If I were a cassowaryOn the plains of Timbuctoo,
I would eat a missionary,
Skin and bones and hymnbook too.
So wrote Samuel Wilberforce, Anglican Bishop of Oxford, chaplain to Prince Albert, and son of William Wilberforce, a man best known for his opposition to Darwin’s theory of evolution, in the nineteenth century.
This verse contains concepts associated with the understanding of mission which was common at that time, exotic location, unfamiliar and probably dangerous wildlife, and a rather ludicrous, though undoubtedly earnest, missionary figure.
We may not know exactly where Timbuctoo can be found on the map, but we can be sure that it is over there, in the dark, a place of otherness, quite unlike England and home. Timbuctoo sounds the sort of place where “the heathen in his blindness” might bow “down to wood and stone.”
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Congregationalists for much of the nineteenth and twentieth century, like the rest of society, were blind to the patronizing nature of their genuine, but colonial concern for the “natives” overseas and the poor at home.
That attitude has now given way to a determination to fight for justice for all, and to work towards the empowerment of others, withdrawing as soon as possible to allow for self-determination. Congregationalists have often been instigators of social change, supporting educational opportunities and entering government.
Participants were children when the old concepts of mission began to fade. They remember having fun at Home Mission Teas and collecting round the neighbourhood with John Williams ship-cards. And then they speak of their social concerns now.
People like Jim Downing, who worked with aborigines, and Peter Munster, who speaks here of teaching in Papua in 1966, were pioneers of new attitudes in this field.
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THEN:
The John Williams was a ship owned by the London Missionary Society, British Congregationalism’s outreach arm, which delivered supplies to Congregational missionaries in remote places in the Pacific.Once a year, Australian Congregational children collected money to support what was then the sixth John Williams and entered details of donations on a ship-card. There was keen completion in the Sunday Schools to collect the most.
In Junior Church we stuck old Christmas cards into scrap-books for the mission children. Australia was a colony itself; our scrapbooks were full of English Christmas scenes, of snowmen and holly, and Santa on his sleigh.
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John Williams ship-cards and scrapbooks for missions: did this grow into a mature understanding of our commitment to others now? I asked participants. One answered briefly and firmly. Yes, she said. Perhaps, said another, and certainly in some people . . .
Papier-mâché kraal boxes, in the shape of African “native” houses held coins collected for the LMS; these were found in most Congregational dining-rooms. One participant remembered these too:
As children we were keen collectors for the John Williams (little huts) our parents allowing us to collect from neighbours, even Catholics who were happy to give us something too. Most of us asked God the question: ‘Am I supposed to be a missionary in some far-off land, or here in Australia?’
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In junior Sunday School we passed half a coconut shell around for the collection, while we sang “Hear the Pennies Dropping.” The shell suggested that the pennies had an exotic destination.
This song must have been universal. Catchy too. A number of participants sang it for me at interview:
Hear the pennies dropping;
Listen while they fall.
Every one for Jesus;
He shall have them all.
Dropping, dropping, dropping, dropping,
Hear the pennies fall.
Every one for Jesus;
He shall have them all.
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One participant was puzzled about how the coins would actually get to Jesus, but she put them in the shell all the same.
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Another song was specifically oriented to foreign mission:
Do you see this penny?
It was brought by me.
For the little children
Far across the sea.
Hurry, penny, quickly hurry
Though you are so small,
Go to tell the children
Jesus loves them all.
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On the Sunday School hall wall hung a picture of a blue-eyed, blonde Anglo-Saxon Jesus with a group of the world’s children around him. The white child stood beside him; coloured children sat on the floor. We were not post-colonial in the 1950’s.
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It is hard to rate impacts on attitudes to giving, stated one participant.
And then he added,
One of my great Sunday School teachers ignited my concern for the work of the Mission to Lepers and I started giving—probably only pennies in those early days— yet from then till now, I have never missed donating to them every year. I am
77.
I think that we can rate the impact on attitudes to giving in this man’s case.
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Home Mission Teas were held in the Melbourne and Sydney Town Halls. Everyone shared a meal, and then the adults listened to a speaker on an area of social concern.
We used to have Tea Meetings in the Sydney Town Hall, stated one participant. Home Mission Teas I think that they were. Long trestle tables. All the churches. People went from table to table renewing friendships. There was a big meeting afterwards in Pitt Street Congregational- we moved across the road to it . . . I don’t think the missionary activity is quite so strong in the UC.
