The African American pastor and emancipated slave George Liele (1750–1828) began his missionary career some ten years before William Carey, the great English missionary to India, set sail for Calcutta (Kolkata) in 1793. Liele formed the Ethiopian Baptist Church in Jamaica in 1783, intentionally using Ethiopian in the church’s name because he rightly believed that Christianity was the religion of Africans long before it became the dominant religion of Europeans. Liele’s effective missionary labors gave rise to a Baptist movement in Jamaica that would animate a slave revolt in 1831 and inspire the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833.
About a half century before Liele founded the Ethiopian Baptist Church, an Afro-Caribbean woman and former slave named Rebecca Freundlich Protten (1718–1780) began her own long career as a missionary. Her labors predated those of Ann Judson, the celebrated American missionary, by more than 75 years. Protten led revival movements in West Africa and the West Indies and helped spread Christianity throughout the Atlantic world. By some accounts, she is considered the matriarch of modern Christian missions. (Her life is the subject of a book, Rebecca’s Revival, published by Harvard University Press.)
The work of Black missionaries like Liele and Protten has not been completely ignored in the history of Christianity. Important studies like Black Americans and the Missionary Movement in Africa and Black Americans and the Evangelization of Africa, 1877–1900,both published in the early 1980s, have stood the test of time. These pathbreaking works are essential reading, even if some of their arguments are built on older ideas from the 1960s and 1970s.
But new studies are now emerging. The work of Black missionaries is now being “written back into the story,” to cite one recent CT headline, and misguided stereotypes of Christianity as a white man’s religion are being successfully challenged.
A generation ago, the great historian of missions Andrew Walls encouraged fellow scholars to “enlarge the story” of Christianity. One of the things he had in mind was placing greater focus on the contributions of African Americans. Emerging research in the history of missions is gradually adjusting our understanding of how Christianity actually spread throughout the world in the modern period.
For example, we now know that the gospel message was transmitted to Africa and the African diaspora largely through the efforts of other Africans. Mounting evidence drawn from mission archives also shows that the success of Anglo-European mission societies, founded in the 19th century, owed largely to African translators, evangelists, missionaries, pastors, teachers, and other workers. Available statistics show that as early as 1910, African workers already outnumbered white missionaries by a ratio of about five to one.
In addition, Black converts in Africa and the Atlantic world, including former slaves, not only accepted the Christian message but also shaped its meaning in remarkable ways. As the late missions scholar Lamin Sanneh put it in Whose Religion Is Christianity? The Gospel Beyond the West, “Christianity helped Africans to become renewed Africans, not remade Europeans.”
One of the more interesting features of emerging work on Black missionaries in the Atlantic world is the necessary emphasis placed on agency, to use the term favored by historians. Stories that recall the blood, sweat, and tears of Black missionaries offer a welcome departure from what is sometimes called “done-to” history—narratives that focus primarily on the enslavement and mistreatment of Black people. As a result, we’re learning more about their own efforts to spread the gospel as opposed to what others have done to them.
Kent Michael Shaw I’s book Missiology Reimagined: The Missions Theology of the Nineteenth-Century African American Missionary is a recent example of this new trend. Shaw, a pastor and professor, sifts through sermons, letters, diaries, and journals written during the 1800s, bringing to light the history of African American missionaries during this period.
In particular, Shaw’s work examines the lives and ministries of noteworthy African American missionaries who set sail for Jamaica, Haiti, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Hawaii, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. These figures include George Liele, Lott Carey, James W. C. Pennington, Amanda Berry Smith, Betsey Stockton, Alexander Crummell, James Theodore Holly, Daniel Coker, and William Henry Sheppard. As his book’s title suggests, Shaw also shows how their contributions shaped African American reflection on the work of missions.
In Shaw’s narrative, slavery and racism serve as the backdrop for his focus on the ministries of African American missionaries. He shows that the majority of enslaved African Americans heard the gospel not from their white masters but through the witness of other African slaves. This finding is consistent what we know about the spread of Christianity through indigenous agency. Shaw argues that African American slaves were so stirred by the Exodus narrative, the message of God’s love for the oppressed, and the story of Christ suffering to “set them free” that some were compelled to devote their lives to missionary service. Moreover, these missionaries were motivated to proclaim the Good News to other Africans because they believed the gospel would transform their lives.
