The Church Missionary Society

The Church Missionary Society (CMS) was the principal Anglican missionary society of the British Empire. At the height of its work in 1900, the CMS had 1,140 European missionaries in the field, supported by an annual income of nearly £400,000, drawn from a subscriber base of perhaps 250,000. The society worked in West Africa, East Africa, the Indian subcontinent, the Himalayan region, China, Japan, New Zealand, the Pacific Islands, and, after 1900, in the Sudan. It was, as Andrew Porter has put it in Missions and Empire (2004), “the most thoroughly researched, the most thoroughly documented, and the most thoroughly controversial of the British missionary societies.”

The CMS was, in its own way, the institutional embodiment of the late-eighteenth-century Evangelical revival. It was founded in 1799 as the “Society for Missions in Africa and the East,” a successor to the older Eclectic Society, a London discussion group of Evangelical clergy. The founders — John Venn, the rector of Clapham, his father Henry Venn, and the Clapham Sect circle of Wilberforce, Thornton, and Zachary Macaulay — were committed to the same programme of Evangelical reform that had produced the Clapham Sect’s campaign against the slave trade. The CMS, in its early decades, was a small and cautious body; the first missionary, the Rev. William Melville, was sent to Sierra Leone in 1804, and the society did not begin serious expansion until the 1840s.

The CMS in West Africa

The CMS’s first field was Sierra Leone, where the society established the Fourah Bay Institution in 1827 — the first institution of higher education in West Africa, and the precursor of the University of Sierra Leone. From Sierra Leone, the CMS expanded into the Gold Coast (now Ghana), where it established the Accra Grammar School (1876), the Adisadel College (1910), and a network of primary and secondary schools; into Yorubaland (now Nigeria), where it established the CMS Grammar School, Lagos (1859), the CMS Training Institution, Lagos (1866), and the CMS College, Ibadan (1906); and into the Niger Delta, where it established the CMS Training Institution, Onitsha (1902), and the Dennis Memorial Grammar School, Onitsha (1925).

The CMS’s most consequential single enterprise in West Africa was, however, the Yoruba mission. The mission was founded in 1842 by Henry Townsend at Abeokuta, and it produced, in the next half-century, a remarkable generation of Yoruba Christians — Samuel Ajayi Crowther (the first African Anglican bishop), Henry Rawlinson, James Johnson, and many others — who would go on to lead the West African churches of the twentieth century. Crowther’s consecration as Bishop of the Niger in 1864 was a turning point in the history of Anglican missions, and it was the first time an African had been consecrated as a bishop in the modern Church of England.

The CMS in East Africa

The CMS’s East African work was, in many ways, the most ambitious of the society’s enterprises. The Uganda mission, established in 1877 by the CMS, was, by 1890, the largest mission field in the world — more than 12,000 converts had been baptised in the previous decade, and the kingdom of Buganda had, in 1892, accepted a treaty that made it a British protectorate. The CMS’s most famous East African missionary was the Scottish medical missionary Robert Laws, who founded the Livingstonia mission in Nyasaland (now Malawi) in 1875; the successor institution, the University of Livingstonia, is one of the most significant Christian universities in Africa.

The CMS in East Africa had a complicated relationship with the imperial government. The 1890 Anglo-German Agreement, which divided East Africa between Britain and Germany, gave the CMS a privileged position in the British sphere; the 1895 establishment of the East Africa Protectorate, with the CMS missionary A. H. Hardinge as the first commissioner, was the institutional completion of the CMS’s role. The CMS missionaries in East Africa were, however, often the loudest critics of the imperial government’s policies — particularly its policies on forced labour, the land question, and the East Africa Protectorate Ordinance of 1903, which restricted the access of African farmers to the highland areas.