And from Melbourne another participant wrote:
Trestle tables were set up around the outside of the Melbourne Town Hall, under the balcony overhang, and covered with sheets. The table of the church of the president for that year was on the stage. There were flowers on the tables, and the names of the churches at the end. I remember the ladies carrying huge pots of food up from the kitchens downstairs, and pouring tea from large white enamel teapots. There was lots of mingling between churches; we all knew each other. After dinner there was a speaker. While people finished their meal, the children went up into the balcony and ran around. We threw paper darts down on the people underneath and were pursued by the caretaker. John Cowan, the organist at Collins Street, played the organ for a hymn after the meal.
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POST-COLONIAL THEORY:
In the universities, philosophers and theorists began to speak of the post-colonial. It is difficult to find the first critique of colonial assumptions, but some writers trace the beginnings of post-colonial theory to Frantz Fanon, who wrote Black Skin, White Masks in 1967. The major post-colonial text, however, is Edward Said’s Orientalism, which was written in 1978.Post-Colonial theory speaks of the not-white, the not-European, the “native” who was placed in the European mind as Other, not-like-us, not like the norm, not like the civilized people of the First World, in a Self/Other dichotomy. It was the people of Europe, of course, who divided the areas of the Earth into the hierarchy of First, Second and Third World, placing Europe as First, and the areas which Europe became aware of last as Third. This distinction is heavy with colonial assumptions.
Post-colonial theorists noted that in the Western grand narrative of colonialism, Europe was the norm. Europe was placed as central, and the colonies were located on the periphery. The colonies were written as alluring places containing exotic wildlife and backward people. Colonialism contained a narrative of modernism as progress through education, towards freedom and democracy. “In this male power fantasy,” said Edward Said, “the women of the colonies were written as unlimited in sensuality, stupid, and above all, willing.”
Colonialism wrote a fixed form of Otherness. Stereotypes abounded; the West identified the essential duplicity of the Asian, the African’s bestial sexual license and “the wisdom of the East.” Colonial assumptions are not dead; notice the way white Australia now assumes, and often tries to appropriate, a universal aboriginal spirituality and oneness with the land.
As former colonies entered nationhood, paternalistic colonial assumptions gave way to a nationalism which posited the nation-state and its ideologies as the ideal. Post-colonial theory critiques the assumptions of nationalism too.
Nineteenth century concepts of mission began to collapse as the critique of colonialism spread from the universities into society.
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... AND LATER:
One participant stated:That Seddon group was very sporting. Keith Eisenberg played cricket for Footscray. Jim Downing was into motor-bikes. There were gang-fights in the street and football and cricket. Twenty of us would rock up to the Catholic parish up the street when a dance was on. Our parents, if they had known, would have had a fit. We played cards up in the back seat of the church. Don’t know how they put up with us.
But they’ve still got us. And we’re all still socially-involved in the welfare of the community.
He went on:
Congregationalists are often responsible for social reform; Warnock Lowry first brought gays and lesbians into the church at East Cheltenham.
Once a month or so I write a letter to the Herald-Sun or local paper. I go to bowls and they say “Haven’t seen your name in the paper this week.” I had to pick up my father from the pub at 6 and protect my mother from him when he had been drinking, so alcohol is an issue for me. I want to restrict advertising and increase taxes on it.
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Another was trained in social action from the start:
My father belonged to The Public Questions Committee of the NSW Congregational Union, so political and justice issues were discussed at home and seen as important. My grandfather sought to improve our community through many years of being an alderman and 14 years as Mayor of Strathfield. Visits to my grandparents’ home would always include comments about the ‘state of the nation’ and ‘learning the lessons of history’. Following the completion of the Leaving Certificate, each grandchild accompanied my grandparents to Canberra to stay with them in The Hotel Canberra, and to meet and hear views of the Federal Government at the time.
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There are examples of imaginative and tactful action both in the community and in the church itself:
We went through bad times when the manse and hall were burnt. (Homeless Asian youth had been allowed to live in the manse, and they built a fire on the floor of the lounge,) said one participant.
We were left with nothing but the church building. We used to serve soup and sandwiches in the pews. Sometimes when it was fine we sat outside. We were the first church in Williamstown to have morning tea after the service. Not just tea and a biscuit. Sandwiches, hot pies, cakes. Because there were a couple of oldies, and we weren’t sure that they were eating properly.
