This thesis investigates the efforts of the West Indian Church to establish and run a fascinating Mission in an area of West Africa already influenced by Islam or traditional religion. It focuses mainly on the Pongas Mission’s efforts to spread the Gospel but also discusses its missionary hierarchy during the formative years in the Pongas Country between 1855 and 1863, and the period between 1863 and 1873, when efforts were made to consolidate the Mission under black control and supervision. Between 1873 and 1900 when more Sierra Leonean assistants were hired, relations between them and African-descended West Indian missionaries, as well as between these missionaries and their Eurafrican host chiefs, deteriorated. More efforts were made to consolidate the Pongas Mission amidst greater financial difficulties and increased French influence and restrictive measures against it between 1860 and 1935. These followed an earlier prejudiced policy in the mission that was strongly influenced by the hierarchical nature of nineteenth-century Barbadian society, which was abandoned only after successive deaths and resignations of white superintendents and the demonstrated ability of black pastors to independently run the Mission. Instrumentalism aided the conversion process and the increased flow of converts threatened both the traditional belief systems and social order of the Pongas Country, resulting in confrontation between the Mission and traditional religion worshippers, while the lack of more legitimate trade in the Pongas Country and allegations of black missionaries’ illicit sexual relations and illegal trading caused the downfall of John Henry A. Duport, the Mission’s first black Head Missionary. In the late 1800s, efforts to establish a self-supporting, self-generating, and self-propagating church together with initiatives toward African agency in the Pongas Country failed. However, it was French activities and eventual consolidation of their interests in the Pongas Country from 1890 and their demand that Mission schools teach in French, together with successful recruiting of Mission students by the Roman Catholics and Muslim clerics in Guinea, that finally crippled it. Thus, by 1935 when the Gambia-Pongas Bishopric was established in the hope of rescuing the Mission, this gender-biased Christian enterprise in West Africa was already a spent force.

This thesis investigates the efforts of the West Indian Church to establish and run a fascinating Mission in an area of West Africa already influenced by Islam or traditional religion. It focuses mainly on the Pongas Mission’s efforts to spread the Gospel but also discusses its missionary hierarchy during the formative years in the Pongas Country between 1855 and 1863, and the period between 1863 and 1873, when efforts were made to consolidate the Mission under black control and supervision. Between 1873 and 1900 when more Sierra Leonean assistants were hired, relations between them and African-descended West Indian missionaries, as well as between these missionaries and their Eurafrican host chiefs, deteriorated. More efforts were made to consolidate the Pongas Mission amidst greater financial difficulties and increased French influence and restrictive measures against it between 1860 and 1935. These followed an earlier prejudiced policy in the mission that was strongly influenced by the hierarchical nature of nineteenth-century Barbadian society, which was abandoned only after successive deaths and resignations of white superintendents and the demonstrated ability of black pastors to independently run the Mission. Instrumentalism aided the conversion process and the increased flow of converts threatened both the traditional belief systems and social order of the Pongas Country, resulting in confrontation between the Mission and traditional religion worshippers, while the lack of more legitimate trade in the Pongas Country and allegations of black missionaries’ illicit sexual relations and illegal trading caused the downfall of John Henry A. Duport, the Mission’s first black Head Missionary. In the late 1800s, efforts to establish a self-supporting, self-generating, and self-propagating church together with initiatives toward African agency in the Pongas Country failed. However, it was French activities and eventual consolidation of their interests in the Pongas Country from 1890 and their demand that Mission schools teach in French, together with successful recruiting of Mission students by the Roman Catholics and Muslim clerics in Guinea, that finally crippled it. Thus, by 1935 when the Gambia-Pongas Bishopric was established in the hope of rescuing the Mission, this gender-biased Christian enterprise in West Africa was already a spent force.

