Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society

This paper is an historical and linguistic introduction to some of the missionary translations made by the Reverend Lancelot Threlkeld (1788-1859) into the language (sometimes called 'Awabakal') of the Hunter River-Lake Macquarie region of Australia's east coast. It focuses in particular on Threlkeld's shorter texts, including his 'Selections from the Scriptures', which is the earliest published scripture translation into an Australian language. The paper places Threlkeld and his Indigenous collaborator Biraban in their local historical context, and also in the broader context of missionary linguistics. It considers some unique features of this genre, and focuses on cases where missionary compositions provide the only substantial records of an extinct language (the 'Chibcha phenomenon'). Such cases raise the question of reliability, which we propose can be tested. We use as our example a grammatical feature, the subordinator =pa, to determine the extent to which Threlkeld's construction of subordinate clauses was idiomatic. We conclude that, in spite of a small number of anomalies, which are probably errors, Threlkeld's usage appears to have been remarkably consistent with what we know about the functioning of such clauses in Australian languages in general.

There has been considerable research into the lives of women, including some Australians, who married missionaries and worked in the mission fields of the Pacific.' But very little has been written about the missionary' wives who lived among the Australian Aborigines, or the independent women who were trained in Australia for work in China or the Pacific, the two main destinations chosen by Australian women. Missionary wives were consistently represented, above all by their husbands, as 'helpmates' and 'companions in the wilderness', and only later as mission partners? They were certainly participants, with other mission authorities, in the business of colonialism, but their participation needs to be assessed in terms of contemporary expectations laid on evangelical wives and their own aspirations in the mission field. This article aims to assess the work performed by missionary wives in Australia in these terms. To what extent did Australian mission wives serve as 'partners in the wilderness', that is, as active missionaries with their own feminine work to perform? The work of missionary women in Australia can be divided between three main periods. The first period began with the foreign mission movement in the eighteenth century. It was associated with the imperial mission organizations established in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, such as the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG) and the Society for the

Cuando se estudia la Reforma Protestante, se nota el surgimiento de cuatro tradiciones que aún se manifiestan en el mundo occidental: luterana, calvinista, anglicana y anabaptista. La comunicación que planteamos toma en cuenta un importante elemento de la tradición calvinista (también identificada como reformada o presbiteriana): la predicación. Este ejercicio se llevará a cabo examinando el presbiterio o mobiliario en los templos de las más antiguas iglesias presbiterianas en la ciudad de Santiago, enfocándose especialmente en el de la calle Santo Domingo, que alberga la congregación de la Primera Iglesia Presbiteriana de Santiago de Chile. Era un templo anglicano que fue comprado por los reformados de la capital. Los demás templos siempre pertenecieron a las iglesias presbiterianas. Por medio de estos locales de culto, se pretende señalar tanto matices de la teología practicada por los presbiterianos chilenos como posibles influencias de otras tradiciones en lo que corresponde a s...

During the first half of the nineteenth century, one of the uses Britain made of its Australian penal colonies was as a repository for incorrigible indigenes from its various colonies. Included amongst this largely forgotten cohort were several dozen Aboriginal men transported from New South Wales. Sent to such far-flung places as Van Diemen's Land and Norfolk Island, Aboriginal captives were incorporated into the system and worked as convicts. Factors that set them apart from other convicts include their different pathways into captivity, their different understandings of and responses to imprisonment, and the different rationale informing the punishment meted out to them by the colonial authorities.

