British Protestant Missions and the Conversion of Europe, 1600–1900

Simone Maghenzani, Stefano Villani, Simone Maghenzani, Stefano Villani

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429516849
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: History of Architecture

This book is the first account of British Protestant conversion initiatives directed towards continental Europe between 1600 and 1900.

Continental Europe was considered a missionary land—another periphery of the world, whose centre was imperial Britain. British missions to Europe were informed by religious experiments in America, Africa, and Asia, rendering these offensives against Europe a true form of "imaginary colonialism". British Protestant missionaries often understood themselves to be at the forefront of a civilising project directed at Catholics (and sometimes even at other Protestants). Their mission was further reinforced by Britain becoming a land of compassionate refuge for European dissenters and exiles. This book engages with the myth of International Protestantism, questioning its early origins and its narrative of transnational belonging, while also interrogating Britain as an imagined Protestant land of hope and glory.

In the history of western Christianities, "converting Europe" had a role that has not been adequately investigated. This is the story of the attempted, and ultimately failed, effort to convert a continent.

Section IV

A British Missionary Land

9 The Evangelical Transformation of British Protestantism for Mission

David Bebbington

University of Stirling

The Evangelical Revival of the eighteenth century revolutionised the Protestantism of Britain. Beginning in the 1730s, the revival sprang up in England, Wales, Scotland, and the British colonies of North America. Led by John Wesley and George Whitefield, preachers fanned out over the country to establish bodies of enthusiastic believers. The impetus of the revival did not decay over time, but on the contrary, stimulated increasing church growth during the first half of the nineteenth century. Not only were new denominations formed, but also existing churches were revitalised. The established churches of England and Scotland were affected almost as much as the Dissenters – the Protestants who existed outside their bounds. The movement was rarely called “Evangelical” during its early years, but towards the end of the eighteenth century the term began to be used as its label. An early instance was an essay penned in 1789 by Joseph Milner, subsequently a distinguished church historian, entitled “On Evangelical Religion.” This form of faith upheld, according to Milner, as the first doctrine absolutely necessary to salvation, belief in “a divine light, inspiration, or illumination, in order to understand, to relish, and to practise true Christianity.”¹ The diffusion of that light was the priority of the Evangelicals. Whereas previously the chief preoccupation of Protestant churches in Britain had normally been the vindication of their own distinctive principles, the revival aroused a desire for action. The age of Reformation in which the great aim was conformity to right ecclesiastical patterns gave way to an age of revival in which the propagation of personal religion took precedence. Church order faded in importance before the spread of the gospel. The Evangelical paradigm of religion generated a new insistence on mission as the grand aim of the churches.

1. Protestant Renewal

The novel spirit was evident across the range of Protestant denominations. In the first place there were the Methodists, the followers of John Wesley. The societies that he created as fellowship groups up and down the British Isles did not initially form a separate ecclesiastical body, but their members were encouraged to remain devoted to their parish churches. The Methodists emerged from the Church of England only after the death of Wesley in 1791, forming a separate organisation under the direction of a conference of preachers. Wesley upheld the distinctive theological position of Arminianism (called after the Dutch theologian Jacobus Arminius), which Wesley interpreted as the conviction that all human beings, and not just a select number predestined by the Almighty, could embrace the salvation offered by Jesus Christ. He and his adherents engaged in periodic debates with other Evangelicals who maintained Calvinism, with its restriction of redemption to the elect, which had been Reformed orthodoxy in the seventeenth century. The possibility of salvation for anybody was a natural inducement to transmit the glad tidings to all. Wesley sent out “helpers” to travel, like him, around the land to convey the life-giving message. These itinerant preachers evolved into Methodist ministers in the early years of the nineteenth century. They were so effective that in 1811, the Home Secretary, Lord Sidmouth, fearing that they might be infected with radical principles, proposed to restrict their movements by requiring them to obtain a licence to preach in specific places only. The measure was defeated by the exertions of Anglican Evangelicals such as William Wilberforce, but the episode illustrates the alarm of the established order at the mushrooming of the denomination. By the middle of the nineteenth century it catered for no less than 5.1% of the population.² Its evangelistic zeal eventually spilled over into foreign missions, which began on an organised basis in 1813. The Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society, which was not differentiated from the home body, became a major concern of all Wesleyan Methodists. The eagerness to spread the gospel overseas was shared by the lesser Methodist bodies that arose after Wesley’s death – the Methodist New Connexion, the Primitive Methodists, the Bible Christians, and others. Here was a new movement with enormous appeal.