African Americans who wanted to serve as missionaries in the 19th century faced significant challenges. Many, of course, had to win their own freedom before pursuing the missionary calling. Those who did had limited access to theological education, a problem worsened by the discriminatory practices of American colleges and seminaries.
Some prepared for overseas ministry by studying under the tutelage of ordained ministers. Others attended Black colleges like the Ashmun Institute (now Lincoln University) or Tuscaloosa Institute (now Stillman College), schools founded in the 19th century to train African American ministers. A few were admitted to institutions of higher learning like Princeton, Yale, Oxford, and Cambridge, usually with the help of determined white advocates.
Uncertain access to financial resources created another hurdle. Established mission societies and denominations tended to freeze out African American aspirants. A few white mission societies accepted Black applicants, often due to the mistaken belief that they would be less susceptible to tropical illnesses abroad.
But most African Americans were flatly rejected on racial grounds. This compelled them to strike out independently, either by providing their own finances or by receiving assistance from Black congregations. As the century wore on, more African American missionaries relied on predominantly Black denominations like the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, and the National Baptist Convention.
Shaw draws from 19th-century primary sources to show that African Americans were engaged in missiological reflection. They thought about a range of subjects like colonialism, slavery, racism, education, cultural contextualization, the Holy Spirit, and even dancing and shouting in worship services.
The book helpfully illuminates African American understandings of the doctrine of salvation, which affirmed conventional evangelical perspectives but also transcended them. The African American missionaries in Shaw’s study believed in the doctrine of substitutionary atonement, which views Christ as bearing punishment upon the cross for the sins of humanity. This was the way most 19th-century Western evangelicals understood the meaning of Christ’s death. At the same time, and with equal fervor, they adhered to the Christus Victor atonement theory, which taught that Christ’s death also overcame evil by liberating mankind from sin, sickness, and death. This was the view many early church theologians had espoused, and it resonated with African Americans due to the history of oppression they endured.
Readers will be impressed by Shaw’s research as well as his familiarity with the history of African American missionaries. But the book does have certain flaws. There are a few grammatical stumbles and some unevenness in its overall flow. And at times, Shaw’s work comes close to celebrating its subjects uncritically.
But these imperfections do not detract from Shaw’s important contributions. His book helps point the way toward research avenues that further “enlarge the story” of Christianity. For starters, the archives of Black denominations need more exploration. And the history of white mission agencies, whose complicity with discrimination continued well into the 20th century, deserves honest evaluation. Evangelical mission agencies are trying to recruit Black missionaries, but the legacy of segregation lingers.
We also need more work on global missions in the 20th century, especially in this new era of world Christianity. Today, nearly half of the world’s foreign missionaries are Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans. We would shirk our duty as historians to abandon the study of Christian missions just as it is becoming less white and Eurocentric!
Readers interested in the growing diversity of the Christian story will find it useful to consider Shaw’s work alongside another recently published volume, The Palgrave Handbook of Christianity in Africa from Apostolic Times to the Present. Though focused mainly on African Christianity, it features several articles on the work of Black missionaries. Noteworthy contributions come from historians like Brian Stanley (who examines the important role of Black missionaries in Africa), David Killingray (who shows how emancipated slaves served the missionary movement), and Kimberly Hill (who considers how the concept of “Ethiopianism” spurred Black efforts at evangelization).
Studies like these offer a richer and fuller picture of the diversity of Christianity. Africans and African Americans embraced the gospel, transformed it in significant ways, and then made remarkable contributions to the growth of Christianity. Even today, we are only now beginning to appreciate the contours of this story. As Killingray notes, even the “evangelization of Africa” was “in the hands of Africans” and “often out of sight of European missions.”
Historians are now bringing these stories into the open, casting new light on the prophetic remarks of King David in Psalm 68:31–32. In the words of the King James Version, “Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God” and sing the praises of the Lord.
F. Lionel Young III is a senior research associate at the Cambridge Centre for Christianity Worldwide. He is the author of World Christianity and the Unfinished Task: A Very Short Introduction.
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