This fascinating story of a Dutch Reformed mission among the Karo of North Sumatra chronicles the field's first fifteen years - 1889-1904. Plantation executives sponsored the mission, hoping to enlist the Karo as Christian allies in a colonial war against Muslim "fanatics." But the Karo hated the plantations, and likewise distrusted and resisted the missionaries. Civil servants saw the mission as a forerunner of the government's annexation of the Sumatran highlands, and in the military expedition to take the region, the missionaries played a prominent role. Consequently, the missionaries found their credibility diminished by their links to the despised colonial apparatus. Nonetheless, the missionaries' motives were religious, and they struggled with the compromises that made their work possible, yet ultimately precluded its success. Unlike other missionary studies - that focus on biography or on large regions - this historical ethnography concentrates on a single field, and on the personalities and activities of the several men who pioneered it in its formative years. It examines the missionaries' assumptions and values, describe how the missionaries contrasted themselves with the government and capitalist business, and explores the difficulties of translating Christianity across a great cultural gulf. The Early Years of a Dutch Colonial Mission will give pause to anyone who has thought missionaries heroic, or to anyone who has thought them mislead.

This selection of texts introduces students and researchers to the multi- and interdisciplinary field of mission history. The four parts of this book acquaint the readers with methodological considerations and recurring themes in the academic study of the history of mission. Part one revolves around methods, part two documents approaches, while parts three and four consist of thematic clusters, such as mission and language, medical mission, mission and education, women and mission, mission and politics, and mission and art.Critical Readings in the History of Christian Mission is suitable for course-work and other educational purposes.

Studie over de relatie tussen de kerk en de slavenmaatschappij.

Focusing on the six decades that German Moravian missionaries worked in the British colony of Victoria, Australia, this book enriches understanding of colonial politics and the role of the non-British other in manipulating practice and policy in foreign realms. Central to the transnational nature of the book are questions of identity and of how individuals, and the organisations they worked for, can be seen as both colluders and opposers within nation-state borders and politics. It analyses the ways in which the Moravian missionaries navigated competing agendas within the colonial setting, especially those that impacted on their sense of personal vocation, their practices of conversion, and their understandings of the indigenous non-Christian peoples in the settler society of Victoria.

The story of Christianity in the West has often been told, but the history of Christianity in the East is not as well known. The seed was the same: the good news of Jesus Christ for the whole world, which Christians call "the gospel." But it was sown by different sowers; it was planted in different soil; it grew with a different flavor; and it was gathered by different reapers. It is too often forgotten that the faith moved east across Asia as early as it moved west into Europe. Western church history tends to follow Paul to Philippi and to Rome and on across Europe to the conversion of Constantine and the barbarians. With some outstanding exceptions, only intermittently has the West looked beyond Constantinople as its center. It was a Christianity that has for centuries remained unashamedly Asian. A History of Christianity in Asia makes available immense amounts of research on religious pluralism of Asia and how Christianity spread long before the modern missionary movement went forth in the shelter of Western military might. Invaluable for historians of Asia and scholars of mission, it is stimulating for all readers interested in Christian history. --

Explores the roles and expectations of women and men in Christian missionary experience

The George Hicks Collection at the National Library, Singapore, comprises about 6,900 books and materials donated between 200 and 2015 by Mr George Lyndon Hicks. The Collection focuses on four main subject areas – Southeast Asia, China, Japan and overseas Chinese – spanning the disciplines of history, sociology, economics, political science and anthropology. The body of works in the Collection reveals Mr Hicks’ profound interest in Asia and his scholarly pursuits over the decades. This volume, written and compiled by Eunice Low, presents an annotated bibliography of selected works from the Collection and highlights significant titles. Also included are an overview of the life and career of Mr Hicks, a list of his authored and edited works, as well as essays introducing the chapters.

These two memoirs provide windows into the Sumatran past, in particular, and the early 20th-century history of south-east Asia, in general. In reconstructing their own passage into adulthood, the writers tell the story of their country's turbulent journey to independence.

Placing theories of ethnicity and religious pluralism in relation to theories of the state, Rita Smith Kipp in Dissociated Identities situates a particular Indonesian people, the Karo, in the modern world. What the state's policies on culture and religion mean to Karo women and men, who now live in cities throughout Indonesia as well as in their Sumatran homeland, becomes clear only by looking at the way Karo families and communities contend with religious pluralism, with the pull of tradition working against the wish to be "modern" and with the new wealth differences in their midst. Newly discrete facets of Karo selfhood - ethnic, religious, and economic - replicate in microcosm the political tensions of the nation-state, revealing both why the New Order has enjoyed great stability over almost three decades and the sources of disruption that may lie ahead.

Indonesia is the home of the largest single Muslim community of the world. Its Christian community, about 10% of the population, has until now received no overall description in English. Through cooperation of 26 Indonesian and European scholars, Protestants and Catholics, a broad and balanced picture is given of its 24 million Christians. This book sketches the growth of Christianity during the Portuguese period (1511-1605), it presents a fair account of developments under the Dutch colonial administration (1605-1942) and is more elaborate for the period of the Indonesian Republic (since 1945). It emphasizes the regional differences in this huge country, because most Christians live outside the main island of Java. Muslim-Christian relations, as well as the tensions between foreign missionaries and local theology, receive special attention.