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The Church Mission Society and World
Christianity, 1799–1999. Edited by Kevin Ward
and Brian Stanley. Studies in the History of
Christian Missions. Grand Rapids, Mich.:
Erdmans, 2000. xviii + 382 pp. \$45.00 cloth.
Marcia Wright
Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture / Volume 72 / Issue 03 / September
2003, pp 679 - 680
DOI: 10.1017/S0009640700100721, Published online: 28 July 2009
Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/
abstract_S0009640700100721
How to cite this article:
Marcia Wright (2003). Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture, 72,
pp 679-680 doi:10.1017/S0009640700100721
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BOOK REVIEWS AND NOTES 679
churches in 1900 sets the scene well; a similar chapter at the end of the
century would have been useful. The author carefully traces attitudes to
politics and society in general and education in particular. He could have
developed the effect of religious divisions on the position of trade unionism
and socialism. Megahey acknowledges that he has omitted some important
themes, such as women and the gospel halls, but an examination of how far
changing patterns of clerical recruitment have affected the Protestant
churches in general, and the relationship of the Church of Ireland and the
Presbyterian Church in Ireland in particular would have been interesting.
Nevertheless, this is an excellent introduction.
David M. Thompson
Fitzwilliam College, University of Cambridge
The Church Mission Society and World Christianity, 1799-1999. Edited by
Kevin Ward and Brian Stanley. Studies in the History of Christian Mis-
sions. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Erdmans, 2000. xviii + 382 pp. $45.00 cloth.
The thirteen authors of chapters in this volume celebrate the bicentennial
of an extremely far-flung Protestant world evangelical organization. The
various contributions reveal how the CMS began small and suspect in the
eyes of the Anglican establishment, reached its zenith of personnel and extent
around 1900, and then lost momentum and resources between the world
wars, when it faced and only partly contained an evangelical and fundamen-
talist revival at home and abroad. Formidable new leaders, notably Max
Warren, emerged at the time of the Second World War and in the era of the
United Nations and decolonization. Finally, under the guidance of John V.
Taylor, the indigenous churches achieved a recognized adulthood. The stra-
tegic vision for this book aimed to reflect the pluralistic church, acknowledg-
ing that the energy of evangelization can pass from a vibrant Christian
practice in the wider world back to England itself, and may flow as well
among CMS-descended churches outside of England. In 1995, four years
short of its bicentennial, the Church Missionary Society became the Church
Mission Society, soon to be led by the first woman General Secretary and
committed to a new kind of global partnership among peers rather than
patriarchal hierarchy. The two most important currents in this volume con-
cern the qualities, or linked facets, of this alliance: internationalism and
localism.
The concurrence of British imperialism and Anglican church-planting gen-
erated an endlessly contested and contestable historical record. Anglicanism
proves to be fraught and complex. Paul Jenkins discusses the Basel Mission,
the source of so many CMS missionaries before the middle of the nineteenth
century, in a relationship ending badly amidst failures on the part of the CMS
to grasp the culture of missionary discipline fostered in Basel. In the after-
word, Brian Stanley contemplates the separability of Anglicanism from "Eng-
lishness." John Karanja works on the theme from the angle of local history as
he writes of how the Kikuyu came to be self-consciously Anglican.
A brief note can only invite readers to see for themselves, perhaps starting
with the extended entry in an online research library catalog providing
complete details of chapter titles and authors. It is nevertheless timely to
point out that this volume includes several chapters on the Middle East, one
680 CHURCH HISTORY
of which concentrates on CMS women missionaries and Muslim women in
Persia (Iran).
Marcia Wright
Columbia University
Gods of War, Gods of Peace: How the Meeting of Native and Colonial
Religions Shaped Early America. By Russell Bourne. New York: Harcourt,
2002. xv + 425 pp. $28.00 cloth.
For most readers of this journal, Russell Bourne's thesis will come as no
surprise. An ambitious survey of nearly two hundred years of interaction
between Euro-American settlers and American Indians, Bourne's book as-
serts that the Encounter was "intrinsically religious," and that religion
shaped the course of early America. Stated differently, the first half of
American history is a story of contested faiths, as both Indians and colonists
drew upon their gods both to make sense of and to control unfolding events.
"There they stood," Bourne describes, "combative forces locked in common
purpose, worshipping different gods, abetted by peculiarly American preach-
ers and prophets" (21). Given the unrelenting stress of the Encounter, some
of these prophets offered the hope of the "gods of peace," while others
offered the power of the "gods of war." In the end, everyone was different;
neither faith escaped unaltered. The result was a "strangely uncombined,
uniquely American civilization" (xiv).
As a tool for surveying an immense history, Bourne's focus on the prophets
of the "gods of war and peace" carries considerable merit. Better yet,
Bourne's narrative effectively problematizes the Encounter. This is not the
story of avaricious Europeans conquering noble but hapless Indians. Pro-
phetic voices for war and peace emerged on both sides, illustrating the live
alternatives daily facing each side. Puritans, for example, could have em-
braced John Eliot's vision of a biracial New England Way. Hiawatha articu-
lated for the Iroquois Deganwidah's conception of peace, which Handsome
Lake tried to restore decades later. Jean de Brebeuf's St. Louis, Jonathan
Edwards' Stockbridge, David Brainerd's Crossweeksung, and the Nanticoke
Reformer's Juniata Junction all provided examples of model peaceful cities.
At the same time, however, each side had preachers prophesying on behalf of
the gods of war. In 1637, most Puritan ministers advocated the eradication of
the Pequot nation. Likewise, Metacom of the Wampanoag (a.k.a. King Philip)
sought the expulsion the Pilgrims and Puritans from New England in 1675.
In 1763, the Delaware prophet, Neolin, provided the inspiration for Pontiac's
rebellion, and some fifty years later the Shawnee prophet, Tenskwatawa,
provided the inspiration for Tecumseh's revolution.
For all Bourne's success in synthesizing a diverse body of literature,
however, there are at least three problems with the structure of the book.
First, the narrative frequently reads like a rather conventional military or
political history, thereby blurring the author's "religious" thesis. Admittedly,
lines between genres of history are artificial. Nonetheless, Bourne fails to
focus his thesis with precise attention to the theological. Perhaps the best
example is Bourne's discussion of the American Revolution, in which he
asserts, "As one looks more closely at the War of Independence, it becomes
a disconnected story not only of opposed philosophies but also of divinely
inspired men of different religions" (277). What is disconnected about this
