INTERDENOMINATIONAL AITH Kampala, Uganda, and He Received Doctor's Degrees from Dar-Es-Salaam and Heidelberg Universities

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

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 interdenominational 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. 6 If this is true, the change of a mission from one 'type' to another would be a significant event in its history, requiring special interpretation. - *The Restorationist Revival, not united in itself, also did not produce a distinct missionary movement of its own. The Restorationist movements, which soon turned into denominations,

8 a valid base for the classification of missions, a 'historical typology' can be reached. The results of such an attempt are summarized in the table on the next but one page. On the following page the concept of historical typology is applied to the various national mission associations.

The historical typology of Protestant missions Kenneth Scott Latourette calls the period from 1800-1914 the 'Great Century' of world missions, with William Carey at its very onset.7 During this period, the mission society—independent of the churches but closely related to them—is the characteristic organizational form of missionary work.8 The missions of the Great Century are known as the 'classical missions'; all missionary enterprises before 1793 look more like fore- runners, and are therefore known as 'pre-classical' missions. No one can minimize the crucial importance of the classical missions for the church worldwide,9 however, many new mission agencies were formed alongside or after the classical missions. These were not just additional missions, but missions of a new type or types. These new (that is, new type) missions are known as the 'post-classical missions'; they comprise the major subdivisions of evangelical missions and Pentecostal/Charismatic missions, each of which can be further subdivided. This book deals exclusively with the faith missions, but in order to perceive their characteristics clearly, faith missions must be seen in the overall context of the whole Protestant missionary movement.

were all engaged in foreign missionary work and often followed the pattern of the Faith Missions, only that they were not interdenominational. 7 "In 1793, five years before the death of Schwartz, there landed in Calcutta William Carey, who was to begin a new era in Protestant missions, not only in India, but also in the entire world" (Kenneth S. Latourette, A History of the Expansion of Christianity, Grand Rapids, Zondervan Edition 51976 (1939/1967) III, 281). 8 William Carey, An Enquiry into the Obligation of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathen, Leicester, 1792, especially 81ff. 9 See Andrew F. Walls, "Missionary Societies and the Fortunate Subversion of the Church", in Evangelical Quarterly 88:2 (1988), 141-155.

10 National Mission Associations ECUMENCIAL EVANGELICAL FUNDAMENTALIST OTHERS USA DOM-NCCCUSA IFMA (Inter- TAM-ICCC (The A growing (Division of denominational Associated number of US Overseas Foreign Missions Missions, missions are not Ministries, Association) [Only International members of any National Council faith missions] Council of Christian missions of the Churches Churches) [denomi- association, for of Christ in the EFMA (Evangelical national—'fighting example, USA) [Classical Foreign Missions fundamentalism'] Wycliffe Bible missions] Association) Translators, [Denominational FOM (Fellowship of New Tribes No Pentecostal missions, Missions) ['quiet' Mission, Youth missions including non-denomi- with a Mission Pentecostal national No double missions] fundamentalism] membership Double member- Double ship IFMA and membership of any EFMA possible for kind not possible faith missions

Canada CCC-CWC (Ca- As in the USA Only TAM-ICCC has Similar to USA nadian Council a Canadian of Churches, member, World- Commission on wide Evangelical World Mission Concerns) [as USA]

Switzerland Konferenz Arbeitsgemein- Few, for (German Evangelischer schaft Evangelika- example, speaking) Missionen ler Missionen Evanglischer (KEM) [Clas- (AEM) [Faith Brüderverein sical missions missions, no and Kwango Pentecostal Mission] missions]

11 ECUMENICAL EVANGELICAL FUNDAMENTALIST OTHERS Great Conference for Evangelical Only two Some small Britain World Mission Missionary fundamentalist missions [Classical Alliance (EMA) missions (one (classical and missions: [Post-classical, 'fighting', one post-classical) denomination- except Brethren 'quiet') nal, interdeno- and minational, Fundamentalist specialized. No missions. Also Pentecostal Pentecostal missions] missions] Three Anglican missions (CMS, SAMS and BCMS) and three specialized missions hold double membership

Germany Evangelisches Arbeitsgemein- Bibeltreue Mission Some faith Missionswerk schaft Evangelika- Weltweit (small) missions and a (EMW) [Clas- ler Missionen growing sical missions, (AEM) [Faith number of one Pentecostal missions, one Charismatic mission (Verei- classical mission missions nigte Missions- (EBM), one non- freunde)] church mission (Wiedenest)]

France Sercvice Fédération des and French Protestant de Missions Evangé- speaking Mission et de liques Francopho- Switzerland Relations nes (FMEF) [Faith Internationales missions, one (Défap) non-church mission, one charismatic mission, one classical specialized mission]

12 ECUMENICAL EVANGELICAL FUNDAMENTALIST OTHERS Nether- Nederland's Evangelische Zen- Few missions lands Zendingsraad dings Alliantie [Classical mis- (EZA [Faith sions, mostly missions, Pen- denomination- tecostal missions, nal, no no non-church Pentecostal missions, no missions] denominational evangelical missions] Sweden Svenska Missionsrådet [Classical and Few missions, post-classical missions. New especially new international missions partly as international observers (1986] faith missions Norway Norsk Missionrådet Moratorium for accepting new missions as members (1986) Denmark Dansk Missionsråd [Classical and One-fifth of all post-classical missions] missions (of various types) Finland Finnish Missionary Council [Classical missions, Pentecostal missions, faith missions] Nigeria Nigeria Evangelical Missionary Alliance (NEMA) [Faith missions, denominational evangelical, independent and Charismatic missions]

13 A historical typology of the Protestant missionary movement TYPE OF OLDEST IMPORTANT NAME FORM OF POSITION FINANCE SPIRITUAL MISSION MISSION MISSION ORGANIZATION MOVEMENT

Pre-Clas- [SPCK 1699] Dänisch Hallesche Individual enterpri- Employed State support, Pietism sical 1706 Moravians ses Colonial mis- contributions Reformation [SPG 1701] 1732 sions State directed

Classical Baptist Church Missio- Name Missions societies Employed Gifts, Revival of the late Denomi- Missionary nary Society indicating Rarely mission memberships 18th and early 19th national Society 1792 (CMS) 1799 origin, mostly departments of fees century (Carey) Methodist Mis- denominatio- churches sionary Society nal 1813 [1786]

Classical [London] ABCFM 1810 Name Mission society Employed Gifts, Revival of the late Interde- Missionary Basel 1815 Paris indicating memberships 18th and the early nomina- Society 1795 1819 Barmen geographical fees 19th century tional 1828 origin

Classical Edinburgh Me- BMMF 1852 Job-oriented Mission society Employed Gifts Revival of the late Specia- dical Missionary WUMS 1860 names 18th and the early lized Society 1841 Ludhiana F. 1894 19th century