The Committee

“Where no wise guidance is, the people falleth; But in the multitude of counsellors there is safety.”

— Proverbs 11:14, ASV

Two Centres

From the beginning, the Heart of Africa Mission had two centres. One was at Highland Road in Upper Norwood, where Priscilla Studd and the home staff dealt with money, candidates, publicity and supporters. The other was wherever Studd happened to be in the Congo. As long as Priscilla lived, the two were held together by her loyalty to her husband and her standing with the mission’s friends. When she died in January 1929, that bond was broken.

The mission’s home affairs were overseen by a committee, as was usual for missionary societies of the period. Its members were men and women of standing in the evangelical world who had lent their names and their time to the work, and who felt responsible to its supporters for the way the mission was run. By the late 1920s many of them were deeply troubled. They had heard of the quarrels in the field, the resignations and dismissals, and the dismissal of Alfred Buxton. They had read the D.C.D. booklet and been alarmed by it. They had heard about the morphine. And they knew that the founder of the mission, now an old and sick man thousands of miles away, would accept no one’s authority but his own.

The Breaking Point

The crisis came in 1930 and 1931. The full story has never been told from the committee’s side, and the sources available to this book are mostly those of the Studd family, so what follows must be read with that in mind.

According to these accounts, the committee decided that Studd could no longer continue as leader of the mission, and planned to confront him and remove him from the leadership of the work he had founded. Norman Grubb, who had come home from the Congo and whom Studd had designated as his successor, found himself shuttling between the two sides, trying to keep the mission together while defending his father-in-law. When it became clear that the committee intended to act, Grubb and another of Studd’s sons-in-law, Colonel David Munro, the husband of Studd’s eldest daughter Grace, took the mission’s records from the headquarters, so that control of the mission would remain in the hands of those loyal to Studd. Grubb maintained that he had legal authority to do so, as Studd’s nominated successor while Studd still lived. In later life he told the story with relish and some comedy. It was, all the same, a painful and bitter episode, in which a Christian mission split along lines of personal loyalty, and in which people who had worked together for years ended on opposite sides.

The Split

The split was real and costly. A large part of the home staff, and a considerable number of missionaries, left the mission. In 1931, according to the history of the society they formed, thirty-six missionaries who had been serving in the Belgian Congo and Brazil, the mission’s two main fields, reorganised themselves as a new body, the Unevangelized Fields Mission. That society’s own brief history does not dwell on the causes, but the timing and the fields involved leave little doubt that it came out of the same crisis. That mission grew in its turn and continues today under another name; it has long cooperated with the society it came from.

The Worldwide Evangelisation Crusade was left very small. When Grubb took over its leadership, he later recalled, there were about thirty-five missionaries on its books, and for one month that year the mission had an income of about one pound a week. Its reputation in Britain was damaged, its supporters divided, and its founder near death in the Congo.

Who Was Right?

It is natural to want to take sides, and most of the books about Studd take his. In their telling the committee were cautious, worldly people who could not understand a man of faith, and Grubb and Munro saved the mission by their boldness. There is some truth in that. Studd’s mission had been founded on faith and obedience, not on committees, and those who wanted to control it from London did not always understand what they were trying to control. Without the courage of those who stayed loyal, WEC might not have survived.

But the committee also had real reasons for concern, and some of them were the same concerns expressed by the Dictionary of African Christian Biography long afterwards. They saw a mission whose founder could not work with others, who dismissed colleagues for disagreeing with him, whose public language offended many Christians, and who was ill and taking morphine. They were responsible for the mission’s good name and for the welfare of its missionaries. It is hard to see what else they could have done except try to change its leadership. It is also hard to see how Studd, being who he was, could have accepted that.

The proverb at the head of this chapter says, “in the multitude of counsellors there is safety.” Studd never had much use for counsellors. He believed that God spoke to him directly, and he acted on what he heard. That conviction had carried him to China and Africa, and it had done great good. But it left him without the safeguard that the Bible itself commends: the wisdom of others who could see what he could not. The letter to the Hebrews tells Christians to submit to those who lead them, “for they watch in behalf of your souls” (Hebrews 13:17, ASV). Studd had spent his life leading and never learned to be led. In 1931 the cost of that came due, and it was paid, very largely, by other people.

One further thing should be said in fairness to both sides. The crisis of 1931 was not only about Studd. It was also about what kind of body a mission should be: a fellowship of people under the direct leadership of a founder who believed he heard from God, or a society with a constitution, a committee and procedures that applied to everyone, including the founder. Both models have their dangers. The first can become a tyranny; the second can become a bureaucracy. The Church has never found a perfect way of holding vision and accountability together. In 1931 the Heart of Africa Mission did not find one either, and the result was a painful division. It is a warning that every Christian work, sooner or later, has to face.

Jesus gave his disciples a pattern for dealing with wrongs between them: “And if thy brother sin against thee, go, show him his fault between thee and him alone: if he hear thee, thou hast gained thy brother” (Matthew 18:15, ASV). The pattern continues with witnesses and then with the church. It is a pattern of patient, personal approach, aimed at winning the brother back, not at defeating him. Neither side in 1931 seems to have found a way to follow it. The distance between London and Ibambi made it almost impossible; the bitterness of the previous years made it harder still. It is a sobering thought that a mission founded to carry the gospel to the ends of the earth could not carry it, in this matter, across its own divisions.

Norman Grubb

The man who emerged from the crisis as leader of the mission deserves a word of his own. Norman Grubb was thirty-five in 1931. He had served as an officer in the First World War and been wounded, had come to the Congo with Pauline in 1920, and had spent most of the decade there, learning Bangala and working on its New Testament. He loved and admired his father-in-law, and he took his side in 1931 without hesitation. He was also, by the accounts of those who worked with him, a very different man in temperament: a thinker and writer, warm and patient, with a gift for drawing people together.

Under his leadership the mission recovered. He wrote the biography of Studd that made his father-in-law famous to a new generation, and many other books besides, and he gave WEC a spirit of faith, fellowship and mutual submission that was in some ways a corrective to Studd’s own style. Histories of the mission commonly say that it learned from the troubles of 1931: learned, among other things, that a mission needed more than one person’s vision, and that leaders had to be accountable to the fellowship they led.

That lesson was learned at a high price, and it was learned, in part, against the very man whose memory Grubb defended. It is one of the ironies of the story that the best thing to come out of the crisis of Studd’s last year was a mission that worked in a way Studd himself could never quite manage.

Whether in Pretence or in Truth

Paul, in prison, heard that other people were preaching Christ, some of them out of rivalry with him. His answer is one of the most generous passages in his letters. “What then? only that in every way, whether in pretence or in truth, Christ is proclaimed; and therein I rejoice, yea, and will rejoice” (Philippians 1:18, ASV).

The split of 1931 left two missions where there had been one. Both went on preaching Christ. The Unevangelized Fields Mission went on to work in Congo, Brazil, Papua and elsewhere. WEC, under Grubb, recovered and grew into one of the largest interdenominational missions in the world. Neither could have known that in 1931. The people on both sides had been hurt, and some of them never fully recovered from it. But Christ was proclaimed, by both, for decades to come, and the Congolese church went on growing through it all. Paul would have rejoiced in that, and perhaps, in his better moments, so would Studd.