Response to News Feature on Beginnings of Adventist Missions in Africa
By Dr. Bruce Campbell Moyer
I am writing in response to Andrew Hanson’s article on the beginnings of Adventist mission work in Africa. I commend Andy for his extensive use of primary sources and for his interest in this subject. I have serious questions regarding his slant on the materials.
Rhodesia and Solusi Mission was the first attempt by Adventists to reach out to a non-Christian people. As Andy readily admits, these people were seriously dedicated and confident and flawed. The reality is that they were very much a product of their times. Anthropology, as a serious area of academic study, was in its infancy. Virtually all western thought (Americans included) subscribed to a Darwinian anthropology assuming that the brightest and best, the highest on the evolutionary scale, were themselves. All other peoples ranged downward on the social, intellectual, industrial, etc. scale. Advancement was in the direction of western society. Mission service, in its crass terms, was “the white man’s burden”. Racism was endemic to the conventional wisdom. These early missionaries saw nothing of any value in African culture and considered it something to be wiped out and replaced by the obviously superior western culture.
One of the most successful assignments, while I taught at Solusi University, grew out of a reading of a western text that referred to ‘the primitive cultures of savage Africa.’ My students were, understandably, very unhappy about the text. When I asked them to unpack the terms, they defined ‘primitive’ as preliterate. When I asked what ‘culture’ was, they replied, “the West.” I then required a serious paper from each of them about their own culture. This was the first time anyone had suggested that they had a serious, viable and valuable culture. This was conscientization, [a Portuguese phase phrase suggesting ‘consciousness raising’] at its earliest stage.
Only on the academic levels were serious attempts being made to understand other non-western cultures, and this had not trickled down to the missionary or practical level. Contextualization, now almost universally accepted, had not even been a glint in any academic eyes. That had to wait another century.
As indicated, I served in this part of the world during the early 1970s. The work of the Adventist Church in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) was controlled by South Africa and Rhodesia itself was virtually a fifth province of the Republic of South Africa (RSA) and part of its meta-story of apartheid and racial superiority. I was told by white South Africans, ‘you will never understand the Africans’. When I left, I was asked by my African friends, ‘who will now understand us?’
Yes, the beginning of our mission work was rough and ill-equipped by today’s standards. But today’s standards did not exist in the late 1800s. There was no serious preparation for mission service as there is today, and which must still struggle against western ethnocentricity. Yet credit must be given to people who braved serious sickness, death and hostility and a large unknown to establish schools and clinics upon which our present work is built. In spite of the challenges brought on by the lack (read, non-existence) of proper training and cultural biases, these missionaries accomplished a great deal. I have had the privilege to work alongside many of these people and I have learned from them. Imperfect? Yes, definitely so. But so are we still. Andy Hanson does well to resurrect these early pioneers, but he could do so more kindly.
Moyer is an emeritus professor of world mission at Andrews University and retired staff member at the Mission Institute.
I’m still a g good friend of Bruce Moyer and like to believe I am one of “these missionaries who accomplished a great deal”. Two experiences — one in 1955 and the other in 1972 — helped to open my eyes. In 1955, during my early time in Barotsland (Western Zambia) I watched helplessly as a Catholic nurse straight from Northern Ireland performed “extreme action” in the middle of the night for a two-year old dead from malaria. At the time my traditional Adventist bias toward anything Roman Catholic was running full-bore. That bias certainly changed over the years. In 1972, at mission headquarters in Salisbury(Harare, Zimbabwe today), just weeks before I left permanently for the States, an office administrative assistant for years to largely South African administrators in (then) Rhodesia– said to me, “Elder ________, you’ve been known as one who loved the African.” How weird, I then thought. Today I understand a bit better.
We found that while performing overseas mission service in the 1960s, there were still some “workers” who quite openly commented that the indigenous people were of decidedly lower intellectual and social ability, compared to white North Americans. In our case, we were operating a hospital in the Andes of Bolivia, as white Americans of German/Scandinavian descent.
In some cases a pastor or nurse did very well relating with the local people, treating them equitably, while the spouse and even the children held a better-than-thou attitude. It appeared to me that those who treated the Bolivian people as equally deserving were far more effective in representing the Lord. Those who remained aloof, refusing to learn the language, and holding an exaggerated sense of American exceptionalism may have done more harm than good in their mission experience…. Fortunately by the 1960s the Church had honed in on the foreign missionaries who understood how to relate and beyond with local people, and those who did not.
Oopsy-doopsy. The word “beyond” in the final sentence above should be “bond.” Sorry.
I am reasonably confident that Warren Zork’s “autocorrect” made his reference to the Roman Catholic rite of “Extreme Unction” (with “Unc….”) into the nonsensical “Extreme Action.” It should not be left uncorrected.
It’s a mistake to suggest that today’s standards did not exist in mission work during the 1800s. Perhaps not among SDA but certainly in other denominations, people did all they could to identify with the local people.
The Jesuits in China are a good example, as early as the 1600s. Later in the 1800s the China Inland Mission practiced assimilation. CIM had dozens of their workers killed during the Boxer uprising. The foreign families were so deeply embedded in far away places, escape was impossible
The “us” and “them” SDA mentality causes problems even in home countries. Things like vegetarianism, Sabbath keeping and other peculiar practices tend to divide and separate rather than bring unity.
A fairly recent China published Christian history specifically mentions Adventism as a pernicious foreign religion, thanks to some zealous SDA preachers who identified Mao and the Communist party with the apocalyptic beasts of D+R.
The 19th century was also a time in which the US emerged in strength to invest itself with superior attributes, many of those assumptions by no means defensible in real-life analysis. Even so, there were those missionaries who ministered in an admirable way in foreign lands and set a high standard of Christian proclamation. We noted in particular that those Adventist ex-patriot families that seemed to be guided by a philosophical gyroscope tilted in favor of the white Anglo-Saxon culture seemed to have less success bonding and ministering with the local people than those of us who saw the differences in capability as negligible.
My parents may have subscribed in some ways to American exceptionalism, but it was never referenced in any way at home or in discussions with other missionary families. In one case, I recall, one of my Bolivian friends excelled in piano performance and got a scholarship to study in France. This achievement was a threat to some missionary families, whose children also excelled in music, but not to the point of receiving a scholarship to a prestigious Parisian university….