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Klaus Fiedler, born 1942 in Germany, is a missiologist and mission historian connecting the conntinents of Europe and Africa. He studied initially at the Baptist Seminary in Hamburg, but received his most formative F education at Makerere University in INTERDENOMINATIONAL AITH Kampala, Uganda, and he received Doctor's degrees from Dar-es-Salaam and Heidelberg Universities. He served for seven years as a missionary with the Kanisa la Biblia in South Tanzania, then 16 years in AITH ISSIONS M F M Germany as pastor, teacher and editor. In 1992 he started teaching at the University of Malawi in Zomba, since 2008 he is Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at Mzuzu ISSIONS IN FRICA University and Postgraduate Coordinator. A It is not the European and American churches that evangelized Africa, but the mission societies. The missions from the Great Awakening like London Missionary Society and Church Missionary Society, or the Holy Ghost Fathers and the White Fathers, which started the process of Sub-Saharan Africa becoming a Christian continent, are well known and their work is better documented. Less known and less documented are the interdenominational faith missions, beginning in 1873, aiming to reach the still unreached areas of Africa: North K Africa, the Sudan Belt and the Congo Basin. So there were LAUS missions like Africa Inland Mission or Sudan Interior Mission, which gave birth to some of the big churches like ECWA in F Nigeria and Africa Inland Church in Kenya. IEDLER KLAUS FIEDLER This book is part of Mzuni Press which offers a range of books on religion, culture and society from Malawi INTERDENOMINATIONAL FAITH MISSIONS IN AFRICA Copyright 2018 Klaus Fiedler All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any from or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without prior permission from the publishers. Published by Mzuni Press P/Bag 201 Luwinga Mzuzu 2 ISBN 978-99960-60-46-5 eISBN 978-99960-60-45-8 Mzuni Books no. 34 This book is based on "Story of Faith Missions", published by Regnum (Oxford), 1994 and 1995 Index and editorial assistance: Marvin Esau and Daniel Neumann Cover: Daniel Neumann Mzuni Press is represented outside Malawi by: African Books Collective Oxford ([email protected]) www.mzunipress.blogspot.com www.africanbookscollective.com Printed in Malawi by Baptist Publications, P.O.B. 444, Lilongwe Interdenominational Faith Missions in Africa History and Ecclesiology Klaus Fiedler Mzuzu 2018 To my teachers Martin Metzger, John Mbiti, Canon Hutchinson, Louise Pirouet, Isariah Kimambo 4 Contents Chapter 1: A Plurality of Missions: The Faith Missions in the Context of the Protestant Missionary Movement 6 Chapter 2: A New Missionary Movement: The Early History of the Faith Missions 31 Chapter 3: Not an Easy Endeavour: Faith Missions in Africa 78 Chapter 4: Born in Revival: Faith Missions and the 1859/1873 Revival 129 Chapter 5: Reaching the Unreached: Faith Mission Geography 147 Chapter 6: Interdenominational Missions and Denominational Churches: The Concept of Individual Unity 199 Chapter 7: Power for Service: The Faith Missions and the Holiness Movement 247 Chapter 8: The Rigorous Christian Life: Faith Missions and African Holiness 291 Chapter 9: A Propelling Vision: The Faith Missions and the Prophetic Movement 320 Chapter 10: Using [No Longer?] Neglected Forces: Women 343 Chapter 11: Continuity and Change – Faith Mission Churches in Africa 374 Chapter 12: A Vision Taken Up: African Faith Missions 426 Chapter 13: Sufficient Challenges 457 5 Foreword This book is the revised edition of the earlier book: "Story of Faith Missions" (1994) or "The Story of Faith Missions from Hudson Taylor to Present Day Africa" (1995, both Regnum, Oxford), which in turn was the English version of the (earlier and quite different) "Ganz auf Vertrauen. Geschichte und Kirchenverständnis der Glaubensmissionen" Gießen/Basel: Brunnen 1992). All three books have been sold out for years, and as they have not been superseded by more recent works, I felt that a new edition of the English version would be appropriate. When I did the original research in the late 1980s, I lived in Germany, though my mind was much in Africa. In 1992 I moved back to Africa, not to Tanzania where I had lived for seven years, but to its neighbour, Malawi; and from rural missionary work to teaching at the university. To really update the book while in Germany would have been a daunting task, but to do so from here in Malawi, with somewhat changing research interests due to different work committments, would have been outrightly impossible. Though I could not bring the contents up to date, I have included new information wherever it was available to me, marked by an asterisk (*). Such additions are mostly found in the footnotes, but also sometimes in the text. And where they have a Malawian bias, this