REGIONS BEYOND MISSIONARY UNION ARCHIVE

Part 1: Minute Books of the Regions Beyond Missionary Union, 1903-1955

Part 2: Correspondence and Reports of Regions Beyond Missionary Union: The Congo Mission,

            1888-1955

Part 3: Correspondence and Reports of Regions Beyond Missionary Union; Peru, Argentina, India, Nepal,

            Kaliminta and Irian Jaya, 1893-1955

Part 4: Regions Beyond, 1878-1981, and Horizons, 1981-1990

Part 5: Correspondence and Reports of Regions Beyond Missionary Union: All Regions, c1955-1990

The One Hundred Years of 'Regions Beyond'

The following article was published in the Autumn 1990 issue of Horizons, the RBMU journal, and assessed their work over 100 years.

From the ‘Regions Beyond’

This issue of Horizon marks the end of an era that spans over 100 years and commenced when the first issue of ‘Regions Beyond’ (the original name of this magazine) was published around 1880. What were mission magazines writing about at the turn of the century? Has anything really changed?

Only a minute fraction of the wealth of the Church is devoted to foreign missions; only an insignificant proportion of her members are consecrating their lives to the evangelisation of the world.

These words were written in 1899. In 1899 people writing about mission didn’t pull their punches; the writer went on ….

The twentieth century is dawning on a world one half of which is heathen; and on a Church one half of which is sadly oblivious of her Lord’s commission. The century behind her has opened wide the doors of every Moslem and of almost every Pagan land. With the uttermost parts of the earth brought to her very threshold, and the challenge to possess them ringing in her ears, she loiters on half heedless of her obligations. She loiters face to face with realms she is called to enter, but of which she still knows nothing, vast Regions lying Beyond her present reach. Can we remain content to spend our little life-day without entering ourselves and helping others to enter these Regions Beyond?

RBMU’s origins lie in the formation, in 1873, of the East London Training Institute by H Grattan Guinness. The original vision was to establish a missionary training college, but as time passed Grattan Guinness and the East London Institute became involved with setting up several missionary societies. Some simplification was obviously called for and so the same edition of ‘Regions Beyond’ went on to announce the adoption of a new name ….

The little Stepney Mission House begun in faith twenty-six years ago has grown till it today includes missions in South America and on the Congo, and three training colleges at home, besides educational, evangelistic and Medical mission work in London and elsewhere. The whole organisation has, after a quarter of a century’s existence, outgrown its early name of ‘East London Training Institute’, and with January 1st, 1899 passes under a more adequate and comprehensive designation. THE REGIONS BEYOND MISSIONARY UNION will henceforth be the name of the various home and foreign mission efforts connected with Harley House. It is our earnest hope and prayer that an early forward step of the Union may be an effort, divinely created and sustained, for the further evangelisation of one of the most neglected sections of the Indian Mission field – Bihar.

Four years later a special edition of ‘Regions Beyond’ was published in the form of an illustrated survey of the entire work of RBMU. The survey ran to 100 pages, but the following extracts give some flavour of what RBMU was doing in 1903.

Our Training Institutions

Harley College training is evangelical, practical, and thorough, as far as we can possibly secure, and the tone is deeply spiritual and earnest. Our efficient staff of resident tutors, under Principal Forbes Jackson, MA is securing a satisfactory standard of Educational, Biblical and Theological work. The length of training varies according to the individual need, in the cases of those who became medical missionaries, it occupies five or six years. The ordinary course, however, last three or four, the final year in many cases being devoted to the special medical training given at Livingstone College, which affords valuable aid to men in the Foreign Field, but in no sense entitles them to the name ‘medical missionary’, which ought only to be applied to fully qualified men. (Harley College was the main college run by RBMU.)

Since the commencement of the work in 1873, 887 men and 281 women have passed through the College of the Union, making in all 1,168. Their distribution throughout the world has been as follows:

From Harley College and Cliff College, to:
Australia and New Zealand 26
America, North, Central, and South 170
Europe (United Kingdom 177) 233
Asia (China 103) 182
Africa (Congo 96) 215

Sixty-one have left us to undergo further training at various denominational colleges prior to entering particular Missions.

Since the foundation of Doric Lodge in 1884, we have received 345 deaconesses. Of these 216 have gone out to the foreign field in addition to these 24 others went in for further training, either in hospitals or other Missionary Institutions, prior to entering foreign work.