Shocked by the abject failure of the London Missionary Society's (LMS) first overseas mission to Polynesia, missionaries retreated to New South Wales in 1799 having had their evangelical certainties about morality, culture, religion, and race thoroughly shaken. White settler communities proved almost as disturbing as the islands for the disgraced missionaries. Samuel Clode was brutally murdered soon after arriving; lay missionaries found that their simple communal religious practices would not be tolerated by the established ministers of religion; and co-habiting with convicts, military men, and Aborigines seriously challenged evangelical social mores. John Youl wrote, " no other spot on the face of the Habitable Globe, contains more witnesses of the awful depravity of human Nature " (1801). Humanitarian narratives were central to British evangelical missionary work. Although humanitarian narratives often struggled to emerge in the early Australian colonies given the predominance of aggressive settler expansionism, the isolated voices of individuals associated with evangelical reform deserve attention because they provide troubling accounts of the problems and failures of settler colonialism. This article uses Clode's accounts of his experience at Matavai Bay in Tahiti, and accounts of his death at Port Jackson, as nodal points through which to trace the moral contours of emergent settler modernities in Pacific Rim worlds. Colonial resistance to evangelical authority by both Europeans and Indigenous people confounded the expectations of the vigorous humanitarian lobby in Britain, and the information garnered by colonial agents provided considerable challenge to European expectations. Yet it also provided considerable ammunition to argue for religious models of the moral empire. In such ways evangelical experiences garnered from colonial locations became part of a

This article analyses humanitarian narratives that emerged in response to violence in New South Wales in the 1830s and argues that they make a revealing contribution to the antecedent history of human rights. The missionary Lancelot Threlkeld used his linguistic skills and access to Indigenous communities to collect and circulate testimony about violence and conflict. Threlkeld passed on such information in a variety of ways, for a variety of purposes and through a diverse network of correspondence and print. This article analyses how such testimony was framed within the language of colonial violence into humanitarian narratives, how it was mobilised for specific local and international effects, and how print culture mobilised (or countered) evidence of colonial conflict as part of broader debates about the British Empire, Indigenous peoples and the law. It argues for a nuanced approach to legal sources which enables us to see the crucial role of the Australian settler colonies in nascent human rights discourses and legal practices. The Supreme Court in New South Wales (established 1823) was a vehicle through which evangelical humanitarianism was mediated and circulated in the 1820s to 1830s cases in which Rev. Lancelot Threlkeld became involved. This was neither uncontroversial nor uncontested at the time; yet, crucially, the tension between humanitarian sensibilities and settler interests was fully present in the court room and in the court records, published at the time in the newspapers. Colonial law had only recently moved away from the preceding military system and, as a consequence, was open to debate and influence by a range of sectional interests. So, too, the English common law that had been brought to the colonies was a dynamic and contested discourse. Natural law, common law and public law was already a complex mix, which then took on new meanings in the context of what Ian Hunter terms the 'volatile tripartite relations' between settlers, governmental officials and Indigenous peoples. 1 Settlers and their lawyers, colonial governors working both independently and as conduits for the British Colonial Office, humanitarian agitators and the diverse polyglot of a mobile multicultural colonial world (including Indigenous people) used the law courts as crucial social institutions within which they tested their rights and responsibilities. This is particularly evident in the early foundational criminal law cases, in many of which Threlkeld and his Aboriginal collaborator Biraban played a role. They appeared at ten cases between 1827 and 1838 and were present at eight of the twenty-one NSW Supreme Court cases between 1827 and 1836 in which Aboriginal people were tried, convicted and executed. Their presence was usually solicited because of recognised problems with Aboriginal witness testimony and trying Aboriginal defendants in a system of which they had little knowledge and to which it had not yet been established they were subject. Threlkeld and Biraban assisted by translating and explaining legal procedures. 2 Heather Douglas and Mark Finnane rightly emphasise the distinctiveness of Australian colonial debates about law and sovereignty. 3 Yet comparisons with other colonial

La exposición se basa en la teoría sociológica del compromiso religioso para reflexionar sobre dos ámbitos sociales que han sido relevantes en la historia del presbiterianismo en México y en Yucatán: la conversión religiosa y la posición política. Entiendo que la conversión es un proceso que puede culminar en el compromiso hacia el grupo en cuestión, en este caso del presbiteriano, en el que el aspecto social tiene un papel importante. Al mismo tiempo al adquirir una identidad de fe, nuestras acciones son guiadas por una visión particular de la sociedad, en la historia del presbiterianismo fue evidente cuando algunos presbiterianos se alinearon a una posición política durante la Revolución y el socialismo.

