The title and its narrow time-frame might suggest that this is a book for missiology specialists. In a sense it is. But it is much more.
It is a story full of immense human interest as it recounts how missionaries, often with little or no specialist training, sought to bring the message of Christ to another culture. They did so very far from the advice, let alone the control, of the missionary societies which sent them. In any event these new societies were still discovering an effective strategy for their missionaries. Particularly in the early stages of the New Zealand missions some missionaries abused their power, were tempted to be involved in lucrative trading on the side and succumbed to a range of scandalous and sometimes lurid accusations of inappropriate sexual liaisons.
It is a story also of attempts to shape a missiological strategy: to work out, for example, whether the missionary role was to be an agent of civilization or to seek understanding of what the Gospel means in a very different culture and, most importantly of all, the discovery that Mãori Christians were infinitely more effective evangelists than Europeans were ever likely to be and were extraordinarily committed to being such.
Tim Yates tells this story, as one would expect, in the exact, balanced and unsensationalized style of a historian of integrity concerned never to exaggerate – indeed rather to under-state. The material he handles could easily be over-stated, indeed could form the basis of a gripping page-turning popular novel or a block-buster film. For any such future ventures it is to be hoped that the author or script-writer will be guided by Dr Yates. However, Tim will not, I predict, be asked to write the script. His careful historical gifts lie at the opposite end of the spectrum from those of a script-writer!
Samuel Marsden, the pioneer CMS missionary in Australia and New Zealand, was a key figure in the early days of the Mãori mission. Convinced that civilization was prior to conversion for a heathen, cannibalistic culture, he favoured what he called ‘artisan settlers’ as his first missionaries. Civilization was inevitably defined in European or, more precisely, English terms. It was therefore no surprise that the missionary families lived in, as one contemporary observer put it, ‘cottages … built in English style, of wood and as neat and comfortable as … the civilised world could admit of’. These early missionaries may have been good carpenters or blacksmiths, but they had little guidance to help them adapt to another culture, nor had they recognized leadership experience in the Church. In a context of great freedom, totally isolated from a Christian community some missionaries began to exhibit serious weaknesses. Thomas Kendal, to take perhaps the worst example, was easily roused to passionate anger, bartered muskets and powder with the Mãori and, his wife having had an affair with a convict, had a 17-year-old Mãori girl as his mistress. Allowances, said Marsden of his missionaries, ‘must be made for their particular situation their want of Christian society and public ordinances of religion’. Nonetheless, as he reflected while taking another missionary to task for drunkenness, ‘it is a most profound and disturbing thought that all these alarming evils have originated with the missionaries themselves and not the poor heathens whom they came to instruct’.
Wrong policies, ill-disciplined and poorly-equipped missionaries made little impact on the Mãori. But there were also admirable missionaries. Very quickly, Yates tells us, it was discovered that Mãori were themselves excellent instructors. As one missionary candidly acknowledged of a Mãori catechist turned teacher, ‘he was a better preacher than I was’. ‘Again and again in later years’, Yates observes, ‘it was this transmission from Mãori to Mãori that was the main means by which the Christian faith was spread’.
The mission turned something of a corner when the brothers – William and Henry Williams – arrived in the mid-1820s. From the start they emphasized the need to acquire proficiency in the language and for a disciplined ‘community life’. Even prior to their coming, the civilizing strategy of Marsden was being questioned. The Williamses had a vision, similar to that later developed by Henry Venn, of European missionaries, in Yates's words, ‘acting as initiators before moving on to unevangelized fields, while leaving the building of the church to indigenous converts’. There were amazing consequences. The most thrilling section of this book is Henry Williams's account of a Christian response in places where there had been no European missionaries: ‘the greatest growth arising from knowledge having found its way in a silent manner unknown to any missionary’ and having an impact ‘where no European had .. gone before…’. And something similar was true, Yates tells us, of the other missions, including the Roman Catholics. So extraordinary was this advance that Bishop Selwyn could claim in 1842, with substantial accuracy Yates assures us, that the whole Mãori race had been converted. But not to a Europeanized version of Christianity. The Mãori, as Yates puts it, ‘reinterpreted Christianity in their own cultural setting, creating a symbiosis or “Mãorified Christianity”.’
This of course gives the lie to the still popular belief that missionaries were agents of cultural imperialism. Some of them, such as Marsden, may have had a strategy which pointed in this direction but this strategy soon proved to be miserably ineffective. The indigenous strategy, by contrast, was hugely effective. ‘The overwhelming evidence’ is, says Yates quoting approvingly Norman Etherington, ‘that the agents of conversion were local people, not foreign missionaries’. The resulting Mãori church was emphatically not a consequence of cultural imperialism.
The missionaries did sometimes take on a political role, for example in the whole process leading up to the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840, but they did so, Yates shows, to protect the Mãori against the encroachments of land-grabbing Europeans and because of their anxiety about the immigration policy. They can certainly be accused of, in John Darch's phrase, ‘incipient imperialism’. What this means in this context is that missionaries were imperialist because they saw a protectorate role for the British government as the most likely means to protect the Mãori from passing into, as Henry Williams put it, ‘a kind of slavery’ or being ‘wholly extirpated’. There can be much debate about whether they were right and whether the Treaty gave sufficient protection but that they were motivated by a desire to protect Mãori against the advances and threats of the often ‘wicked’ and greedy settlers is surely established by Yates and the sources he draws on.
Dr Yates demonstrates the enormously positive consequences of the strategic vision of the Williamses. Sadly Bishop Selwyn's subsequent vision of ‘blending’ the colonial (European) and missionary (Mãori) rather than the Venn vision of self-government was to delay the ordination of Mãoris to the priesthood and episcopate and effectively to exclude the Mãori from church government until 1992. It is a sad outcome of the enormous promise of the period covered by Yates.
His study, which includes Methodist and Roman Catholic missions, then raises the most important missiological issues. We must be grateful for his careful scholarship in this important book. It can be read with great profit by thinking people concerned with the preaching of the Gospel in cross-cultural settings – very much now including multi-cultural countries such as the United Kingdom – even if they have little knowledge of, or interest in, the story of mission in New Zealand.