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I discovered confidentially (when I forgot the keys to the Sunday school room, and one of the Youth Group boys showed his skill in picking a Yale lock) that the minister was a Probation Officer and several of the boys were under his care, said another. It says a lot for his handling of everything that most of them continued in the church over the following years; he earned their trust because everyone was treated with equal respect, and the rest of us appreciated what he had done when we learned of the situation only years later.
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As I remember what I learned of mission at Canterbury Congregational Church I feel again a sense of openness ... said a third.
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Several other participants shared their memories:
Kashie Munster was one of a number of our people who befriended two young Czech brothers who practised their English with us when they first arrived in Australia in'69. She used to spend hours making a "special" Czech cake for them each time they visited, to remind them of home.
She never knew it was from a different area from theirs, and they had never tasted it before.
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Minnie [Hope Ruth] Bratt was a nurse who grew up in Black Rock, and was a very dedicated worker in Ethiopia, especially with the women for whom she was often the only medical assistant in many miles. The Black Rock folk supported her as well as they could for all those years. One of her needs was for a donkey, to convey her to outlying villages, so people contributed- a leg- an ear- etc till we were able to send her the money required. We still use a table cloth, on which are embroidered the names of people who contributed to this in 1956.
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Every confirmed member of the church was expected to minister. John and Gwen Parkin, the parents of the footballer and coach David Parkin, took church flowers to nursing homes for 25 years.
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POST-COLONIAL TEACHING IN PAPUA-NEW GUINEA
In 1966, Judy and Peter Munster, both secondary teachers and strong Congregationalists, left for Papua, determined to teach and to share any skills which might be useful for the newly-emerging nation.Peter was a historian, and was working on his Master’s thesis. Their first child, Julia, was five months old.
Papua New Guinea became independent in 1975. The Munsters left the country two years later.
Peter tells their story:
Hong Kong?
We were in London. I was 32, and Judy was 25. We went to the LMS office and asked to be sent to a church school for 2 or 3 years. The LMS suggested Ying Wa College, in Hong Kong. We went to a few courses with British Volunteers Abroad who agreed to sponsor us.
Then the Principal at Hong Kong School, Mr Noble, died, so our contact was lost. The Acting Principal took over negotiations, and offered us a salary but no accommodation. The LMS and Hedley Bunton, when consulted, said that we couldn’t live on what was being offered. The Acting Principal told the LMS that if we were so materialistic, he didn’t want us.
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Koaru School, Papua, 1966
So we accepted a placement at this little school in the wilderness of Papua. By this time Judy was pregnant. We returned to Melbourne for Julia’s birth in July 1965. In 1966 our valedictory service was held; the LMS made it clear to us that we were not missionaries, who offer service for life. We left for Papua when Julia was 5 months old.
We arrived in Moresby in January 2006. It was the wet season, a time of unpleasant humidity. We stayed at ‘Metorea’, the mission house established in the 1880s by Dr Lawes, a pioneer LMS missionary. We found the missionaries, pressured by over-work and a trying climate, impatient and short-tempered. They were not welcoming, and resistant to newcomers. Our illusions were shattered.
When Paul was born in Port Moresby Hospital in January 1967, none of the missionaries stationed in Port Moresby visited; they were too busy! This not true of the friendly New Zealand missionary couple who were stationed at Saroa, near Ruatoka College. They became very good friends.
We decided that we would share any skills, and leave at Independence or when our job was able to be taken over by nationals. Judy taught the women to use a sewing machine. I taught English and Social studies to year 7 and 8.
We stayed in Port Moresby for a week, finding the time uncomfortable. Then Stephen Yates, the headmaster, arrived back from England. He was a dour, lay educationist with Victorian attitudes.
We left Moresby in a funny little aeroplane, arriving at the nearest airstrip on Tauri River in the Gulf District. The priest welcomed us there, and offered to take us the rest of the way by motor-boat (a 1 or 2 hour trip). Stephen refused. It was a shock to find he wouldn’t have anything to do with Catholics.
The Papuans who were to meet us hadn’t arrived, so the priest agreed to take us to the nearest village. All the men were away. We got into a dugout canoe, Julia in a basket with an umbrella over her. Betel-nut chewing, pipe-smoking, bare-breasted women paddled us down the river and dumped us on the beach at the river's mouth. It was mid-day. It was a day’s walk along the coast to Koaru, the mission station and junior high school.
We began to walk. We crossed a number of rivers, waiting for the ferrymen. There was a welcoming party in each village; we had to shake hands with everyone, and reply to the Toaripi greeting "Lareva kofa!" (“Very good!”). It got dark. We were still in the bush. There were snakes. Finally we arrived to find three lovely women on the staff, a nurse and 2 teachers. We were warmly welcomed and given dinner.