Relatively little is known about the life and work of William James Shrewsbury in Barbados, other than the fact that he was a Methodist missionary who ministered to a small flock in Barbados during the early 1820s that included Sarah Ann Gill (future national heroine), and that he was driven from the island by an angry mob that destroyed his chapel in 1823. He is commemorated in the Shrewsbury Methodist chapel in St Philip. This article discusses Shrewsbury’s career as a Methodist missionary, and in particular, two seminal events in his life. The first of these events was the incident in Barbados. The second event came over a decade later, in 1835, while Shrewsbury was serving in Southern Africa as a missionary there. To the dismay of the Missionary Committee at home in England, he sided with the Settlers against the local Xhosa people to whom he had been sent to minister when war broke out between them, and advocated the use of the harshest measures against them by the colonial authorities.  Having been widely praised and feted in England for his heroic defence of the faith against the slave-owners in Barbados in the first episode, he was roundly condemned and vilified for his role in the second, and was forced to retire from the mission field in disgrace. How did this happen? Who was the real Shrewsbury – the hero or the villain?

1. Theology of reconciliation, theology of friendship:  From a White Southern Woman´s Social Gospel to the theology to the hope of transformation in the public sphere
2. Theology of reconciliation, theology of hospitality:  From the experience of the convivência (Living together)  to a deeper understanding of hospitality as Philoxenia

Abstract:
Since Albrecht Ritschl, the theology of the cross as theology of reconciliation or the overcoming of human enmity by godly friendship in the crucified Christ
has left its mark in mission, for example, in Bonhoeffers book "Discipleship". Less known is a parallel discussion in the North American Theology of the second half of the 19th century.
The conference shows the impact of this discussion in mission, focusing on four moments: the theology and Practice of White Southern Woman as educators (1888-1945), the proposal of the Social Creed of 1970 in what concern to the public sphere (1970-1990), the attempts to serve indigenous populations (1950-2000) and the horizon of a Church as place of hospitality  as Philoxenia (2015).
Seen together the conference arguments that a radical engagement in mission can be furthered by strong christological roots and a theology of the cross.

Religious discourses on social justice address the churches and the public. For new generations in the churches, they sometimes seem more imported from outside rather than grown from inside. The paper reminds the forgotten and widely untold story of social gospel influences, especially among woman, in the Brazilian Mission of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, their profound impact on church practice and their at least likely influence on doctrinal change.  In a wider sense, the paper develops the argument that social justice claims during the Brazilian Dictatorship between 1964 and 1985 and in the 21st century are and can be rooted in a longtime missionary identity, initially especially nurtured by woman and their missionary agencies, open and able to respond to new challenges and to dialog with new partners (WCC, social movements, theology of liberation). The paper highlight the historic importance and impact of woman to develop social justice claims and suggests the need for new or continuous affords to remind their example and to invest in theological education done by woman and developed for woman. Beside this, remembers the paper a specific Methodist - and ecumenically embraced (by the Federal Council of Christian Churches in the US and their respective missions) - response to social justice claims: a social “creed” as interface between social doctrine, liturgical life and Christian militancy as an afford to imbed social justice claims in church life as a whole, a dynamic expression of a “status confessionis” “… as an address of faith to the Christian conscience…”.

This chapter traces the changing representation of the female missionary figure in Britain from the 1820s to the 1870s.. Eyre argues that the representation of female missionaries in early nineteenth-century missionary biographies impacted how women from a variety of denominations subsequently represented themselves. The chapter outlines how biographies used emotion in their representation of the female missionary, establishing her as ideally self-sacrificing and domestic. However, using the newsletters of the Wesleyan Methodist Mission’s Ladies’ Committee, Eyre argues that women missionaries in the field displayed ambivalence concerning this ideal female missionary identity. These women’s rewriting of the missionary narrative revealed the subordination at the emotional heart of female missionary biographies as they in turn used the deaths of their native converts for emotional effect.