This dissertation demonstrates how the Emmanuel Gospel Center, a parachurch organization in Boston, built an urban evangelical coalition out of the city’s postwar migrant communities. Efforts to resist government-directed urban renewal and a missionary posture toward the city drove the organization’s initially all-white staff into ministry partnerships with minority Protestant leaders. The Emmanuel Gospel Center brought these diverse communities together through the organization’s consistent promotion of collaborative city-wide ministry endeavors. Partnership with Boston’s growing migrant population then extended the organization’s ministries overseas. The study argues that white urban evangelicals created and promoted enduring cross-cultural and global religious networks within the United States. Douglas Hall and Judy Hall, who arrived at the Emmanuel Gospel Center in 1964, changed the organization from a fundamentalist preaching station into an evangelical “mission society” that prioritized collaboration with migrant churches. The couple’s missionary approach fit the tenuous neo-evangelical situation in the inner city created by middle-class flight to the suburbs. Protesting urban renewal with their Puerto Rican neighbors in the late 1960s saved the Emmanuel Gospel Center, turned the Halls into community organizers, and transformed their neighborhood into the heart of the city’s Puerto Rican community. In the 1970s, the Halls built ministry networks with African-American and Puerto Rican Protestant leaders. Boston’s multicultural evangelical coalition became institutionalized with the founding of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary’s urban educational program in 1976. The study argues that intercultural collaboration produced a coalition that was ethnically diverse, poor and working-class, and increasingly pentecostal. Furthermore, through the Emmanuel Gospel Center, neo-evangelicals formed an integral part of this coalition. In the 1980’s, the Emmanuel Gospel Center built partnerships with Haitian ministers. These connections drew the organization’s ministries into the Haitian diaspora beyond Boston while promoting unity within the city’s often divided Haitian Protestant community. This dissertation contributes to scholarship on evangelicalism by arguing that postwar coalition-building on the local, urban level provides an alternative reading of the movement compared with studies that highlight regional or national associations. Analysis of the Emmanuel Gospel Center demonstrates that American evangelicalism developed within a transnational and interconnected Caribbean context. For the field of World Christianity, the study shows how midcentury African-American and Puerto Rican migrations laid the foundation for multiethnic Protestant networks among late twentieth-century urban immigrant communities.

This dissertation argues that female piety and mission practices shaped the Evangelical Protestantism and the missionary movement that emerged from the Réveil [Revival] in nineteenth century France. It shows that women through their writings, their philanthropic initiatives, and their focus on education and social renewal on behalf of children laid the foundation for French Protestant mission and outreach. This study fills a gap in Anglophone scholarship on the role of women in French Protestant mission history and the history of the nineteenth century Evangelical Revival in France. After the Reformation, Protestant women preserved the Huguenot cultural identity of Protestants both at home and abroad. This continuity was manifested in the nineteenth century when the countries of the Huguenot Refuge sent missionaries of the Evangelical Revival back into France. The ethos of Jan Hus’ Dcerka [The Daughter] present in the work of French Protestant women in philanthropy, education, and social renewal demonstrates the continuity in piety and outreach from the Reformation to the nineteenth century. After the founding of the Paris Evangelical Missionary Society in 1822, the Paris Mission women’s committee, led by Albertine de Broglie and Émilie Mallet, played a crucial role in promoting missions by mediating regional and class differences between Protestants. Late eighteenth century female initiatives on behalf of vulnerable women and children laid the foundation for the work of missions because, through them, women developed networks that served the goals of philanthropy, fundraising, and infant education. Infant school education, pioneered in the Lesotho Mission by Elizabeth Lyndall Rolland, was essential to women’s mission practice. The infant school pedagogy of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi and Jean-Frédéric Oberlin, with its religious teaching, the centrality of the female role, and the emphasis on kindness was the key component in the work of the Lesotho Mission. In the 1830s, the arrival of missionary wives launched the work of the Lesotho Mission and energized French Protestant faith. In the 1840s, women once again sparked spiritual renewal with the creation of deaconess communities in Paris and Strasburg that served as models of Christian unity and self-sacrificial service. Overall, women’s piety and outreach were sources of revitalization in the Reformed Church and influenced early Evangelical Protestantism in nineteenth century France. Women’s mission practices that focused on works of mercy, education, and the nurturing of Christian families served as catalysts for renewal.

Thesis (M.A. (Church and Dogma History))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2010.

Thesis (M.A. (Church and Dogma History))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2010.

In this Master’s thesis, I conduct a micro-historical study of deaconess and missionary Greta Andrén (1909-1971) and her work for Svenska Israelsmissionen, the Swedish Israel Mission, in Vienna during the National Socialist occupation. By examining letters as well as select publications, I try to uncover her motives and how she found meaning in her work, and how this could be seen in relation to the origins of the Mission in the Swedish Low Church awakening and certain apocalypticviews on the Jews. Ultimately, I conclude that “Sister Greta’s” world-view was centred around the children and youth she cared for, because she found in them signs of God’s will, as well as teachers and examples of how a good Christian should relate to the Lord. Her capable personality expressed itself through action, and it was through diligent work that she upheld an everyday world filled with meaningful signs of divinity.