This was a school of 40 or 50 children. They didn’t start school until age 7, so by year 7 they were 14 or 15. Some wanted to be pastors, others teachers. The school was under the control of the Papua Ekalesia, the Papuan name for the new Church (from the Greek ecclesia of course, but Papuanised). This may have been the first local church set up in P.N.G., ahead of the Anglicans, Catholics, and Lutherans. Many missionaries still had Victorian attitudes, but the LMS people back in U.K and Australia probably gave a lead to localisation; the LMS in localising was ahead of its time.
I enjoyed teaching. We had a lot of fun in the class-room, which had a high thatched roof but open sides. English poetry was on the curriculum, and I remember we were dramatising that poem about young Lochinvar coming out of the west, with Lochinvar on his trusty steed on his way to rescue the damsel in distress, when a tree snake drooped out of the thatched roof, landing in the middle of the assembled actors. Those teenagers beat the snake to the exit, clearing the class-room in seconds.
The best students were the girls; this led to problems with the boys, who often felt the girls were outsmarting them. The best boys went to government high schools, while the best girls were sent to mission schools by their parents, who believed, quite rightly, that they were less likely to get pregnant there. While we were in Koaru or later at Ruatoka Teachers College, as far as I know, no girl became pregnant. They quickly became pregnant, however, as soon as they left school, which was a bit frustrating for the Church which had trained them, but probably what you would expect in a culture where it was accepted that they would marry when still teenagers.
We spent 12 months at this little school. It was really remote and access was limited. A little steamboat arrived once a week or fortnight with supplies, called a 'K' boat —I can't remember why. It was also known as the 'freezer boat' because it brought our fortnightly supplies of frozen food. There was no reef, just an open beach, so no safe anchorage. The boat’s arrival depended on the weather. The boys paddled out on log rafts, and back through the surf, and brought the supplies in. The mail too. There was a radio schedule. Every afternoon we talked to Moresby and the other missions, and there was a medical schedule. The nurse had a small hospital and she talked to the doctor.
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Bert Brown
Down the coast, at Moru, which was nearer to Moresby, was the district missionary, ‘Bert Brown of Papua.’ He was a scholar, quiet and self-effacing, with an enormous understanding of local language and culture. He had been trained by Malinowski, a famous anthropologist, who believed that missionaries were the scourge of the earth because they destroyed indigenous cultures, but Bert sneaked into his lectures in London incognito, and thus he had a good grounding in anthropology, from the best teacher of his day. Bert was also an artist and later designed a wonderful set of stamps with Toaripi designs.
He had arrived in Papua in the 1940s, post-war. Soon after he arrived at Moru Bert wanted to understand the initiation ceremonies, which had been abandoned as being un-Christian. Boys were initiated every so often; wonderful masks were worn. He wanted the ceremony to be repeated; the LMS pastor said that it was pagan. Bert offered a bullock, which did the trick and the men agreed, in spite of the Pastor's protests to re-enact this "Semese" initiation ceremony.
Masks were made, and a men’s house was built. The ceremony took place, and was photographed and drawn by Bert.
The next Sunday the pastor preached on the text, ‘The dog is turned to his own vomit again and the sow that was washed to her wallowing in the mire’(2 Peter 2:22). This incident took place before my time, in the 1940’s or 1950’s.
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The Industrial Mission, Kwato and Koaru
Charles Abel was a renegade. Formerly with the LMS, he had joined the Oxford Movement (Moral Rearmament) and parted company with the LMS. In Kwato, at the east end of Papua, he founded what was seen as a model industrial mission. (They had a cricket team which played the Europeans in Moresby.) The converts had to work a certain number of hours each day on a coconut or rubber plantation, which helped to finance Abel's mission.
Following this model, in Koaru the church bought a coconut plantation and set up the school and hospital beside it. When we arrived in 1966, all the students were engaged in making copra from the coconuts which they harvested from the plantation. I was shocked by the amount of time the young people were working there for no pay. It was a bit like slave labour, although it was argued that their work paid for their schooling and board. Stephen Yates said that the school wouldn’t be able to function without the income from the plantation although a grant was received from the government. When he retired a couple of years later, the practice stopped.
