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nternstlonsetlnVol. 8, No.1January 1984
and MissionI n his classic study on American Protestant Women in WorldMission, R. Pierce Beaver-the founding editor of this
journal-traced the contributions of American Protestant womento the missionary movement from the nineteenth century. "Here isthe font," wrote Beaver, "o f all organized women's activities in thechurches and to some extent in the community." In this issue ofthe International Bulletin, which focuses on "Women and Mission,"all the articles have been written by women.In her address to a Catholic Mission Congress in Baltimore,Melinda Roper, presiden t of the Maryknoll Sisters, called attentionto the need for missions to embrace diversity and communion inmany forms. This appeal is based on her experiences in a remoteIndian village in Mexico where, she recalls, "I began my romancewith the pre-industrial, pre-technological, pre-urban peoples ofour globe."Joyce M. Bowers tells of her participation in a project for re-thinking the roles of women in Lutheran missions, with the les-sons of history and of the women's movement behind them in thelate 1970s. On the Catholic side, Mary Motte examines some ofthe major changes for women in mission that came in the wake ofVatican Council II. It may be too early to take an accurate measureof all the changes that are still taking place, in both Protestant andCatholic circles, bu t it is crucial to take note of them for furtherresearch, reflection, and action.
Amy Glassner Gordon presents a ground-breaking study ofwhat was actually the first Protestant missionary effort, in Brazilin the 1550s. The whole enterprise lacked any prospects for perma-nence from the very start, for it was carried on by some 600Frenchmen-but no women!In our continuing Legacy series, we have articles on two Brit-ish mission leaders whose careers had mutual influence. KathleenBliss tells of the work of J. H. Oldham, whose contributions to themission movement in this century are incalculable. Among his nu-merous writings is a book that introduced the work of FlorenceAllshorn to many readers, and it is her legacy that is introducedhere by Eleanor Brown. The lessons that Florence Allshornbrought to Christian mission workers-not in writings bu t in theexperiences of life in St. Julian's Community-have only grown inimportance with the passage of time.
With such accounts of pioneering contributions by women tothe work and study of the Christian mission, our readers are urged
not just to look at the past and the great things that have beendone by our forebears, bu t to join in the creative tasks of missionin the future, to share what Melinda Roper calls the "visions anddreams of the coming of the reign of God in a particular culture,time, and place."
On Page2 Faith and Pluralism in Global Mission ExperienceMelinda Roper, M M4 Roles of Married Women Missionaries: A Case Study
Joyce M Bowers9 The Involvement of Roman Catholic Women inMission since 1965Mary Motte, F.MM
12 The First Protest ant Missionary Effort: Why Did ItFail?Amy Glassner Gordon
18 The Legacy of J. H. OldhamKathleen Bliss
24 The Legacy of Florence AllshornEleanor Brown
28 Noteworthy30 Book Reviews36 Fifteen Outstanding Books of 1983 for Mission
Studies40 Reader's Response46 Dissertation Notices48 Book Notes
issionaryResearchf
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Material about OldhamBliss, Kathleen. "J. H. Oldham," article in Dictionary of National Biography.
London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1981.Clatworthy, Frederick James. TheFormulation of British Colonial Education Policy.
Ann Arbor, Mich.: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1971, passim.Eddy, George Sherwood. Pathfinders of the World Missionary Crusade. New
York: Abingdon-Cokesbury, 1945, pp. 277-86.Hogg, William Richey. Ecumenical Foundations. New York: Harper, 1952, pas-
sim.Hopkins, C. Howard. John R. Mott, 1865-1955. Grand Rapids, Mich: Wm. B.
Eerdmans, 1979, passim.
Martin, W. Lance. "Joseph Houldsworth Oldham: His Thought and Its De-velopment." Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Univ. of St. Andrews,Scotland, 1968.
Rouse, Ruth and Stephen Charles Neill, eds. A Historyof theEcumenical Move-ment, 1517-1948. Philadelphia; Westminster Press, 1954, passim.
Visser It Hooft, Willem A. "Oldham Takes the Lead," chapter 8 in The Gen-esis and Formation of the World Council of Churches. Geneva: World Councilof Churches, 1982.
