4 - ‘Good temper and common sense are invaluable’: the Church of Scotland Eastern Himalayan Mission

Summary

‘India is not big cities and accepts Presbyterianism well because of the work of elders, as a ecclesiastical form of government, is understood and welcomed in India, because it falls in the customs and habits of the people’.

The long history of Scottish Presbyterian interest in missions is difficult to separate from the convoluted domestic history of the Scottish churches at this time. It was in 1824 that the Church of Scotland resolved to begin mission work, and it sent its first worker to Bombay in 1829. As might be expected, missionaries and their work were affected by the 1843 disruption of the Church of Scotland (CofS) into the Church of Scotland and the Free Church of Scotland (FCofS). This resulted in the unusual situation wherein most (all but one) of the missionaries joined a Free Church mission, bereft of mission buildings, that had been retained by the Church of Scotland. Mission administration was greatly affected by these and subsequent developments well into the twentieth century. In 1900, the Free Church joined with the United Presbyterian Church (UPC) to form the United Free Church of Scotland (UFCofS), which then joined with the Church of Scotland to form a new Church of Scotland in 1929. Within the re-formed denomination, the old offices of the various foreign missions committees continued to function separately for a time although this appears to have been the consequence of administrative artifice and logistical problems rather than suggestive of any animosity. In any case, disruption was of far less concern to missionaries in the field than to church members and workers in Scotland.

As was the case with other Protestant missions, it was not until after the upheaval of the 1857 Indian Rebellion that significant numbers of single women began to be sent to the new stations established in the Punjab, Poona, and the eastern Himalayas. Before this, it was the wives and relatives of male missionaries who had initiated work with local women. In the 1870s, the church also established large mission stations in Africa and China, but the work in these locations will not be addressed here.