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Ruatoka Teachers’ College, Kwikila
Kwikila is east of Moresby in the foothills of the Owen Stanley Ranges. The climate is dry. The principal, Bob Beevers, was going on leave for 2 years and I applied for the position of Acting Principal. It was a primary teachers’ college staffed by dedicated women, former primary teachers. There were about 40 students, gaining certificates for infant or primary teaching. Ruatoka was a Cook Island (Raratongan) Teacher-Pastor, brought to Papua by James Chalmers in the late 19th century. One of Ruatoka's colleagues was Tamarua, the name that we were to give our second son.
The women made the best students. After 6 months the men students went on strike, claiming that the girls were humiliating them. They claimed that the girls were cheeky and boasting of their success, but I think that it was more a case of the girls knowing all the answers and speaking up in class, which was not the sort of thing that happened back in the village.
Church Union took place in January 1968. Presbyterians, Methodists and Congregationalists formed The United Church of Papua, New Guinea and the Solomon Islands. I had a seat on the council. No longer the Papua Ekalesia, they now had the United Church. Bishops were appointed. The Church was divided into regions, not diocese, although each one was presided over by a bishop.
There was the Papuan Region, but Moresby was in the Urban Region, which meant that when we went to Goroka the United Church there was in the Urban Region, and Frank Butler was our Bishop. Later on all the Bishops were Papua-New Guineans. The first Papuan Region Bishop, Ravu Henao, was a Papuan. Frank Butler sometimes stayed with us when he came to the Highlands.
One of the costs of church union was that the Papuan Region lost all its institutions. The Lawes Theological College at Fife Bay was closed, and amalgamated with what was formerly the Methodist theological college Rarongo, near Rabaul, and Ruatoka was amalgamated with Gaulim Teachers College, also near Rabaul. It was argued that the students would be self-supporting, as the volcanic soil around Rabaul was much more fertile than in Papua, and there were many more primary schools around Gaulim where students could do their practice teaching. A year or two later Koaru High School was also closed.
A parallel to this process, I suppose, was the number of Congregational churches which were closed after church union here, the new Uniting Church congregations worshipping in what was formerly a Methodist or Presbyterian building.
Towards the end of our time, the Church's Education Committee decided to recommend to the Church that Koaru High School be relocated to a place called Veiru, in the Western District. I was involved in the planning and would have become its principal. But the European power-brokers in the new Church executed a nice piece of ecclesiastical bastardry by going against the decision of the Papuan Region's Annual Meeting and over-ruling what had been a democratic decision of the Church, and the plan to move to Veiru was scuttled.
They believed that the Church should, wherever possible, pull out of its historic role of providing education in Papua. In fairness to them, perhaps they were just being very Congregational, for here in Victoria at least, we had no church schools. I was out of a job but had contacts in the Education Department Division of Teacher Education. We moved to Goroka.
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Goroka
Goroka had been an old patrol post. It was now the administrative capital of the Eastern Highlands District, 5000 ft. above sea-level with a temperate climate, "a land of eternal spring-time". We were given one of the lovely old houses, brought in in kit form from Bulolo in 12 flights of DC3s.
I was appointed to the Secondary Teachers’ College, (formerly Primary). I lectured in social science, a subject taught in schools, combining history, geography, sociology and politics. Several years after Tam was born in Goroka (September 2nd, 1969- the same birthday as mine, so my best birthday present!), Judy got the job of assistant to the manager of the council guest house, Minogere. A frequent guest was Mr Justice Minogue, so we called it the Minogerie.
After a year or two she became secretary to the Town Clerk of the Goroka Local Government Council. She learned Highland Pidgin (Neo-Melanesian) and took the council minutes. (Some Highland councillors were still in traditional dress.) Judy raised the money to build a local swimming-pool and began the Clean Up Goroka Campaign. I became a regular contributor to the local paper ‘The Highland News’, writing reviews of books about Papua New Guinea under the pseudonym of "Game Mikase" which in Gahuku, the Goroka language, meant ‘A place on the boundary’.
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Research
The first year I was in Goroka, a colleague showed me a book by Kenneth E. Read, The High Valley, about a village a walking distance away. Read had gone to USA. The colleague started to visit the village and gather stories; I went too. We gathered oral histories. When my colleague left at the end of the year, I continued to visit the village. My research began to spread to the whole valley.
I wrote my qualifying thesis on the purchase of land by the government from the clans in Goroka. Unlike the Australian situation, the government recognised ownership of the land and paid for it (though not much). I began to collect photographs, many taken by Mick Leahy who had been a pioneer gold prospector in the Highlands in the 1930s (which had first exploration in 1930).
