On 26 October 1832 Jonathan Gibbons of the parish of Lutton, some twelve miles east of Spalding, wrote to John Kaye, bishop of Lincoln, describing how ‘A great proportion of the lower orders are now supporting a sect called ranters and attending their meetings as the only resource for religious instruction.’ The reasons for this, he argued, lay with ‘lax government and want of proper attention to services and duties’ in the Church, but in addition to these problems the Church of England also had the difficult task of extending its ministrations into the scattered communities of the newly drained and cultivated south Lincolnshire fenland. In Lutton the people were left ‘open to all the evils attendant upon unrestrained ignorance’ and the voluntary religious bodies, including the Primitive Methodists or Ranters, were often quicker to respond to their needs than the Established Church.

in 1844 Baptist Wriothesley Noel, minister of the Anglican proprietary chapel of St. John’s Bedford Row since 1827, published a book of verse, with a piece on ‘Schism’ containing the following stanzas:

For man-made discipline let bigots fight
Canons and rules old fathers have approved;
By us may those whose faith and life are right,
Be owned as brothers and as brothers loved.

All true believers are the ransomed church,
Children of God by Jesus owned and loved;
And in the day when God the heart shall search
Will they who part them be schismatics proved.

In the 1820s Noel had been an enthusiastic sympathiser with the pan-evangelicalism then prevalent in London and had remained loyal to these views during the period of stormier relations between Church and Dissent in the 1830s. In the slightly calmer waters of the 1840s Noel’s sentiments again came to represent the views of a small number of Anglican Evangelicals and a rather larger proportion of moderate Dissenters whose efforts to promote Christian unity were to culminate in the formation of the Evangelical Alliance in 1846.

‘The Irish need to be governed and controlled as well as I excited.’ So wrote Daniel Wilson, a young English clergyman later to be bishop of Calcutta, after visiting Armagh in June 1814 to discuss with local clergy the possibility of setting up a branch of the Church Missionary Society. An Irish (Hibernian) Church Missionary Society, he argued, would

In 1818 Dr John Philip was sent out to supervise the London Missionary Society stations at the Cape of Good Hope. His first letter to the Society’s headquarters is dated from Liverpool on 5 December of that year and contains the statement, ‘We have been at sea for seventeen days and are still in the Mersey River.’ Philip went on to ask for various items, including - significantly perhaps - a barometer! And there was time for the barometer to reach him before he left the Mersey: it was a further five days before the winds changed.

When the London Missionary Society (LMS) came into being in 1795 two principles formed the twin pillars of its existence: the Fundamental Principle, which declared that the Society existed to preach the gospel to the heathen and not to promote any particular form of church polity: and the voluntary principle, which declared that financial responsibility for a church devolved upon its members, and not upon the government or, in the long term, upon the missionary society. This paper examines the problems of applying the voluntary principle in a colonial situation. The investigation focuses on the work of the Revd Richard Birt, LMS missionary in South Africa from 1838 to 1892. Birt was a supporter of the voluntary principle by conviction, by background and by commitment to the LMS. In practice, however, his life’s work was to show the difficulty of maintaining the voluntary principle in a pioneering missionary situation.

Crowther’s consecration in 1864 did not produce a church on the Niger which was entirely independent of the CMS. It remained financially dependent. Nonetheless, though technically still a mission, it had a very great deal of independence and, in some respects, it seemed to symbolize the Venn ideal - a self-governing native church. That the events of the nineties in the Niger represented a major disenchantment with Henry Venn’s vision of an independent church under African administration cannot be questioned. The curtailment of Bishop Crowther’s powers, the appointment of European missionaries on the Niger, the public criticism and dismissal of African ministers, and the replacement of Crowther by a European all made the point eloquently.

It was a ghetto, undeniably,’ concluded the American political journalist, Garry Wills, when recalling from the safe distance of 1971 his ‘Catholic Boyhood’. ‘But not a bad ghetto to grow up in.’ Wills’s ghetto was defined by the great body of shared experiences, rituals, relationships, which gave Catholics a strongly felt common identity, and separated them from their Protestant and Jewish neighbours who knew none of these things. Wills talked about priests and nuns, incense and rosary beads, cards of saints and statues of the Virgin, but in this essay said very little about Catholic organisations (apart from a brief reference to the Legion of Decency). In many European countries, by contrast, any reference to the ‘ghetto’ from which many Catholics were seeking to escape in the 1960s and ’70s inevitably focused on the network of specifically Catholic organisations which was so characteristic of central and north-west European societies in the first half of the twentieth century. The Germans even have a pair of words to describe this phenomenon, Vereins- or Verbandskatholizismus, which can be defined as the multiplication of organisations intended to champion the interests of Catholics as a body, and to meet the special needs, spiritual, economic or recreational, of every identifiable group within the Catholic population. So when in 1972 the Swiss historian Urs Altermatt wrote a book on the origins of the highly self-conscious and disciplined Swiss Catholic sub-culture, the result was an organisational history, as stolid and as soberly objective as Wills’s book was whimsical and partisan. Its purpose was to determine how it came about that so many a Catholic ‘was born in a Catholic hospital, went to Catholic schools (from kindergarten to university), read Catholic periodicals and newspapers, later voted for candidates of the Catholic Party and took part as an active member in numerous Catholic societies’, being also ‘insured against accident and illness with a Catholic benefit organisation, and placing his money in a Catholic savings bank’.

At a great protest meeting in Glasgow against Ultramontanism in 1874, the Jesuits, those wily chameleons, were acccused of masquerading as members of the St. Vincent de Paul Society. That body was

Bishop Casartelli of Salford wrote in his diary for 13 October 1906, ‘Deo Grattas! The magnificent Catholic Demonstration … organised by our new Catholic Federation, has been a wonderful success … 40,000 or more from every part of the Diocese. Extraordinary enthusiasm.’ His joy was understandable, for the Catholic Federation had been founded only a few months before. The aim had been to start something altogether different from the many specific Catholic societies already in existence. It was to be a

Voluntary religious societies may be viewed either as powerful instruments for mobilising the Christian community, or as bodies which divert its energies from their proper function. They tend to be enclaves where distinctive values and activities are encouraged and confirmed. They have been marked by a greater degree of internationalism than the broader church, no doubt because their narrowness and specificity make their transfer outside their home context less problematic. Evangelical voluntary organisations provide good illustrations of these features. It is the intention of this paper to examine the establishment of two evangelical movements which appeared in the distinctive environment of New Zealand. One of them, the Inter-Varsity Fellowship, is a well-known force in twentieth-century voluntarism in the western world. The other ultimately became a branch of the Children’s Special Service Mission, now known as Scripture Union, but it began as a movement unique to New Zealand, as its original name, the Crusader Movement, suggests. The origins of these two evangelical voluntary societies in New Zealand give some indication of the potential and problems of new evangelical movements.

IN July 1935 Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, was the setting for an international gathering that attracted thousands of the eminent and the curious, many of them churchmen. ‘Similar ‘house-parties’ had been held every year since 1930. At free periods during the day, recalled Beverley Nichols, an enthusiast on his first visit, ‘the High Street seemed afire with shining faces’; last thing at night attenders could enjoy a ‘lemonade and biscuit’ party in the Toynbee Room. The main business, however, consisted of sessions where those present listened to testimonies of changed lives, of how people had ‘surrendered’ and were now ‘all out for God’. These were the main annual meetings of the Oxford Group.