“Why are missionary periodicals [not] so boring?” The Missionary Periodicals Database Project

Extract

Missionary periodicals are like librarians. They have an image problem. People think they are boring. Like librarians, they spent a lot of time agonising over their image. Their editorials were full of complaints that even regular church and chapel goers are ill-informed and indifferent to foreign missions and regard missionary magazines as uninteresting. They were constantly exhorting their readers to go out and sign up more subscribers. If the missionary magazines had a problem in their own time, it was a long time before scholars took them seriously as source material. Scholars tended to think of them, if they thought of them at all, covered in a pietistic haze, of interest only to committed missionary antiquarians. All this is changing. I do not have to convince readers of ARD that librarians are not boring; I hope to convince you that missionary periodicals are not boring either.