The Legacy of Florence AIIshornEleanor BrownF lorence Allshorn? Wh o was she? . . . She seems hardly tobelong in this gallery of missionary statesmen, writers,influential figures in the international church scene: this English-woman who was known to only a comparatively small circle, wh owrote nothing for publication, who was only directly involved inthe missionary enterprise for the twenty years between 1920 an d1940.Yet }. H. Oldham, wh o must have met most of the outstand-ing missionary leaders of his day in his work for th e InternationalMissionary Council and the World Council of Churches, could saythat of all of them Florence Allshorn was"one of the most remark-able"; she "saw further than most into the meaning of the mis-sionary task and the nature of its demands." Who then was thiswoman who made such an impact on men like Oldham and Wil-liam Paton, secretary of the International Missionary Council wh osaid of her: "I think she has the greatest spiritual insight of anyoneI have ever known"?
Early LifeAllshorn's life had very inauspicious beginnings. She was onlythree when first her doctor father and then her mother died, andshe and her two brothers were brought up in Sheffield, England,by a governess, a kind bu t undemonstrative lady of strict religiousoutlook. It was a home without brightness, stifling to a child witha naturally lively, beauty-loving temperament. Her brothers wentaway to boarding-school, and Florence ha d a lonely and crampedadolescence. This hard early experience gave her much sympathylater on with people wh o ha d been deprived of a happy home life,bu t it also gave her confidence in human courage and resilience."You don't give people credit for enough courage," she would sayto someone wh o was handing out enervating sympathy.
Florence's promising beginning at the Sheffield School of Artwas cut short by serious eye trouble: after a rest of six months inalmost complete darkness her sight improved enough for her to
Eleanor Brown served as a missionary educational worker with the Church MissionarySociety in Kenya. After returning toEngland, shewasa member andthenthe headofSt.Julian'sCommunity in Sussex.
take a four-year course in domestic science, from which sheemerged with a first-class diploma. She used to say later, in he rtraining of missionaries, that she thought the disciplines of art andhomecraft were especially valuable in that they taught one reallyto look at things (and people) appreciatively an d objectively, an d toexpress one's seeing practically.
Th e first influence to draw her into a living relationship withthe church was that of Dr. Gresford-}ones (afterward bishop ofUganda), wh o came to work in Sheffield. He and his wife recog-nized at once in Florence an unusual potential, which in th ewarmth of their friendship quickly flowered into vivid life. Sheworked with them on the cathedral staff, enlivening factory girlsand Sunday-school teachers alike: forty years later one of themwrote of her, "She inspired every girl with her intense love ofbeauty, not only to look at, bu t beauty of mind and thought; andeverything we did had to be of the very best."
At some time in these years she "fell in love with Christ's wayof seeing things," as she sometimes pu t it, in a ne w way. In he rletters to friends there comes a note of passionate longing for "theone supreme thing." "I'm not content with goodness and nicenessand duty, which I've struggled for. Now I want Him." And with aprescient note: "I'm so troubled about not loving enough. I feel asif I'm not awake ye t. . . . I used to think that being nice to peoplean d feeling nice was loving people. But it isn't, it isn't. Love is themost immense unselfishness and it's so big I've never touched it. hope I shall have enough courage to want it even."
UgandaIn 1920 Florence was accepted by the Church Missionary Societyfor service in Uganda, and at the age of thirty-two found herself incharge of a girls' boarding-school at Iganga in Busoga country;they spoke no English an d at the beginning she spoke no LugandaTh e climate of Busoga is exceptionally unhealthy: in the early daysBishop Tucker had written of it that all nature seemed to be suf-fering from limpness an d lack of energy. Seven young missionarieshad been sent to Iganga in as many years, bu t none had stayedTh e trouble was no t only the climate bu t th e temperament of theirsenior missionary, wh o ha d struggled on heroically bu t at considerable cost to herself and to anyone wh o tried to live with her.
