Journal: Tyndale Bulletin
Volume: TYNBUL 43:1 (NA 1992)
Article: ‘Grand And Capacious Gothic Churches’: Pluralism And Victorian Missionaries
Author: Peter Williams

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TynBul 43:1 (1992) p. 139

‘Grand And Capacious Gothic Churches’:
Pluralism And Victorian Missionaries

Peter Williams

Nothing is easier than to set the nineteenth century missionary movement up as a resource for negative models of missionary work. Thus its missionaries can easily be presented as unreflective imperialists—the bible in one hand, with the flag of their country in the other; as culturally insensitive imagining that no objective was higher than replicating European and American value systems in previously pagan settings; as narrowly evangelistic without any concern for a fully-orbed Gospel able to take account of social needs; as uncomprehendingly hostile to every religious system they met which was not Christian, indeed which was not evangelical Christian. There is obviously some truth in all of these assessments and it would not be difficult to assemble apparently supportive evidence.

It will be argued however that there was a much stronger awareness of the issues than we often credit; that theologically the insights were often quite profound; that weaknesses there undoubtedly were but that these related less to an absence of theology than to a disputed theology. In brief Victorian missionaries provide not an example of a generation which thought little or which thought simplistically about mission strategy but rather one where the thinking, at any rate of some of its some most significant figures, was unexpectedly profound. If that is so, then it makes them somewhat more disturbing. It is not then that they lacked sophistication but rather that they very imperfectly implemented a quite profound analysis. They did not for example fail to move from mission to Church because they ignored the question—indeed they provided quite detailed analysis of how that end could be achieved. If the Victorians saw some of the problems and failed to solve them, then they become a richer quarry for the missiologists than if they had been blissfully unaware of them. They also become much more disturbing for a generation which tends to assume that solutions follow fairly readily once the problem has been diagnosed.

TynBul 43:1 (1992) p. 140

I. VIctorian Attitudes To Indigenous Culture

The Willowbank report of the Lausanne Committee on Gospel and Culture is a good example of the process I am tilting at. It argues that in the early part of the nineteenth century it was generally assumed that the churches on the mission field would be modelled on churches at home. ‘The tendency’, it asserts, ‘was to produce almost exact replicas. Gothic architecture, prayer book liturgies, clerical dress, musical instruments, hymns and tunes, decision-making processes, synods and committees, superintendents and archdeacons—all were exported and unimaginatively introduc...

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