3 - LMS work in north India: ‘the feeblest work in all of India’

Summary

To those who consider that the only legitimate and satisfactory result of a certain amount of money spent and of effort put forth in Christian missions is the baptism of a certain number of professed converts to Christianity, the present aspect of affairs in Northern India generally and of this province in particular will probably be unsatisfactory. But the question arises if this is a wise and correct view of the case’.

In this comparative study of women's work in British missions, the work of the London Missionary Society represents a middle ground against which the other societies are compared. Its funds and candidates came primarily from English Congregational networks – from what might be called a mainstream nonconformity, although the society did reach outside England for workers and support. Members of the society occasionally expressed concern to maintain ties with Scottish Congregational circles, even though David Livingstone, like others of the LMS's most famous missionaries, came from outside Congregational circles and from outside England. The LMS represents middle ground between the other two societies in this study in other important ways. Its membership was originally based on a subscription of one guinea annually or a donation of ten pounds, and it was also open to the ministers of congregations able to subscribe fifty pounds annually to the society. LMS workers did not establish Congregational churches as part of their mission aim; at times this very flexibility resulted in difficulties as policy had to be developed ‘on the ground’. At one extreme from the LMS lay the Scots Presbyterian Foreign Mission Committees, a complicated variety of which constituted the arm of the General Assembly, the governing body of the Presbyterian Church, which dealt with foreign work. Its aim was to create congregations and institutions that followed the Presbyterian form of worship and administration. At the other extreme was the CIM, which was non-denominational. It differed from the others as well in the fact that membership also consisted of its mission workers and that its administration was headquartered in China.

By the 1880s, the work of the LMS was almost a century old, so its operations had become large and institutional and less flexible.