Th e crucial battle of Florence's life, which was fought and
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won during the following years, is best told in her own words,written in letters to a close friend:
I need God so much here. Everything is so difficult. There is somuch "ungoodness" in everything. I keep reminding myself that Iam here for Chr ist and that all the wild and miserable things as wellas the holy and calm ones must beat through me if I am to be used atall. And I thank God that I am here and that it is no t easy. I alwayswanted that .
Florence Allshorn was a born educator in the true sense and,in the few years she was at Iganga, brought the school to a pointthat was described in the Phelps-Stokes Report on education as"first-rate." She discerned the potential for growth in her appar-ently slow and lethargic pupils, and could write "i t is a work fasci-nating in the extreme, full of hope always ." Underneath the hardbu t rewarding work in the school, however, Florence was aware allthe time of a basic failure, a failure in personal relationship thatwas undermining all that was being taught.
My colleague is a dear in some ways, bu t the matter of fact is thatIganga is a hopeless sor t of place . My colleague has stuck it; it justhappens not to have affected her health, bu t it has absolutely rottedher nerves, and she has the most dreadful fits of temper. Sometimesshe doesn't speak at all for two days. Just now we 'v e fini shed upthree weeks with never a decent word or smile! [And then , typical-ly:] I'm sure it isn't the right thing just to leave her to it.
She was almost in despair. Th e children were fully aware that theatmosphere was wrong; words about the love and power of Christsounded hollow. She had come to the crisis of her life . What fol-lowed is told in her own words:
On e day the old African matron came to me when I was sitting onthe verandah crying my eyes out . She sat at my feet and after a timeshe said : "I have been on this station for fifteen years and I haveseen you come out, all of you saying you have brought us a Saviour,but I have never seen this situation saved yet." It brought me to mysenses with a bang. I was the problem for myself. I knew enough ofJesus Christ to know that the enemy was the one to be loved beforeyou could call yourself His follower, and I prayed, in great ignoranceas to what it was , that this same love might be in me, and I prayedas I have never prayed before in my life for that one thing. Slowlythings rightened. Whereas before she had been going about upset-ting everybody with long deep dreadful moods, and I had been go-ing to my school depressed and lifeless, both of us found our way tolighten each other. She had a great generosity and I must have beena cruel burden to her, worn ou t as she was. But I did see that as wetwo drew together in a new relationship the whole character of thework of the station altered . . . . The children felt it and began toshare in it, and to do little brave unselfish things that they had nev-er done before .
For a whole year Florence read 1 Corinthians 13 every day .Though she rarely spoke of this experience again, her later teach-ing of missionary students was founded on it, an d in a talk givenon the eve of her last illness, the hard-won truth is in every sen-tence:
To love a human being means to accept him, to love him as he is. Ifyou wait to love him till he ha s got rid of his fault s, till he is diff er-en t, you are only loving an idea . He is as he is now; I can only love aperson by allowing myself to be disturbed by him as he is. I mustaccept the pain of seeing him with hopefulness and expectancy.
To the end of her life she accepted the pain of seeing with hope-fulness, suffering frustration and disappointment often, bu t never
January 1984
denying her central belief that "w e are made to love as the starsare made to shine."
Training of MissionariesWhen Florence returned to England on leave at the end of fougrueling years, she was found to have a cavity in one lung. Havinglost her mother and her much-loved brother through tuberculosisit felt like a death sentence . But she had a strong faith that, as shesaid, "God is with life, and sickness is the enemy." She refused anoperation, which would have meant living with one lung, and sehe r purpose toward healing. In one of he r later talks she referred tothis experience:
Faith is not an easy thing to come by . You are fortunate if you havebeen ill enough to think that only faith will save you . Then youhave to have it , when your body is saying the opposite . You can gulyourself about the soul, not the body . To believe that God is stronger than the enemy and he has looked on you, His creation, and said"It is very good."
