Horace Russell, The Missionary Outreach of the West Indian Church: Jamaican Baptist Mission to West Africa in the Nineteenth Century - Book Review

Ecumenical Review, The, April, 2003 by Neville Callam

New York, Peter Lang, 2000, 323pp., US$38.95.

The literature is voluminous which describes the North-South thrust of the "modern" missionary movement. The need is urgent for more widely reported and analyzed accounts of the record of South-South and South-North mission efforts. Especially now, with the rapid spread of Christianity in the South, and growing interest in the history of Christianity in Africa, any literary work that combines attention to South-South mission and the history of Christian mission to Africa should meet a real need.

Over thirty years ago, distinguished ecumenist and Caribbean church historian Horace Russell presented his doctoral thesis at the university of Oxford. Happily, at last, after undertaking minor editorial adjustments to it, Russell has made the work more widely available through his latest publication. Of course Russell had published earlier both in the Jamaica Journal and in the Caribbean Journal of Religious Studies, his essay on the emergence of the "Christian black" concept as a replacement for the image of the trickster slave "Quashie" in 19th-century Jamaica. With the publication of The Missionary Outreach, however, we have Russell's thesis as a whole.

Russell examines the process during the 19th century whereby Africans in the Caribbean diaspora considered, and gave expression to, their desire to contribute to the development of their motherland. Through the cooperative efforts of Baptists in Jamaica and the Baptist Missionary Society of London --and notwithstanding the challenges involved--a mission to West Africa was undertaken.

Believing anew that the subject he pursues has suffered from neglect and is in need of careful study, Russell offers an interpretation of the motivation behind the effort made by Baptists in Jamaica to contribute to African Christian mission, and the reasons why the mission did not realize its full potential.

Russell's study focuses on the ecclesiastical aspects of the relationship between the West Indies and West Africa up to the middle of the 19th century. First, he analyzes the forces responsible for the creation within the Jamaica Baptist community of two separate church groupings, one led by missionaries and the other by deacons and elders. Second, Russell assesses how far the success of the mission to the Cameroon was prejudiced by issues related to the bifurcated leadership system in the Baptist churches in Jamaica, and the link with the Baptist Missionary Society of London. Third, Russell probes the consequences, especially for the Jamaica Baptist effort, of the structural transformation from mission to church.

Much more needs to be done to clarify the patterns of relationship in the 19th century between the "missionary-led" churches and those conducted under the "deacon-elder" system, and benefits could certainly be gained from the comparative analysis of the development of churches under both systems. Clearly, Russell has mastered the subject matter and readers will benefit from his painstaking, pioneering research and detailed knowledge of the approaches used by Jamaica Baptist churches as they sought to carry out their ministry both locally and in Africa.

Since Russell's dissertation was presented much work has been done in this area, as Russell himself notes in The Missionary Outreach. In time, the published research undertaken by sociologist Barry Chevannes and others, especially of the university of the West Indies, may lead to a reconsideration of the way in which Jamaican Creoles alternated between missionary-led and deacon-elder-led churches in order to achieve their objectives. Diane J. Austin-Broos has produced a study of Pentecostalism in Jamaica, describing research on the interweaving of cultural phenomena to enable people to fashion their own ways of being, even from within hegemonies. This work is not unrelated to the thrust of Russell's publication.

Furthermore, some may want to examine the relation of Russell's thesis and claims in the recent publication Christian Missionaries and the State in the Third World (edited by Holger Bernt Hansen and Michael Twaddle), in which the contribution of missionaries to the construction, destruction and reconstruction of state structures, both in Africa and the Caribbean, is evaluated. Insofar as Jamaica is concerned, one has to add to this the suggestion by Dale Bisnauth and others of possible Muslim influences in the work of the Jamaican anti-slavery forces. The enquiry into the relation between Russell's thesis and these developments will be an interesting task.

Identifying "emancipation, repatriation and a missionary zeal" as the motivation behind the organized Jamaica Baptist mission to West Africa, Russell traces the course of events that made the outreach a possibility. He also evaluates the developments leading to what he adjudges to be the failure of the mission project to the Cameroon to realize its expectations. His theory that the bifurcated leadership of the Jamaica Baptist witness contributed to that is more likely to be accepted now than when Russell first proposed it.