This paper is the result of coming across a Budweiser Beer advertisement featuring the founder of the Methodist religion, John Wesley. It draws from the blog post on the John Wesley Budweiser Beer ad. In this advertisement for Budweiser, John Wesley, the 18th-century, founder of the Methodist religion was portrayed as an advocate of beer drinking. This John Wesley Budweiser Beer ad was run nationally, during the summer of 1908.

Reflexión Teológica y Litúrgica para el Metodismo Mexicano en nuestro tiempo, busca llevarnos a una reflexion histórica y litúrgica en contraste con la dinámica de fe en nuestro presente, el pietismo y la indiferencia a lo largo de nuestra denominación en México y América Latina

VINTO, COCHABAMBA SEPTIEMBRE 2011 INTRODUCCIÓN Iglesias liberales, mientras que otras son conservadoras; algunas permisivas, otras legalistas; algunas formales, otras extasiadas. La pluralidad religiosa trae desafíos para el evangelismo. Porque cada religión, cristiana o no, posee características peculiares a ella. No con la intención limitada de solo conocer la historia, doctrina y práctica de las Iglesias Presbiterianas y Metodistas, empero conocer sus características marcadas, como fortalezas y debilidades, exentando conceptos preconcebidos al elaborar dicha presentación documentada.

On May16 th , 1820, a caravan of British settlers reached the southeastern coast of what is today South Africa. Standing amidst this uneasy crowd was the Wesleyan missionary Reverend William Shaw. The following account, taken from his memoirs, paints the episode.

2015 will see the bicentenary of the arrival to the colony of New South Wales, at the age of twenty-nine, of the first Wesleyan Methodist minister, the Rev. Samuel Leigh. Of course, Leigh was not the first Methodist to arrive, lay preachers and class leaders such as Edward Eagar and Thomas Bowden already being active in their own ministries. Nonetheless, in spite of its opportunities for lay ministry, early nineteenth century Wesleyan Methodism was a movement dominated by clerical authority, so it is appropriate that Leigh’s arrival be seen as the beginnings of formal British-Conference-approved Methodism in the colony. Methodist ministers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century were primarily missionaries, both at home and abroad. By almost every measure Leigh was a failure as a missionary. He made few converts, failed to establish thriving circuits, and his relationships with his fellow missionaries were strained all around. This paper will provide an introduction to Leigh and his work through discussing three sets of relationships - with Governor Lachlan Macquarie, with the clergy of the Established Church, and with his fellow workers.

This article aims examines the history of Threlkeld's lingnistic studies, exploring the climate in which this remarkable work was undertaken and placing it within the context of his career as a missionary and an advocate of the Aboriginal cause.

In July 1826, two Methodist gentlemen sat down for a tense meeting with the New South Wales Attorney-General, Saxe Bannister (1790-1877). The matter at hand was a controversy that had arisen from a venture undertaken by the WMMS on a remote penal establishment on the frontier at Wellington Valley in central-western NSW. In particular, there were questions to be answered about the conduct of a young missionary, John Harper, who was alleged to have publicly misrepresented the short-term results and long-term prospects for the evangelization of the Wiradjuri people native to the area ...

This article offers a preliminary investigation of illegal movement by British convicts on one of the remote, frontier pastoral districts of New South Wales (Australia) in the 1820s. Principally I am concerned here with some broader questions concerning the redistribution and demographic movement of the NSW convict population during this important period of expansion and reorganisation. What were the frequency and the nature of illegal movement on the remote Bathurst frontier? To what extent was the forced relocation of the convict population countered by their returning illegally? Did they, by clandestinely leaving their employment situations, succeed in improving their situation? Did they find a genuine 'change of place'?