After a winter in Switzerland and a year in a curious little colon y of "dropouts" in the Sussex countryside-a year of bohemianexistence that she found fascinating and freeing-Florence Allshorn was sufficiently recovered to work again, though she had tocontend with precarious health for the rest of her life . At this pointhe Church Missionary Society (CMS) invited her to fill a temporary gap in on e of their two small training colleges for women missionaries. The CMS did no t know what the "temporaryappointment" was going to mean . In the next eleven years Florence was to effect a quiet revolution in th e whole concept of missionary training, a revolution whose effects have been spreadingever since, an d which has changed the attitudes of people wh onever knew her. This was partly because she brought a completelyfresh mind to the situation. She had never had missionary training
JJHer central belief [was] that'we are made to love as thestars are made to shine.' "herself; she was not greatly interested in church controversies oparties; her Christianity was founded more on her personal experence than on family influences . She had no academic qualificationfor the post, only a quick and penetrating intelligence, wide reading, and a natural grasp of the essentials in a given situationAbove all she had learned in a hard school the meaning of thosthree words so often emptily used in Christian teaching: FaithHope, an d Love. Armed with these not-always-available qualifications for a trainer of missionaries, she threw herself into her newwork.
To begin with , Allshorn's unorthodox approach alarmed thmore conservative elements in the CMS, and it was probably onlbecause some of the secretaries recognized her rare qualities thashe was allowed to continue . Suspicions gradually died down athose persons wh o were worried by her "liberal" ideas at one moment found themselves challenged at th e next by her single-minded devotion to Christ. When the two colleges were amalgamatein 1934, she was appointed principal of the combined institution.
Allshorn's quiet revolution was no t primarily in changes i
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the curriculum, bu t in her conception of what was the essentialpurpose of the training. She enlisted the help of excellent lecturers,and broadened the range of speakers on topics of the day; she de-veloped the practical training-all things that are a usual part oftraining. Underlying all this was her burning conviction that theprime necessity was for the Christian witness to be real. Her yearsin Africa had shown her the inadequacy of conventional religionup against the reality of conflicting personal relationships. Thiswas by no means only a projection of he r own experience. Herclear eyes ha d made her aware of what she called "the silent disas-ters" that went on in many missionary lives underneath all thehard work and the building up of successful institutions: the lossof vision, the hardening of attitudes, the acceptance of mediocrestandards.
Florence Allshorn's first aim was to develop in her studentssome real experience in holding together belief and action, theoryand practice: far more important to he r than any technical or aca-demic training (though she valued both) was that they should begrowing in their love for God and their capacity to live with theirfellow students. She considered doctrine to be "o f such importancethat it must not be separated from the rest of the programme. Itsposition in this training is that it is related directly to the total ex-perience of each person. The truths we know and teach must be'proved upon the pulses.'" So pious words in chapel followed bycomplacent or contemptuous attitudes in conversation would meether quick challenge: lofty sentiments about beauty would be heldup against sloppy standards of practical work; new insights intothe great Christian truths emerged from discussion of some small-seeming argument or breakdown in the common life.
For many of Allshorn's students it was a revelation of thewholeness of life. Everything was to come under the discipline ofChrist's two great commandments; bu t within that discipline there
"[Allshorn] was an artist ratherthan a moralist in her approachto people, and she had thepatience of an artist as well asthe artist's care for perfection."
was a sense of freedom, freedom to learn, to grow, to take risks, torebel, to have fun. Florence's deep seriousness about basic issueswas balanced by an irrepressible gaiety: as one of her friends said,unlike the self-conscious obedience that in many of us drains lifeof color, "her obedience pu t the colour into life, and enabled oth-ers to see a ne w world, informed by beauty and light." "Religionto me really is a song," she said one day. She was an artist ratherthan a moralist in her approach to people, and she had the patienceof an artist as well as the artist's care for perfection. "I do feel thatProtestantism works too much on a subconscious feeling of suspi-cion-possibly because it is so concerned with sin-that it losesthe vision of the lovely thing a human soul really is."
