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British World Protestant Children, Young People, Education and the Missionary Movement, c.1840s–1930s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2019

Hugh Morrison
Hugh Morrison*
Affiliation:
University of Otago
*
*College of Education, University of Otago, PO Box 56, Dunedin 9054, New Zealand. E-mail: hugh.morrison@otago.ac.nz.
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Abstract

This article considers the evolving relationship between Protestant children, pedagogy and the missionary movement across the British world. From the 1840s, children were a central focus of missionary society philanthropy. By the time of the 1910 World Missionary Conference, missionary and denominational thinkers were consistently highlighting their strategic importance and the need for clear policy that was focused on children's education. This article traces the ways in which this emphasis developed, and the impact that it had among the children involved. It argues that the children's missionary movement was educational at heart, wherein philanthropy and pedagogy went hand in hand. In particular, over the long nineteenth century all the players consistently emphasized the importance of nurturing a ‘missionary spirit’, a notion that was primarily religious in intent but which in practice moved from pragmatic philanthropy to a more formalized emphasis on education and identity formation. The article introduces representative ways by which this was articulated, drawing on examples from a range of British world contexts in which different communities of Protestant children were engaged educationally and philanthropically in very similar ways.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 55: CHURCHES AND EDUCATION , June 2019 , pp. 463 - 478
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2019 

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References

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2 C.M.C.H. Old Members’ Magazine, February 1912, 87.

3 The term ‘British world’ refers to those countries or societies associated with Great Britain or the British empire, whether as constituents, associates or derivatives, or in some kind of formal arrangement.

4 Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy, 90.

5 Ernest Price, Missionary Stories for the Juniors (London, n.d. [post-1900]), v–vi.

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7 Stanley, ‘Missionary Regiments’, 402.

8 The main focus in this article is on Sunday school children up to about twelve years of age and Bible class young people up to about fifteen, from a range of settings including the USA, Canada, England, New Zealand and Scotland.

9 Prochaska, ‘Little Vessels’, 113–15; Cox, Jeffrey, The British Missionary Enterprise since 1700 (New York and London, 2008)Google Scholar; Morrison, Hugh, ‘“Little Vessels” or “Little Soldiers”: New Zealand Protestant Children, Foreign Missions, Religious Pedagogy, and Empire, c.1880s–1930s’, PH 47 (2011), 303–21Google Scholar, at 312–21; Thorne, Susan, Congregational Missions and the making of an Imperial Culture in Nineteenth-Century England (Stanford, CA, 1999)Google Scholar.

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12 Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy, 81–3; Thorne, Congregational Missions, 126. A wide range of primary evidence suggests that children's money came from a combination of parents or family, from their own money-raising initiatives and as a result of increasing denominational children's charitable movements.

13 Commission VI, ‘Missionary Awakening’, 20–1.

14 Padwick, ‘Children and Missionary Societies’, 563–4.

15 Ibid. 575.

16 ‘Train the Children’, Baptist Missionary Magazine 26 (1846), 154.

17 Other British Protestant children's missionary magazines began in Scotland (1840s) and Ireland (1850s).

18 See Jensz, Felicity, ‘Hope and Pity: Depictions of Children in Five Decades of the Evangelisch-Lutherisches Missionsblatt, 1860–1910’, in Becker, Judith and Stornig, Katharina, eds, Menschen – Bilder – Eine Welt. Ordnungen von Vielfalt in der religiösen Publizistik um 1900 (Göttingen, 2018), 259–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 259 n. 3, in turn referencing Gullestad, Marianne, Picturing Pity: Pitfalls and Pleasures in Cross-Cultural Communication: Image and Word in a North Cameroon Mission (New York and Oxford), 2007Google Scholar.

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23 Padwick, ‘Children and Missionary Societies’, 568.

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28 Ibid. 59–63.

29 Ibid. 63.

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32 Waddell, ‘Sabbath-School and Missions’, 45.

33 Ibid.

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35 Ibid. 46.

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37 Ibid. 74.

38 Ibid. 75–6.

39 Ibid. 78–9.

40 Ibid. 167.

41 Ibid. 76–7.

42 For example, ‘Girls’ Auxiliary Programs’ and ‘Royal Ambassadors’, World Comrades, January 1928, 10–16, 17–22.

43 The Comrade, ‘World Comrade Comments’, World Comrades, December 1927, 1.

44 See further Browning, Don S., and Bunge, Marcia, eds, Children and Childhood in World Religions: Primary Sources and Texts (New Brunswick, NJ, 2009)Google Scholar; Strhan, Anna, Parker, Stephen G. and Ridgely, Susan B., eds, The Bloomsbury Reader in Religion and Childhood (London and New York, 2017)Google Scholar.

45 Janet L. Nelson, ‘Introduction’ to Wood, ed., Church and Childhood, xix–xxiv, at xx.

46 See n. 1 above.

47 See further Morrison, Hugh, ‘Settler Childhood, Protestant Christianity and Emotions in Colonial New Zealand, 1880s–1920s’, in Olsen, Stephanie, ed., Childhood, Youth and Emotions in Modern History: National, Colonial and Global Perspectives (Basingstoke, 2015), 76–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

48 Prochaska, ‘Little Vessels’, 110, 113–14.

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51 See Elleray, Michelle, ‘Little Builders: Coral Insects, Missionary Culture, and the Victorian Child’, Victorian Literature and Culture 39 (2011), 223–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar.