop Compton for assistance in setting up a charity to support buying books for clergy. He received a donation of £44 (£5000) from Princess (later Queen) Anne, and thus was born, in 1699, the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. In the December of the same year he finally travelled to Maryland, taking three months to get there, and founding thirty-nine libraries, some having more than a thousand volumes.
On his return Bray realised that a more thorough effort at the evangelising of the colonies was needed. He saw the danger posed to the Anglican Church by the vigour of such groups as the Quakers, and so in 1701 he received the charter for the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG). Its first meeting was held in Lambeth Palace, and the Archbishop of Canterbury became its first president. It was the means by which the Church of England was able to support its clergy in the English colonies ‘for the instruction of the King’s loving subjects in the Christian religion’ and to evangelize the native peoples there. Having set up these two important societies, Bray retired to his parish, first Sheldon, and then St Botolph’s Aldgate in the city of London.
It was Bray’s foresight that enable the Anglican church to survive the shocks of the War of Independence. It was the model of the two societies which enabled the Church of England to respond to the growth of empire in the nineteenth century, with the swift foundation of other missionary societies:
- CMS– 1799, for the missions to Africa and Asia;
- UMCA (Universities’ Mission to Central Africa)– 1857 (working in Malawi and Zanzibar);
- the BFBS (British & Foreign Bible Society)– 1804;
- the LMS (London Missionary Society)– 1795 (David Livingstone’s sponsoring body);
- SAMS (South American Missionary Society originally the Patagonian Mission)– 1844.
An assessment of the missionary societies?
On the one hand:
SPG funded its missionary endeavours, in part, through the ownership of the Codrington plantation in Barbados where slaves had the word “Society” branded on their chests. Thomas Secker, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1758 to 1768 realised that this was a dreadful responsibility: “I have long wondered and lamented that the Negroes in our plantation decrease and new supplies become necessary continually. Surely this proceeds from some defect, both of humanity and even of good policy. But we must take things as they are at present.” When slavery was abolished in 1833, the bishop of Exeter was paid nearly £13,000 (over £1 million) to compensate him for the loss of 665.
On the other hand:
Before his enthronement as Archbishop of York, John Sentamu said this:
My late parents always said to me whenever you meet a group of people who may be interested in hearing what you have to say, always tell them how grateful we are for the missionaries who risked their lives to bring the good news of God’s salvation to Uganda. It is because of that missionary endeavour that I am standing in front of you. A fruit of their risk-taking and love.1
In the end it was right and is right that a church which was founded and fostered and fed by missionary endeavour from a world-wide church contributed in turn to that missionary endeavour.
This is part of a series of posts. Others in the series are:—
- Anglican Roots / Anglican Routes
- Anglican Roots : Four justifications for the exercise
- Anglican Roots : 664 The Synod of Whitby
- Anglican Roots : 1215 Magna Carta
- Anglican Roots : Movement 1 / The Benedictines
- Anglican Roots : Inheritance 1
- Anglican Roots : The Reformation
- Anglican Roots : 1534 Henry, Supreme Head
- Anglican Roots : 1593 Richard Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Polity
- Anglican Roots : Movement 2
- Anglican Roots : Inheritance 2
- Anglican Roots : 1604 The Hampton Court Conference
- Anglican Roots : 1662 The Act of Uniformity and the Book of Common Prayer
- Anglican Roots : Movement 3
- Anglican Roots : Inheritance 3
- Anglican Roots : 1784 Samuel Seabury consecrated first American bishop
- Anglican Roots : 1888 The Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral
- Anglican Roots : Movement 4
- Anglican Roots : Inheritance 4
- Quoted in Stephen Bates, ‘A cleric’s journey: from Idi Amin’s Uganda to York’, The Guardian, Saturday 18 June 2005. [↩]
, p. 222. [
(London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 2004), pp. 2-3. [
The first Lambeth Conference was called to deal with a doctrinal crisis in the now world-wide Anglican Communion. In 1853 a methodical mathematician called John Colenso was consecrated bishop of the new diocese of Natal. Someone didn’t do their research, because it soon emerged that Colenso had radical (for then!) ideas about polygamy, heathenism and the proper interpretation of the Old Testament. The Bishop of Cape Town attempted to depose Colenso, then excommunicate him. The Privy Council in London got involved and complicated matters further. There ended up two bishops in Natal, the Bishop of Natal (Colenso, who remained in communion with the Church of England even if excomunicate from the church in South Africa) and the Bishop of Maritzburg (who was in communion with the Bishop of Cape Town). It was a mess: if I am in communion with you, but not with him, will I be in communion with her, who is in communion with him, but not with you? Positions were assumed and attitudes were struck. Samuel John Stone, the curate of Haggerstone in London, even wrote a polemical hymn attacking Colenso and supporting the actions of the Bishop of Cape Town:
To understand the C-LQ we have to take a step back and introduce William Reed Huntington (1838-1909), the Rector of Grace Church, New York. Reed Huntington was a great man in the history of the Anglican Communion, an inheritor of the great theologian saints such as Anselm and Hooker. He realised the doctrine when correctly understood and articulated, was the great engine of evangelism and mission. In 1870 he wrote a book The Church Idea which deserves to be much better known outside the Episcopal Church:
, (SPCK, 2nd rev ed. 1998), p. 195. [
, (Oxford VSIs, 2006), p. 121 [
The first Church of England service to be held outside the lands of the English crown was a celebration of Holy Communion at Frobisher Bay on 3 September 1578, presided over by Robert Wolfall, chaplain to the exploration voyage of Martin Frobisher. The first service within the lands which later became the United States was probably in a bay in Oregon on 19 June 1579 when the crew of the Golden Hind and Sir Francis Drake landed to repair the ship. Attempts were made to set up permanent settlements on the west coast of North America in the later years of the sixteenth century, but all failed until the settlement of Jamestown in Virginia in 1607. The Church of England was designated the established church there in 1609, in the lower part of New York in 1693, in Maryland in 1702, in South Carolina in 1706, in North Carolina in 1730, and in Georgia in 1758.
Seabury was a colonist, born in Groton, Connecticut, in 1729. He trained as theologian at Yale College and then as a doctor at the University of Edinburgh. Whilst in the United Kingdom he sought ordination, and returned to the colonies as a missionary for the SPG. When the War broke out he resigned his living in Westchester, New York, and served in private medical practice and as chaplain to the British army. And yet when the war ended, he had remained in the United States. He was unsuccessful in finding an English bishop who would ordain him. They were reluctant to interfere in the affairs of an enemy nation, and anyway, the canons required the newly consecrated bishop to swear an oath of loyalty to the Crown, something that Seabury as an American was manifestly unable to do.
(New York: Church Publishing, 2004). [
(London: SCM Press, 1996), p. 94 [
. Ed. Hans J. Hillerbrand. (Oxford University Press, 1996) [