is due to the fact that this is the country where I have been living and working over the last quarter of a century. Looking back over the last 25 years, I want to express my gratitude that I could teach 15 years at the University of Malawi (Chancellor College, Zomba) and 10 years at Mzuzu University. I am grateful to our students from whom I learnt so much and to my colleagues with whom I shared the work. I also want to take this opportunity to thank those who made the research (Dr. theol. Heidelberg University) possible, first the Deutsche Forschungs- gemeinschaft and then Dr. Irene Fiedler, and also to thank those who helped in the research work and in the productionof the books that resulted from it. Klaus Fiedler Mzuzu, March 2018 6 Chapter 1: A Plurality of Missions: The Faith Missions in the Context of the Protestant Missionary Movement The term 'faith missions' was not coined by the faith missions themselves. They did not claim that other missions worked without faith, nor did they claim to have more faith than the missions that had started their work decades earlier. It was others who took one of the faith missions' innovative concepts—the 'faith principle' of financial support1—and referred to them under that name. This was only partially correct, because 'faith support' is not the most important characteristic of these missions. The most important characteristic is indeed brought out by the name they often use for themselves: 'interdenominational' missions.2 Because not every inter- denominational mission is necessarily a faith mission, in this book they will always be called 'faith missions.' After all, the Methodists, the Baptists and the Quakers did not fare badly with a name that others had chosen for them. Possible definitions of 'faith missions' There are various ways of defining what a faith mission is. For this book, the term is defined by history. A faith mission is a mission which traces its origin or (more often) the origin of its principles3 directly or indirectly back to the 1 As Hudson Taylor formulated it: 'God's work done in God's way will not lack God's supply.' 2 The association of North American faith missions bears the name Interdenominational Foreign Missions Association (IFMA). This term was chosen in order not to give the impression that denominational missions lacked faith (Edwin L. Frizen, An Historical Study of the Interdenominational Foreign Mission Association in Relation to Evangelical Unity and Cooperation, DMiss, Deerfield, 1981, 23). Nevertheless, IFMA published a booklet in which each member mission presented itself, under the title: 'Faith Mighty Faith' (J. Herbert Kane, Wheaton, 1956). 3 This includes the limited number of missions which did not start as faith missions, but at some point in their history, consciously accepted their principles. 7 China Inland Mission (CIM), which was founded by Hudson Taylor and his wife Maria in 1865—not simply as one new mission among others, but as the first mission of what turned out to be a completely new missionary movement.4 In order to define clearly what faith missions are, it is better to look at the various missionary movements in the context of the revival movements that shaped Protestant church history. Looking at church history in this way, it is less a linear development of denominations than a succession of revival cross currents affecting the denominations and the non-Christian sectors of society in various ways. Because nearly all missions trace their origin back to a revival, the various movements of spiritual renewal from which they originated may well serve as a guide for classifying Protestant missions.5 This method of classification allows for the changes which inevitably occur over time—if it can be demonstrated that those changes usually take place within a given sector of the Protestant missionary movement and, therefore do not blur the differences between them. This is indeed the case, for today's mission associations reflect to a large extent the revival movements that brought about the birth of their member missions.6 If one accepts historic origin as Major examples are Pilgermission St. Chrischona (1840) and Women's United Missionary Society (1860). 4 An exception is made to this historical definition in the rare case of a mission consciously repudiating faith mission principles. Possibly there is only one mission which did this: the Kieler Mission, which started as the German Branch of the CIM (Andreas Franz, "Die Abkehr von den Prinzipien einer Glaubensmission, dargestellt am Beispiel der Kieler Mission" in: Klaus Fiedler, Missionswerke ohne Spenden- kampagnen—Die Glaubensmissionen heute und in der Vergangenheit, idea-doku- mentation 9/11, 55-59). 5 *This is the guiding principle in Klaus Fiedler, Missions as the Theology of the Church. An Argument from Malawi, Mzuzu: Mzuni Press, 2015.

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