The existing “old Dissent” was drastically affected by the temper of the Evangelical Revival. The English Presbyterians, by far the largest segment of Dissent at the start of the eighteenth century, moved gradually into unorthodoxy during the eighteenth century. By the second decade of the nineteenth century, most of them were willing to avow Unitarian belief and so they were not attracted into the ranks of the Evangelicals. The Congregationalists and Baptists, however, the other two sections of Dissent, were eventually swept along by the revival spirit. At first they were generally wary of its neglect of church order, their reason for standing apart from the established church, but gradually, as converts from the revival entered their membership and their pulpits, they became attuned to the new religious key. A small denomination, the Countess of Huntingdon’s Connexion, which was created by the revival, aligned closely with the Congregationalists and whole congregations set up by George Whitefield joined their ranks. From the 1780s there were itinerant Congregational and Baptist ministers who imitated the successes of the Methodists in gathering new communities of believers. The Congregationalists and Particular Baptists (both of whom were Calvinists) benefited most, but a New Connexion of General Baptists (Arminians like Wesley) also became part of the gospel coalition. The outcome was growth of their numbers, so that by 1851 the Congregationalists served 4.4% of the English population and the Baptists 3.3%.³ The Baptists bore the palm of founding the first British foreign missionary society of the Evangelical era when, in 1792, William Carey’s proposal in An Enquiry into the Obligation of Christians to use Means for the Conversion of the Heathen was accepted. The Congregationalists followed in 1795 with the largest share in an interdenominational Missionary Society, which from 1818 was called the London Missionary Society. Once more, the outward thrust of the Evangelical Revival led to overseas mission.

The Church of England contained a significant Evangelical sector. George Whitefield, though eager to help other denominations, was a clergyman of the established church and many of his converts remained within its ranks. Other Anglican clergy such as John Berridge, based in Bedfordshire, travelled around the country delivering awakening sermons – in Berridge’s case, some ten or twelve a week after four in his own parish.⁴ It was the preference of many Evangelical clergy, however, to confine themselves to a single parish. Samuel Walker of Truro, for example, insisted on his responsibility to serve his own parishioners. Charles Simeon of Cambridge likewise encouraged concentration on a single parish when instructing successive generations of intending Cambridge ministers in Evangelical principles down to his death in 1836. Simeon was one of several Evangelicals who endowed trusts to purchase the right to appoint clergy to particular parishes and so ensure that there were pulpits reserved for those preaching the gospel. By the 1850s the Evangelical party was dominant in the Church of England, securing many appointments to the episcopal bench. Its home missionary arm, the Church Pastoral Aid Society, founded in 1836 to assist clergy in needy parishes, made a great impact. J.C. Ryle, later Bishop of Liverpool, declared in 1850 that “no one could now deny that there was as much activity within the pale of the English Established Church as in any branch of Christ’s Church.”⁵ The Church Pastoral Aid Society, according to Ryle, was most responsible for this state of affairs – though allowance must be made for the occasion being the annual meeting of the society. The foreign missionary agency of Anglican Evangelicals was the Church Missionary Society, launched in 1799. Initially intended to concentrate on Africa and the East, it soon extended its activities over many other parts of the world. Like its Dissenting counterparts, it was a voluntary society rather than a department of the national church. Again, it was an expression of the dynamic unleashed by the Evangelical Revival.

North of the border the established Church of Scotland was Presbyterian. It enjoyed a number of local revivals during the eighteenth century. The most remarkable pair took place in 1742 at Cambuslang and Kilsyth, where traditional communion seasons turned into times of mass conversions. Dedication to wholehearted evangelism, usually popular with parishioners in general, was often disliked by the landlords who held the right to appoint clergy. The outcome was a series of disputes over such rights of patronage, with Evangelicals often being excluded from parish pulpits. Nevertheless, the proportion of the ministers in the established church who were Evangelical grew steadily over subsequent years and by 1834, for the first time, they could command a majority in the General Assembly. There ensued a ten-year controversy over patronage which led to the departure from the church of about one third of the ministers, led by Thomas Chalmers, in the Disruption of 1843, to form the Free Church of Scotland. Meanwhile, home mission activities were developing. The Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge had, since 1709, provided schoolmasters in neglected areas, especially in the Highlands. In the 1790s Robert and James Alexander Haldane, laymen with their own financial resources, undertook preachi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• Section I Missionary Models
• Section II The Origins of Global Protestantism
• Section III Missions and Church Unifications in the Age of the Enlightenment
• Section IV A British Missionary Land
• Index