German Lutheran missionaries had penetrated the Highlands a year earlier, but kept news of their discoveries secret, so that the Catholics would not follow them. But Mick Leahy, a Catholic, let the cat out of the bag, and soon the Wars of the Reformation were being repeated in the New Guinea Highlands.
By the time we arrived in 1969 peace had been declared and all the mainstream Churches got on very well together. The Catholics offered the United Church the use of one of their buildings close to the Teachers College for services and Catholics, Anglicans, Lutherans and Uniteds worked harmoniously together in the Melanesian Institute in Goroka, studying New Guinea culture and religious transformation.
Returning to the photographs, there were 3000 of Mick Leahy's fascinating 'first contact' photos in the National Library in Canberra and Mick gave me access to them for publication in my thesis. Retired patrol officers and Lutheran and S.D.A. missionaries were also forthcoming with their photos and reminiscences.
The museum in Goroka said they would like to have and display my collection. I went to Mick Leahy and his brother Jim and they agreed to fund a new wing at the Museum to house the collection. It was named the Leahy Wing and opened in 1978. Mick came with some of his old gold-prospecting partners, plus two famous patrol officers Jim Taylor and John Black. I was invited to come back to Goroka for the opening and it was a wonderful celebration. The photos are still there. Judy had a collection of bilums (string bags) and pots, which she collected in the Sepik and other parts of P.N.G. We also collected carvings, mainly from the Sepik River and a few from the Gulf.
The Goroka Teachers’ College students from surrounding villages would translate for me; the oldies didn’t speak pidgin. It was important to balance the European story of contact and change with the accounts of the New Guinean people who remembered the coming of the first Europeans (missionaries, gold prospectors and patrol officers). Some thought that the carriers who came from the coast with the Europeans were the dead returning, and welcomed them as long-lost husbands or sons, some thought that the Europeans were "sky people", spirits from the sky. They called the Europeans Gorohave (Red Skins), never 'whites', as their sun-tanned skins were nearer to red than white.
I also interviewed many Europeans who were part of this 'first contact' and examined old diaries, patrol reports, etc. and this research formed my Master’s thesis on the years 1930-33. For my doctoral thesis I worked on the years from 1934 to the early 50s, with the people moving from the Stone Age to driving trucks, entering into the cash economy with their coffee production, participating in local government and enrolling their children in primary school.
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In 1977, two years after independence, Peter and Judy returned to Victoria.
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THE CHURCH’S MISSION TODAY? THE VIEW OF LESSLIE NEWBIGIN
Lesslie Newbigin, the Quaker-educated Church of Scotland missionary to India and bishop of the ecumenical Church of South India, honoured nineteenth century missionaries, and reminded us that the thousands of them who went to the far corners of the earth ensured that now in every country there are Christian believers. He reminded us too that many Christian-educated children grew up to be the leaders of their post-colonial nations.It is now no longer enough to go to the places where Christ is not known and to preach. In every place the Church already exists, whatever its size, and latecomers must honour its integrity. “The missionary calling is now merged (or dissolved) into the general obligation of all Christians everywhere to fight injustice, challenge evil, and side with the oppressed,” Newbigin stated in the preface to Phillips and Coote (eds), Towards the 21st Century in Christian Mission. “ ‘Mission’ becomes everything that the church is to do and to be in the world.”
The directness that was associated with mission in the nineteenth century, Newbigin reminded us, was associated with colonialism, with progress, with the confidence that “civilization” was a blessing that all the world should share. Eighteenth century Enlightenment had, in Newbigin’s opinion, become attached to mission, with the belief that human reason, formed through education, fundamentally the same everywhere, could liberate. The Enlightenment provoked a reaction in Europe in the Romantic movement, which affirmed the value of the spirit of the people as embodied in their original culture.
The scholars of the Collège de France had laid down as a universal principle “the unity of science and the plurality of cultures,” and religion was widely seen as a part of culture. But, stated Newbigin, true freedom came not from Enlightenment attitudes, nor from respect for enculturation, but through faithful discipleship to Jesus Christ, and in no other way. Newbigin saw the challenge for the Churches of the twenty-first century to be the disentangling of Enlightenment attitudes from Christian truth.
Newbigin returned to Britain after many years in India to find that Britain no longer felt like home. At the end of his life he saw post-Christian Western culture as not secular, but pagan, a society worshipping false gods. In the end, the work of the Church, Newbigin felt, was always and only to embody the new humanity called into being by Jesus Christ. This was the Church’s mission, because this was the Church’s task.
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Next: Chapter 7. Collins Street Independent
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