The CMS in India

The CMS in India was, in many ways, the most complex of the society’s enterprises. The CMS’s Indian work was established in 1814, with the arrival of the first missionaries at Serampore, near Calcutta; the society’s work was, in its early decades, dominated by the Bengal mission and by the South India mission. The CMS’s most important Indian institutions were the CMS College, Kottayam (1817), the first European-style college in South India; the Bishop’s College, Calcutta (1820), a theological seminary; the St. John’s College, Agra (1853); the St. Stephen’s College, Delhi (1881); and the Church of South India schools and colleges, the union of Anglican, Methodist, Congregationalist, Presbyterian, and Reformed churches that came together in 1947.

The CMS in India was, throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a small minority enterprise: by 1947, the Indian Christians of the Anglican communion were perhaps 1.5 million in a population of nearly 400 million. The CMS’s influence was, however, disproportionately large: the CMS was the principal patron of the Indian Bible translation, the principal patron of the Indian Christian press, and the principal patron of the Christian colleges that educated the Indian middle class. The Indian churches of the twentieth century — the Church of South India, the Church of North India, the Church of Pakistan — are, in many ways, the institutional descendants of the CMS’s Indian work.

The CMS in the Pacific and New Zealand

The CMS’s Pacific work was, in many ways, the most distinctive of the society’s enterprises. The New Zealand mission, established in 1814, was the CMS’s first Pacific enterprise; the mission was led by the Rev. Henry Williams and his brother William Williams, who, with the lay catechist Thomas Kendall, translated the New Testament into Māori and played a significant — and contested — role in the negotiations that produced the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi. The CMS’s work in New Zealand was, in many respects, a missionary work of the most idealistic kind: the society’s schools, hospitals, and printing presses were the principal instruments of Christianisation.

The CMS in the Pacific was, however, also the scene of some of the most difficult cultural encounters in the society’s history. The CMS’s Melanesian mission, established in 1849 by George Augustus Selwyn, was the principal Anglican missionary enterprise in the Pacific; the mission was, in the 1860s and 1870s, the target of a series of labour-recruiting abuses that the CMS itself documented and condemned. The most famous case was the kidnapping of students from the island of Nengone (Loyalty Islands) in 1863; the case, which came to public attention in 1871, was one of the first major scandals of the modern missionary movement, and it led to the establishment of the Melanesian Mission as a separate entity in 1877.

The CMS in the Twentieth Century

The CMS in the twentieth century was, in many ways, a different society from the CMS of the nineteenth century. The 1910 Edinburgh World Missionary Conference, which was in many respects the apotheosis of the late-Victorian missionary movement, marked the beginning of a new phase. The CMS in the 1920s and 1930s was a smaller, more cautious, and more ecumenical body. The society’s work in Africa and India was, in many cases, transferred to the local churches; the CMS itself became, in the 1960s, a small, specialised mission agency. The 1968 change of name to the Church Missionary Society reflected the society’s diminished size and the new ecumenical context.

The most lasting legacy of the CMS is, however, the churches and institutions that the society founded. The Anglican churches of West Africa, East Africa, South Asia, and the Pacific are, in many ways, the institutional descendants of the CMS’s work; the CMS-trained clergy of the twentieth century would go on to lead the African and Asian churches of the post-colonial period. The CMS’s schools, hospitals, and universities — the Adisadel College, the CMS Grammar School, the Bishop’s College, the Church of South India Theological Seminary, the University of the South Pacific — are still among the most important educational institutions in the post-colonial era.

Historiographical Note

The historiography of the CMS is dominated by the society’s own records — the Proceedings of the CMS, the Church Missionary Record, the Missionary Register — and by the standard histories by Eugene Stock (The History of the Church Missionary Society, 1899) and J. H. Grubb (The Heritage of the Church Missionary Society, 1928). The more recent literature is represented by Andrew Porter’s Missions and Empire (2004), Brian Stanley’s The Bible and the Flag (1990), and the works of Max Warren, Christopher F. Hall, and J. D. Y. Peel. The unresolved question in the field is the same as for the missionary movement more generally: how to weigh the genuine humanitarianism of the CMS’s work against the destructive consequences of the missionary encounter with non-Christian societies. The present generation of historians has, on the whole, declined to give the society a clean bill of health.

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