This dissertation is a historical and missiological study of the concept of the child in North American holiness and pentecostal mission discourse between 1897 and 1929. Despite official prioritization of evangelistic preaching, new holiness and pentecostal mission movements devoted much of their energies to starting schools and opening homes for children in need. Growing widespread interest in studying and protecting children encouraged child-focused activity. At the same time, an evangelical spirituality that emphasized childlike trust in God helped to sustain mission work with children. The study analyzes narratives found in denominational and mission periodicals as well as other missionary writings to uncover the voices and actions of mission practitioners. In early holiness and pentecostal mission movements, publications enabled the exchange of stories, ideas, and funds. This exchange spread the idea of living by childlike faith, provided resources for raising children in Christian faith, and supported and built children’s homes. Child-centered discourse thus propelled the spread of holiness and pentecostal meta-cultures that formed the next generation of the movements. Chapters 1 and 2 show the links between holiness and pentecostal mission and earlier evangelical movements. Chapter 1 argues that the child has been central to historical evangelical identity, spirituality, and mission. Chapter 2 identifies changing understandings of the child and approaches to mission that accompanied changes in evangelical identity. These developments contributed to the proliferation of mission discourse on the child during the period of this study. Chapter 3 shows how holiness and pentecostal missionaries, such as Albert Norton, looked to God as a good father who met their needs. Missionaries’ response to a benevolent father was called “living by faith,” and it shaped their approach to mission with children. Chapter 4 examines how members of North American Wesleyan holiness groups, the Free Methodists, Wesleyan Methodists, and Nazarenes, pursued a mission of rescuing and raising children in Christian faith around the world. Chapter 5 explores how pentecostals, such as Leslie and Ava Anglin and Lillian Trasher, set up homes for needy children in various global locations and contributed to the formation of pentecostal childhoods. This dissertation argues that holiness and pentecostal efforts to care for and train children helped to form global evangelical movements. It contributes to the history of mission, sheds light on how and why these movements spread, and provides a historical link to popular practices of twentieth-century child sponsorship. The study concludes by highlighting the role that narratives and the concept of the child played in shaping evangelicalism.

This thesis examines the relationship between the Africa Inland Mission (AIM) and the Africa Inland Church (AIC) in Kenya between 1939 and 1975. AIM began laying plans for an African denomination in Kenya in 1939 and established the Africa Inland Church in 1943. The mission did not clearly define the nature of its relationship with the church it founded. The arrangement was informal, and evolved over time. In addition, the relationship between the AIM and the AIC between 1939 and 1975 was often troubled. African independent churches were formed in the 1940s because of dissatisfaction over AIM policies. The mission opposed devolution in the 1950s, even when other mission societies were following this policy in preparation for independence in Kenya. AIM continued to resist a mission church merger in the 1960s and did not hand over properties and powers to the church until 1971. The study focuses on how the mission’s relationship with the church it founded evolved during this period. It considers how mission principles and policies created tension in the relationship with the church it founded. First, it examines how mission policy contributed to significant schisms in the 1940s, giving rise to African independent churches. Second, it looks at how AIM interpreted and responded to post-war religious, political and social changes in Kenya. Third, it explores the reasons for AIM’s rejection of a proposed mission-church merger in the late 1950s. Fourth, this study investigates mission motives for resisting increased African pressure for devolution after independence in Kenya even while it helped establish the Association of Evangelicals in Africa and Madagascar. Fifth, it considers what happened to the mission and the church in the aftermath of a merger in 1971.

This dissertation is focused on one of many aspects of religion and politics in Guatemala in recent history (1976-1990). This period is characterized by unequal wealth distribution, ethnic divisions, civil war, and U.S. influence. It is a contemporary mission history examining missionary efforts directed from the United States, Guatemalan responses, and indigenous initiatives. The problem concerns a movement within Protestant evangelicalism, which in this study is called Political Evangelicalism, and its relationship to the counterinsurgency war which the Guatemalan military waged against guerrillas, political opposition, and the Mayan majority. The problem centers on the following interrelated questions: How did Political Evangelicalism appear in Guatemala and how did it develop? How did agents of Political Evangelicalism act? What kind of discourse was employed to legitimize armed and structural violence? What was the relationship between Political Evangelicalism and counterinsurgency strategy? Political Evangelicalism must be reflected through different actors and aspects of Guatemalan conflicts to be understood. Therefore, Political Evangelicalism is placed in the broader context of the Guatemalan situation and its relation to the United States. This is a chronological study describing the role and development of Political Evangelicalism on three levels: the relationship between the United States and Guatemala; Guatemala on the national level; and an in-depth study of the Ixil people. The focal point is on the Guatemalan national level. A wide array of empirical material is employed, including interviews, unpublished documents, official documents, booklets, articles, and so on.