A Sharp Contention

“And there arose a sharp contention, so that they parted asunder one from the other, and Barnabas took Mark with him, and sailed away unto Cyprus”

— Acts 15:39, ASV

The Hardest Chapter

Every honest account of Studd’s life has to reach this point, and most of his admirers have reached it reluctantly. In the 1920s the Heart of Africa Mission was torn by conflict, and much of the conflict centred on Studd. Missionaries left. Supporters withdrew. His closest colleague, who was also his son-in-law, was dismissed. Long after his death, a historian writing for the Dictionary of African Christian Biography summed up his years in the Congo in a single sentence, to the effect that he proved an obstinate and unreasonable leader and colleague, provoking bitter conflict with family, fellow missionaries and Africans until his death.

That is a hard judgement, and it is not the whole truth. But it is not a judgement made by enemies. The evidence for it comes very largely from people who loved him, including the son-in-law who wrote his biography. It has to be faced.

What the Quarrels Were About

The full story of the conflicts has never been told in print, and the sources available to this book do not allow it to be told here. What they do show is the general shape.

Studd demanded total commitment from everyone in the mission. He expected his missionaries to live on very little, work very long hours, take few rests, and put the work before health, family and comfort, as he did. He regarded caution as unbelief and disagreement as disloyalty. He was the founder and leader of the mission, and he did not share his authority easily with anyone, whether colleagues in the field or the committee at home. He could be warm, generous and funny, and many people loved him. He could also be suspicious, harsh and unjust, and he could write letters that wounded deeply.

Some of the missionaries who came to the Congo in the 1920s found that they could not live and work under him. Some resigned. Others were dismissed. One missionary’s letter, written from Niangara in 1925 and since published online, admired Studd’s sacrifices and at the same time described him as domineering. That combination of admiration and dismay runs through almost every account of him in these years.

Alfred

The saddest of the partings was with Alfred Buxton. Buxton had gone with Studd to Africa in 1913, at the age of twenty-one. He had held the work together when Studd was in England. He had learned the languages, preached, travelled, and married Studd’s daughter Edith. For more than a decade he was Studd’s right hand.

When the differences between Studd and some of his colleagues grew serious in the 1920s, Buxton found that he could not simply take his father-in-law’s side. He thought that some of the criticisms were fair, and he said so. In 1927 he travelled to the United States, where the mission had friends and supporters, to try to repair relationships that had been damaged. Studd regarded his conduct as disloyal and dismissed him from the mission. One account says that the letter of dismissal included Edith as well. The exact date and the exact terms are not clear from the sources available to this book.

It is a painful story, and it does Studd no credit. Buxton had done nothing worse than disagree with him and try to make peace. To dismiss him for it, and his own daughter with him, was the act of a man who could no longer tell the difference between loyalty to Christ and loyalty to himself.

And yet there is another side, and it should be told. According to the Dictionary of African Christian Biography, the personal links between Studd and Buxton were never broken. They had loved each other for many years, and they went on loving each other through the quarrel. Buxton did not turn bitter. He went on to join Thomas Lambie of the Sudan Interior Mission in opening new work in Ethiopia and Somaliland. He was killed in October 1940, with his brother Murray, when a German bomb struck Church House in Westminster during a committee meeting. He was in his late forties.

Paul and Barnabas

The verse at the head of this chapter describes one of the saddest moments in the history of the early Church. Paul and Barnabas had been partners in the first great missionary journey. Barnabas had vouched for Paul when the other apostles were afraid of him. But when they planned a second journey, they quarrelled over John Mark, Barnabas’s cousin, who had left them in the middle of the first. Paul would not take him again. Barnabas would not go without him. “And there arose a sharp contention, so that they parted asunder one from the other.”

Luke does not tell us who was right. Perhaps both were, in part. Paul was right that the work needed people who would not turn back; Barnabas was right that a young man who had failed deserved a second chance. What we do know is how the story ended. Years later, writing from prison near the end of his life, Paul asked Timothy to bring Mark with him, “for he is useful to me for ministering” (2 Timothy 4:11, ASV). The man he had refused to take had become a man he could not do without.

The Bible does not hide the quarrels of its heroes. It records them because they happened, and because God’s work went on through them. The parting of Paul and Barnabas led to two missionary journeys instead of one. The parting of Studd and Buxton led, among other things, to the beginning of evangelical work in parts of Ethiopia. That does not make the quarrels good. It shows that God is not defeated by them.

The Founder’s Temptation

Studd was not the first founder of a Christian work to find that he could not let go of it, and he was far from the last. The New Testament itself records a church leader named Diotrephes, “who loveth to have the preeminence,” who refused to receive the messengers of the apostle John and threw out of the church those who did (3 John 9-10, ASV). It is a short and bitter note in a short letter, and it shows that the problem is as old as the Church.

Founders are often people of extraordinary vision, energy and courage. Without those qualities nothing new would ever be begun. But the same qualities can make it very hard for them to share authority, to hear criticism, or to accept that the work they began now belongs to others as well. They tend to identify the work with themselves, and to regard disagreement with their methods as disloyalty to the work, and even to God. Those around them, who owe them a great deal, often find it very hard to tell them the truth.

Studd showed almost all of these tendencies in his last years. That does not make him a Diotrephes; the comparison would be unjust, because he did not seek preeminence for its own sake and he never used the work to enrich himself. But it does mean that the troubles of the Heart of Africa Mission in the 1920s were not simply caused by worldly colleagues and timid committees, as his admirers often claimed. A good deal of the cause lay in the founder himself.

Why Was He Like This?

It is worth asking why a man of such evident love for Christ, and such evident willingness to sacrifice himself, could be so hard on others. There is no single answer, but several things can be said.

He was ill, in pain and exhausted for most of his last fifteen years, and illness and pain make most people harder to live with. He lived in great isolation, far from his wife and from any equal who could speak to him frankly. He had founded the mission and built it in his own image, and he had come to identify its success with his own obedience. He had grown up in a class and a culture that expected leaders to command, not to consult. And he had a theology of sacrifice so absolute that it left little room for weakness, his own or anyone else’s. If no sacrifice was too great for Christ, then anyone who held back must be failing Christ. It was a short step from there to treating those who disagreed with him as traitors.

None of that excuses him. All of it helps to understand him. The same convictions that made him great made him, in the end, very hard to love. Paul’s description of love is a quiet rebuke to the Studd of these years: “Love suffereth long, and is kind; love envieth not; love vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not its own, is not provoked, taketh not account of evil” (1 Corinthians 13:4-5, ASV). Studd had given away all his goods. Not all who worked with him felt that he had love.

Yet some did, to the end. Norman and Pauline Grubb stayed loyal to him. Others stayed too, and the crowds of Congolese Christians at his funeral suggest how many of them loved him. The story of the 1920s is not simply a story of a tyrant. It is the story of a great-hearted man whose virtues had hardened into vices, and of the people who loved him enough to stay, and those who loved him enough to tell him he was wrong.