The 1913 Kikuyu Conference, Anglo-Catholics and the Church of England

Chapter 5 The 1913 Kikuyu Conference, Anglo-Catholics and the Church of England

Mark D. Chapman

In the wake of the World Missionary Conference held in Edinburgh in 1910, it became increasingly obvious that Christianity had become a global phenom- enon, whose discourse and problems could no longer be restricted principal- ly to the European and American context. This was particularly true of the Church of England: as Europe collapsed into what soon became a world war in the late summer of 1914, many in the Church of England were absorbed in reflecting on the domestic fallout of the Kikuyu Missionary Conference which had been held in British East Africa in June 1913.1 Indeed, in the week before Britain’s entry into the war on 4 August 1914, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Randall T. Davidson was meeting at Lambeth Palace with three East African bishops, William Peel of Mombasa, John Willis of Uganda (both supported by the Evangelical Church Missionary Society) and Frank Weston of Zanzibar (of the resolutely Anglo-Catholic Universities’ Mission to Central Africa). They had been summoned before the Consultative Body of the Lambeth

1 There is surprisingly little secondary literature on the 1913 Conference and its aftermath. An initial review of some of the early literature was made by A. C. Headlam in ‘Notes on Reunion: The Kikuyu Conference’, Church Quarterly Review 77 (1914), pp. 405–23, esp. pp. 414–23. See Stuart P. Mews, ‘Kikuyu and Edinburgh: the Interaction of Attitudes to Two Conferences’, in G. J. Cuming and Derek Baker (eds), Councils and Assemblies: Studies in Church History 7 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), pp. 345–59; Roland Oliver, The Missionary Factor in East Africa (London: Longmans, 1952), pp. 226–8; M. G. Capon, Toward unity in Kenya: the story of co-operation between missions and churches in Kenya 1913–1947 (Nairobi: Christian Council of Kenya, 1962); M. G. Capon, A History of Christian Co-operation in Kenya (Nairobi: Christian Council of Kenya, 1952); E. K. Cole, A history of church co-operation in Kenya (Limuru: St Paul’s College Press, 1957). More generally, see Eugene Stock, History of the CMS (London: CMS, 1899–1916), vol. 4, pp. 409–24; G. K. A. Bell, Randall Davidson (London: Oxford University Press, 1935), pp. 690–708. The issues between the Anglican missionary societies have been addressed in depth by Steven S. Maughan in Mighty England Do Good: Culture, Faith, and World in Foreign Missions of the Church of England, 1850–1915 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014), esp. pp. 436–7. See also Andrew Porter, Religion Versus Empire?: British Protestant Missionaries and Overseas Expansion 1700–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), pp. 325–8.

Conference to discuss the crisis in the Church of England and the wider Anglican Communion emerging from the Kikuyu Conference.2 The Conference of sixty missionaries, twelve of whom were women, under the chairmanship of Willis, was held at the Church of Scotland mission station at Thogoto, Kikuyu, in what is now the Church of the Torch, about 7,000 feet above sea level ‘in the midst of charming and thickly wooded scenery’ mid- way between Mombasa and Lake Victoria in a climate resembling Scotland.3 Of the delegates and members at the conference the largest number (twenty) came from the Africa Inland Mission, an American non-denominational but predominantly Presbyterian Evangelical organisation which had been par- ticular successful among the Kikuyu people.4 The next largest contingent was from the CMS (eighteen), while eight came from the Church of Scotland, two from the United Methodist Mission, and one from the Nilotic Independent Mission.5 Willis’s diocese covered both the Uganda protectorate, which had few non-episcopal missions, but also a part of British East Africa which, while dominated by Anglicans, had a complex mix of missionaries from five societies. His account of the conference, which he felt that Bishop Peel would have agreed with even though he had not seen it, emphasized the specific problems of the missionary context for Christian unity. Missionaries were forced to ad- dress what he called the dominant but ‘malleable’ paganism of the people as well as a strong ‘Mohammedanism’ with its ‘definite, clear-cut creed’ which was particularly strong in the coastal regions.6 In addition, he pointed out that like Islam the Roman Catholic Church presented a unified front whereas Protestants were divided into different and apparently competing denomina- tions, something which could only have a detrimental effect on mission.7 There was thus a pressing need for some sort of ecumenical co-operation, which he

2 See The Archbishop of Canterbury [Randall T. Davidson], Kikuyu (London: Macmillan, 1915), p. 6. 3 J. J. Willis, The Kikuyu Conference: A Study in Christian Unity together with The Proposed Scheme of Resolution embodied in the Resolutions of the Conference (London: Longmans, 1913), p. 3. The first reports reached Britain through the Presbyterian minister, Norman MacLean, who described the Conference as ‘The most wonderful gathering I ever saw’ in The Scotsman (19 August 1913) (in Bell, Davidson, p. 690). 4 See James Karanja, The Missionary Movement in Colonial Kenya: The Foundation of Africa Inland Church (Göttingen: Cuvillier, 2009), esp. pp. 18–24. The AIM had been established in British East Africa in 1895 (the year that it became a British Protectorate), by Peter Cameron Scott. 5 Willis, The Kikuyu Conference, p. 24. 6 Willis, The Kikuyu Conference, p. 6. 7 Willis, The Kikuyu Conference, p. 7.