Missionary Responses to Tribal Religions at Edinburgh, 1910

The Author: J. Stanley Friesen is a Mennonite pastor and adjunct professor at National University in Fresno, California. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Iowa School of Religion, and his M.A. in African Studies from Indiana University. He has been associated with theological education for African Independent Churches in Ghana and Nigeria since 1965, and comes from a family which has been involved in the missionary enterprise since 1907.

"In his study of missionary theory and practice in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, J. Stanley Friesen challenges some of the current attitudes concerning the work of missionaries among tribal peoples at that time in history. Friesen disabuses us of the notion that missionaries then had little or no regard for the positive values of tribal beliefs and practices and that they saw tribal religions simply as something to oppose and to replace with missionaries' presumably higher religion. ...Friesen's research has given us a linkage with the past that has significance for contemporary missiology." (Dr. James C. Spalding, University of Iowa, 'Excerpt from the Foreword')
"The close relationship between Christian missionaries and the development of anthropological studies in the nineteenth century has not been generally recognized. This work challenges the naïve assumptions that anthropological studies informed Old Testament studies and missions. The debt owed by secular university studies to 19th- and 20th-century missionary fieldwork has seldom been recognized. Friesen carefully documents and builds a case for the significance of missionary fieldwork and its contribution to the development of anthropology." (Dr. Millard C. Lind, Professor Emeritus of Old Testament, Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary)
"The world missionary conference held at Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1910 was a landmark event. It is an invaluable prism, through which to view basic attitudes and values that informed the western missionary response. In this careful and nuanced study, based on a fresh reading of the primary source documents, J. Stanley Friesen argues convincingly that the uniformly negative judgment of both western and African scholars needs to be corrected. Focusing on the Report of Commission IV, 'The Missionary Message in Relation to Non-Christian Religions', Dr. Friesen shows the range of opinions that mission thinkers brought to the table as they debated the