Our Missions to the Congo

Some missionary critics pretend to think that it would have been better to leave the natives as they were, without troubling them with more complex views of life. This fallacy of the ‘happy, simple native’ was, however, rudely in contrast with the facts of the case as we found them when our missionaries first went to the Congo, and, in order rightly to appreciate the results of Christian Missions, it is necessary to understand something of the actual condition in which the people lived.

At that time cannibalism was in full swing, and canoes frequently might be seen descending the Lulanga, laden with slaves to be sold as human food on the Mobangi river.

Cruelty was universal, and characterized even the most ordinary commercial arrangements, such as the ratification of an important bargain.

The horrors of domestic slavery were universal, and it would be easy to fill a volume with the recital of the miseries entailed by this cursed traffic in flesh and blood.

Lying and stealing were rather accomplishments than otherwise, and truth was a rare commodity. Polygamy was universal and morality, as we understand it, was practically non-existent.

The religion of the people was demonology, a perpetual attempt to propitiate evil spirits by the wearing of charms. They believed in a Supreme God, who was the creator of all things, but, as he was good and would not harm them, there was no need to pay any attention to him. Their whole effort was therefore concentrated upon appeasing the malevolent spirits by which they believed themselves to be surrounded, and the witch-doctors, whose supposed supernatural powers of detecting and opposing demoniacal influence gave them a position of great importance, were a source of perpetual danger to the community. Thousands of lives were sacrificed every year at their instigation, and they constituted every year at their instigation, and they constituted one of the most difficult elements of opposition to the advance of the Gospel.

Today I am thankful to say the atrocities to which we have referred are entirely a matter of the past wherever missionary influence has been felt. Cases of cannibalism are also becoming of very rare occurrence.

But from the high ground occupied by our station at Bongandanga you can look northward across the Lopori river over a vast extent of virgin forest, in the clearings of which are scores of villages whose presence is betrayed to the eye by thin ascending wreaths of smoke. Among the Ngombe who inhabit this tract of country, and who are as yet untouched by missionary restraint, may be found all the horrors which I have described.

At Work in the Neglected Continent

Again and again, during the last twenty years, Harley College has sent forth new recruits to help to win South America for Christ. Its problems are vast and terrible; it presents an appalling picture of spiritual destitution, and despite the earnest efforts now being made on its behalf, its peoples must still be described as those that sit in darkness and in the shadow of spiritual death.

Nevertheless, athwart that shadow the light is breaking, and it is our privilege to tell the story of its coming, as seen by the little band of workers who represent the RBMU in Argentina and Peru. The contrast between those two spheres of labour is immense. To the missionary, Argentina is a land of promise. Having attained religious freedom, it is shaking off the yoke of Rome, and now requires a lavish expenditure of heat and life, that it may learn the value of spiritual riches the only basis of lasting wealth.

Whilst Argentina has turned her face to greet the rising sun, Peru still slumbers beneath the spell of Papal tyranny. By Article IV of her constitution, Roman Catholicism is the only religion of the State, and until a few years ago a civil marriage was impossible. Even now, the law permitting it is almost a dead letter, since the Catholic Church claims every person born in the Republic as a member of its own communion. Consequently, Peru presents no open door to the Protestant missionary.

Amongst India’s Millions

India is our own, and ‘if any provideth not for his own be hath denied the faith’. What, then, about the evangelization of this vast dependency? Briefly, this. All the missionaries in that land, from Australia and New Zealand, from America and Canada, from Great Britain and other European countries, only number one to every one hundred thousand of the people! That ought to mean shamefaced heart searching for all British Christians. Is this providing for our own?

The populous province of Bihar contained, as recently as three years ago, about twenty-two millions of people who lay outside the sphere covered by missionary activity. Twenty-two millions of our fellow subjects sinning, suffering and dying – without a suggestion from us that Christ loved them and gave Himself for them, and that we worship Him as the Saviour of the world! (The first group of RBMU missionaries travelled to India in 1901 and by 1903 their ministry in Bihar was still at a very early stage. In this extract the author was anxious to drive home to British Christians their responsibility for the evangelisation of what was then a British colony.)

These extracts provide only a few snap-shots from one point in RBMU’s history. They say nothing, for instance, of RBMU’s pioneering involvement in Irian Jaya and Nepal which took place in the 1940s and 50s or of the Peru Inland Mission which became part of RBMU in 1948.

Information about these events and much more besides is, however, included in two books. ‘For Such a Time’ by Betty Pritchard describes the history of RBMU during its firs 100 years. (This book was published in 1973 and only a few copies remain). ‘Dawn Beyond the Andes’ by Phyllis Thompson, charts the work of the Peru Inland Mission.

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