The Story of Lutheran Missions

by Elsie Singmaster

Think too of the awful caricature of ships carrying in their holds these untold millions of gallons of rum, holding on Sabbath the beautiful services of the Church of England! More than all this, along this coast are ships of war, bristling with cannon, and on these ships, too, are read the Sabbath service, and there is a chaplain to read daily prayers. They are here to protect commerce, a trade that is transforming so many of these people into driveling idiots, gibbering maniacs, thieves, harlots, everything that is low and wicked, then launching their sinful souls into the lake that burns.”

To the horror of its own situation Africa is not dull. Like the American Indian, like every poor besotted wretch in his hours of sanity, the African has besought that this curse be removed. In 1883 the natives of the diamond fields implored the Cape Parliament to have public houses removed at least six miles. The petition was refused. |Mohammed-anism in Africa.| A little over six hundred years before the Christian era Mohammed preached his new religion in Arabia, urging upon those who followed him prayer, almsgiving, fasting and pilgrimage to Mecca, and allowing them slavery, concubinage, polygamy and easy divorce. With the rapidity of fire in a field of dry grass the new faith spread, not the least productive of the methods of the prophet being wars of subjugation and extermination.

The Mohammedans soon conquered North Africa sweeping away the early Christianity, and then crossed into Spain from which they were finally driven. For a long time the great desert served as an impenetrable barrier to further advance in Africa, but presently they crossed the desert, and when Christian missionaries arrived on the west coast, they found that Islam had preceded them. Forbidding none of the old practices of heathendom, imposing only a few new rules which are easily followed, the Mohammedan faith has had an enormous following. Between the Crescent and the Cross West Africa must make her choice and upon the Christian Church depends the decision.

In meeting Islam and its active missionaries the Christian cannot but be sadly aware that the evil of drink was and is condemned by the prophet and his followers and that to a true Mohammedan all forms of alcohol are taboo, a fact with which the Mohammedan has not failed to taunt his rival.

Dr. Zwemer and Dr. Westerman estimate the total population of the Moslem world to be two hundred million of whom forty-two million are in Africa. To them as well as to the pagan should the Gospel message go.

A missionary book or a missionary address to which I am not able to give credit describes the parting of an English trader from the African woman with whom he had lived during a long residence in Africa, who had served him and truly loved him. Having accumulated riches, he was about to return to England without even bidding her farewell, but she had heard of his departure and followed him to the shore, where throwing herself at his feet, she besought him not to cast her aside. Indifferent to her grief, annoyed by her importunity, he angrily thrust her from him and embarked. Such have been the dealings of the white race with Africa.

|Africa Under European Flags.| Except for a few almost negligible sections the continent is under European flags. France owns a colony twenty times the size of France itself; Great Britain a colony as large as the United States, which extends almost without interruption from the coast to Cairo, a distance of six thousand miles; Germany, a colony one and one-half times as large as the German Empire in Europe; Belgium, a territory equal to that of Germany; and Portugal, Spain and Italy a twelfth of the continent between them.

|The Picture Not All Dark.| But the picture is not all dark. The mention of Africa recalls to our minds the names of Livingstone, of Robert Moffatt, of David A. Day. The Christian world has in Africa its records of shame, it has also its records of glory. It has at Kimberly the deep shafts of diamond mines, symbol of the pride and lust of man’s heart; it has nearby the graves of many pious German Lutherans. Lingering along the western shore there must be still the cries of the afflicted, the wailing of mothers torn from their children, of husbands beaten from their wives! Yet here are the graves of the children of David A. Day. Into the distant interior penetrated the slave raiders, torturing, driving the inhabitants from their villages, binding them with chains, marking their course with blood; yet here is buried the heart of Livingstone. Whether or not we heed the call, we are bound to Africa by an unbreakable bond.

|The First African Missionary a Lutheran.| It is a satisfaction and an inspiration to know in the searching of heart which should be ours that our own church has heeded the Ethiopian call. If it is true that “when the history of the great African States of the future comes to be written, the arrival of the first missionary will be the first historical event”, then will the Lutheran Church have its Peter Heiling (Chapter I) to record as the first of the Protestants to concern himself directly with the spiritual welfare of the Africans. Would that there were no such gap as that which exists between his going to Abyssinia in 1634 and that of the next Lutheran missionaries!

For purposes of Lutheran missionary study, we shall divide Africa into three sections: first, the West Coast; secondly, South Africa; thirdly, East Africa. As in the case of India we shall consider first the work of the German, then the work of the Scandinavian, then the work of the American Lutherans.