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Language, ‘Native Agency’, and Missionary Control: Rufus Anderson’s Journey to India, 1854-5
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 February 2016
Extract
In the early years of the modern missionary movement there were many influences which turned minds towards support for the general principle and practice of reliance on ‘native agency’. Strategies of conversion such as those of the London Missionary Society and the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions at work in the Pacific, which aimed at kings or other influential local leaders, at least implicitly allotted important roles to the leadership and example of highly-placed converts. Awareness of the scale of the missionary task in densely-populated regions, contrasted with the limits of the western missionary input, pointed to the need for delegation as quickly as possible. The Serampore missionaries, Alexander Duff and Charles Gutzlaff, all travelled early down that road. Financial crisis – manifested either locally as Dr John Philip found in South Africa, or centrally as when the Church Missionary Society decided in the early 1840s to withdraw from the West Indies - prompted inevitable questions about the possibilities for deployment of local agents, who were far cheaper than Europeans.
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References
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21 Ibid., entry 16 August 1854.
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30 Ibid., entries 29-30 December 1854.
31 Ibid., III, entry 6 April 1855.
32 Ibid., entry 4 May 1855.
33 Ibid., entry 24 May 1855.
34 Ibid., entry 11 March 1855.
35 IABC 30/12, Anderson’s Journal, II, entry 17 October 1854.
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49 ABC 14/3, nos 269-70, letters from Knight to Anderson, both 31 May 1858.
50 Ibid., nos 485-6, H. Carre Tucker (Secretary, CVES) to Anderson, 18 September 1858, and 22 January 1859. For the formation of the CVES and its early difficulties, Savage, ‘Evangelical education policy’, pp. 444–5.
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58 For a different interpretation of Anderson’s views and ABCFM policy, in which their concern with financial economy and self-support drove out self-government and perpetuated missionary control, see Harris, ‘Denominationalism and democracy’.