A Notice in Liverpool

“How then shall they call on him in whom they have not believed? and how shall they believe in him whom they have not heard? and how shall they hear without a preacher? and how shall they preach, except they be sent?”

— Romans 10:14-15, ASV

Liverpool, 1908

In 1908, walking in Liverpool, Studd saw a notice outside a hall. It read, in effect, that cannibals wanted missionaries. The wording, as it has come down in the accounts, was meant to catch the eye, and it did. Inside, a German explorer and missionary named Karl Kumm was speaking about Africa.

The words on the notice reflect the attitudes of the time, and they need comment. Stories of cannibalism in central Africa were common in European travel writing, and they were often exaggerated or invented. They served, among other things, to make Africans seem utterly other, and to justify European rule over them. Missionary societies used the same language to raise interest and money, and it worked. This book mentions the phrase only to report the notice that Studd saw. It is not a description of any people.

Kumm himself was a serious man. Born in Germany in 1874, he had worked in North Africa and had married Lucy Guinness, daughter of the famous missionary teacher Henry Grattan Guinness. In 1902 they had founded the mission that took the name Sudan United Mission in 1904, with the aim of planting a chain of mission stations across the broad belt of Africa south of the Sahara that Europeans then called the Sudan, from the Niger to the Nile. In 1909 and 1910 Kumm crossed that whole region, from Nigeria to the Nile, and he published an account of the journey, From Hausaland to Egypt, in 1910. When Studd heard him, Kumm was speaking about the peoples of the interior who had never heard the gospel, and about the traders, hunters, officials and slavers who were reaching them first.

The Question That Would Not Go Away

Studd came out of the meeting with a question he could not shake off. Why had no Christians gone to these people? The answer, as he heard it, was that no one had been sent. Kumm’s account seemed to him to fit exactly the words of Paul at the head of this chapter: “how shall they hear without a preacher? and how shall they preach, except they be sent?” And the question that followed, according to his own later account, was a personal one. Why should he not go himself?

He had every reason not to. He was forty-seven. He had asthma and a history of serious illness in China and India. He had no money of his own, and no mission behind him. His wife was in poor health and did not want him to go. His friends thought the idea absurd. A middle-aged invalid setting off for the interior of tropical Africa, where young and healthy missionaries died of fever every year, looked to them less like faith than like a death wish.

Studd did not think so. He thought it was a matter of obedience. In his view, if God was calling him, the doctors, the climate and his age were simply beside the point. This was the strength and the danger of his faith in one sentence. He was right that God sometimes calls people to do what common sense forbids. He was not always willing to consider that common sense might, sometimes, be God’s way of speaking too.

The Sudan, 1910–11

Towards the end of 1910, Studd sailed for Africa to see the need for himself. His route took him to the southern Sudan, where the Church Missionary Society had begun work among the peoples of the upper Nile, and the accounts say that two of its senior missionaries showed him something of the country. Some later accounts say that he travelled alone; at least one says that the young Alfred Buxton was with him. The record is not clear, and this book leaves the question open.

What he found on that journey, and what he heard from traders and officials, convinced him that between the upper Nile and the great lakes, in the north-eastern corner of the Belgian Congo, lay a large and populous region in which no Protestant missionary was at work. The Catholic missions were present in parts of it. But to Studd, who shared the deep suspicion of Catholicism common among British evangelicals of his day, that did not count as the gospel having been preached. A modern reader may judge that differently. What is not in doubt is that the peoples of that region had very few Christians among them in 1910, of any kind.

On the voyage out, according to his later account, he became convinced that the journey was not for one corner of Africa only but for the whole unevangelised world. That conviction would shape everything he did for the rest of his life. It would also make him impatient with any mission, or any committee, that seemed to him to be thinking too small.

Home Again

He came back to England in 1911, a year after he had left, more certain than ever. He began to plan a new mission to the heart of Africa. His first approaches, to existing societies, did not go smoothly. The accounts of his biographers say that a committee he approached was unwilling to support his plan, at least on his terms, and that he told them he would go anyway. Records of the Africa Inland Mission, examined in modern times, show that he applied to that mission in November 1912 and was accepted; but that soon after he left for Africa, he asked for changes in its constitution, the council refused, and within a few weeks both sides agreed that his membership should end. The episode is little known, and it is told here because it is the first clear example of a pattern that would recur. Studd found it very hard to work inside any structure he did not control.

It would be unfair to treat that only as a fault. Studd was trying to do something new, and new things often need new structures. The missions he approached had their own commitments and limits, and they were right to protect them. He was right to look for another way. But the speed with which his relationships with committees broke down, then and later, says something about him. He had decided that he was obeying God, and he found it hard to believe that people who disagreed with him might be doing the same.

A Continent Divided

The Africa that Kumm described in 1908 had been carved up by European powers within living memory. At the Berlin Conference of 1884 and 1885, the year the Cambridge Seven sailed for China, the governments of Europe had agreed among themselves the rules by which they would claim African territory. No African ruler was present. Over the next twenty years almost the whole continent was divided into colonies and protectorates, often by straight lines drawn on maps in European capitals, and conquered, sometimes with great violence. By 1908 only Ethiopia and Liberia remained independent.

Missionaries were caught up in that process in complicated ways. Some had been in Africa long before the colonial powers, and some opposed the worst abuses of colonial rule; it was missionaries, among others, who had exposed the atrocities of the Congo Free State. But missions also benefited from colonial peace and colonial roads, depended on colonial permission to work, and often shared the assumption that European rule was good for Africa. When Studd began to dream of the heart of Africa, he dreamed of it as a mission field, not as a colony. But he would reach it by the routes the colonial powers had opened, and live in it under their authority.

None of that changes the sincerity of his call. It does help to explain why, a century later, the story of missionaries in Africa is told with more caution than it once was, and why the African side of the story matters so much. The Africans of the Uele and the Ituri had not been consulted by the Berlin Conference, and they were not consulted by the Heart of Africa Mission either. What they did with the gospel when it came was their own decision, and it would turn out to be the most important part of the story.

It is worth adding that Studd’s complaint against the missions of his day was not entirely unfair. In 1910 there were, by the estimates of the missionary conference that met in Edinburgh that very year, vast regions of Africa and Asia where no missionary of any kind was at work, and most missionary resources were concentrated where churches already existed. The World Missionary Conference of 1910 itself called attention to the “unoccupied fields.” Studd was not alone in seeing the gap. He was unusual in deciding, at fifty, to go and stand in it himself.

Sent

Paul’s chain of questions in Romans begins with calling on the name of the Lord and ends with sending: “how shall they preach, except they be sent?” The Church has often read the passage as a call to go, and Studd read it that way. It is also a reminder that going is not a solitary act. In Paul’s own experience, those who went were sent by a church, which prayed for them, laid hands on them, and received them back to hear their report (Acts 13:1-3; 14:26-27). The sending and the going belonged together.

Studd’s whole Africa venture would be marked by a struggle over that relationship. He had a fierce sense of being sent by God, and a much weaker sense of being sent by anyone else. In the years ahead he would found his own mission, with his own family and friends to support it at home, and that would give him great freedom. It would also leave him, at the end, almost without anyone who could tell him he was wrong.