Missionary Files: Methodist Episcopal Church Missionary Correspondence, 1912-1949 (China, Japan, Korea)

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Retrieve imperfect matches to accommodate spelling variations or approximate spellings sometimes found in historical documents.

Overview

Missionary Files: Methodist Church Missionary Correspondence, 1912–1949 (China, Japan, Korea)

As America expanded across the continent over the course of the nineteenth century, religion, especially the flourishing of evangelical Protestantism, was central to many aspects of nation building. During the first half of the century Protestant groups focused on planting churches as white settlement advanced into the West and took leading roles on both sides of the national debate about slavery that culminated in the Civil War. But earlier in the century, some churches had also begun to send missionaries abroad, a movement that gained momentum as California became part of the Union and missionary societies looked across the Pacific to Asia.

The foreign missions of the Methodist Episcopal Church (later the Methodist Church) were active participants in this expansion, sending missionaries to China as early as the 1840s. In Asia, as elsewhere around the world, these missionaries played a complex role in the nineteenth-century cultural dynamics of Western colonialism and commercial expansion. They promoted Western learning and improved living conditions with the establishment of schools, orphanages, and hospitals, yet their presence at times made them the target of violent anti-foreign and specifically anti-missionary agitation, as in China's Boxer Rebellion of 1900.

The letters contained in this collection, intended to be reports from the field, are far more than dry discussions of mission business. Ranging in length from single fragments to reports of over twenty pages, they describe Asian peoples and cultures, cultural differences and mores, and the many problems and achievements of the work. The letters often become personal and even anguished, as the writers disclose their fears, worries, and hopes. Stationed in sometimes dangerous areas, the missionaries faced countless hardships and reversals. Loneliness surfaced at times, and problems of health seem to have been ever present.

This correspondence also reveals attitudes about Asian peoples which, at first glance, appear contradictory. The missionaries combined an indestructible belief in the local population's potential to rise into the Christian civilization with a fundamental intolerance of its “heathen” culture. The goal was not to express Christian truths through traditional forms but to achieve total victory over the corrupting past. Once converts had accepted Christ and an idealized civilized way of life, however, they were to become members of the Christian civilization enjoying equality with their American and European brethren.

This collection invites study in a range of disciplines. Though the ethnocentrism of the writers often detracts from their perceptions, the letters include considerable discussion of local cultures, and much can be gleaned of daily life in China, Japan, and Korea from historical and sociocultural perspectives. Acculturational approaches could prove especially useful, as the missionaries were often preoccupied with ongoing developments within local groups and the varying responses to Western cultural intrusion. The relationship between missionaries and their home and adoptive country governments also calls for deeper investigation. Missionaries could be scathing critics of governmental policies, for while their task was to “Christianize and civilize” local communities, they also saw themselves as their protectors, and they seem to have had little difficulty in reconciling these potentially conflicting roles.

Another area of investigation is women's history, for American women played a vital role in the missionary movement both at home as organizers and abroad as active missionaries in the field, and their relationships with local women in the areas where they worked constitute an often overlooked aspect of cross-cultural contact. And because of the personal nature of some of the letters, they provide a means of investigating missionary psychology and motivations. Even quantitative approaches should prove fruitful—the letters contain a wealth of statistical information on mission church and school membership and on financial and other matters.

These files are composed of correspondence from missionaries in the field to the governing board at home and correspondence from the board to its missionaries. The files also contain reference material about missionaries, their mission stations, and conferences. In addition, these files discuss the establishment of a variety of educational facilities, hospitals, orphanages, seminaries, and other institutions that reflected the Methodist Church's educational, medical, and evangelical ministry.

The files in this collection are arranged by geographic area or mission conference and then alphabetically by missionary's last name. Some of the files in this series are arranged alphabetically by the missionary's last name only, and there may be no direct reference to the geographic area served by the missionary.

Collection Facts

Date Range:
1912-1949
Extent:
1,797 manuscripts; 13,279 items; 179,732 pages
Language:
English
Source Institution:
General Commission on Archives & History, United Methodist Church
William Nast College in Kiukiang, China, run by missionaries of the Methodist Episcopal Church, c. 1910.
The Library of Congress