It was just because of the possibilities Florence Allshorn sawin the young women coming into training that she was able toconfront head-on not only their ow n weaknesses bu t what she feltto be the unfaced failures of the mission field. "I believe ou r greattrouble is that we won't stir up courage to look at failure." In her
only published article, "Corporate Life on a Mission Station," sheset out forcefully what she saw that failure to be:
The failures amongst missionaries are those who have lost the for-ward vital impulse, the life of the Spirit, because they have nevergot through their own spiritual, personal and social problems. Thisma y be due either to the fact that they were the wrong kind to sendout-people whose spiritual life was unreal-or because they havebecome caught in the cog of the mechanical routine of too muchwork, and have become exhausted and unable to deal with theirproblems. Failing to find success in their spiritual and mental lifethey are seeking it by putting almost all their vitality into "the job."But womanhood may no t do that. Womanhood means more than abright vision of success in a job; it means patience and longsufferingand the deepening of gentlenesses; it means going down into deepplaces.
In this article, much of which is relevant fifty years later, shegoes on to speak of how, in training, the emotional life of the stu-dent has been left to take care of itself-"this queer hinterlandwhere there huddle the anxieties, timidities, antagonisms, self-deceptions, which somehow ou r spiritual life does no t go deepenough to touch." Florence was considerably ahead of her time ingetting all the help she could from psychology, and some of thebooks that are now considered classics were on her shelves soonafter they appeared. But what she read only confirmed her grow-ing conviction that any deep change in a person needs time. Shewas finding as the years went on that the year allotted to mission-ary training was only the first stage of a process. "You really can-not do much in the initial training," she wrote to a colleague."They have not come to the end of themselves; you can only gentlytry to make them more real."
The first furlough was crucial: watching her ow n studentscoming home after what was often a very testing first tour, Flor-ence saw that as well as those wh o seemed satisfied with their lifeand service, there were "those who had gone out on a big spiritualadventure, bu t were rather immature in Christ and found theycould not cope." For these especially it was necessary to have timefor quiet thought and for guidance from someone further on, forregripping their vision in a deeper way.
But what was happening (what still happens) was that theywere being plunged into a succession of courses, conferences,meetings at which they had to give a "good" picture of their work,all conspiring to mask the things that were troubling them; so thatoften they returned to the same situation no further along, morelikely than ever to be dominated by obvious needs, and to stopgrowing-in Florence's eyes the only real defeat.
With her usual incisiveness Florence Allshorn wrote in amemorandum:
Some very clear thinking has to be done about what is real vocation.If they go ou t primarily to do medical work then obviously the firstclaim on their time when they come home is the renewal of theirmedical knowledge, and consultation with doctors who can helpthem. If they go ou t primarily as ambassadors for Christ, then surelythe first claim on their time and energies is this period of readjust-ment to Him and fresh vision of Him, and nothing must be allowedto take its place.
Toward CommunityIt was largely her awareness of this need which led Florence All-shorn to resign from the Church Missionary Society training andto launch into the final, the hardest, and the most creative adven-ture of he r life: the founding of St. Julian's Community in Sussex.
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She expressed some first thoughts about this in a letter to her oldstudents:
I want to do something where I can still go on serving you withwhat I have of experience and real caring for you. I have a dream ofa house in some lovely quiet place where you could come and bequiet and rest and read and talk-where things could be refreshedand recreated before you went off on your new courses. . . . Also forChurch people at home wh o go on and on and on in the same rut.
Beneath this thought was another, which was pressingincreasingly on Florence Allshorn's attention, and which was tobecome the dominant aim of the St. Julian's experiment. For sometime she, like many others, had believed that the Christian witnessneeded by the twentieth-century world was not so much that ofoutstanding individuals as of groups committed to working to-gether. She saw also that, while this was happening to a certaindegree, there was almost always a sticking point, where humanconflicts became too strong, and the group foundered or retreatedto a diluted "putting up with each other," which in reality signaleddefeat. She felt the need of a center where some would make theattempt to break past the point at which most people draw back.
The story of that attempt is told in Oldham's biography, Flor-ence Allshorn and the Story of Sf. Julian's. Nothing illustrates morepowerfully Florence's unique blend of originality, single-mindeddevotion to an ideal, and clear-eyed realism than the bringing ofher purpose into being. In the darkest years of World War II, withlittle money and against active dissuasion from her advisers, shegathered three companions to begin a dual enterprise: to make aplace of physical and spiritual refreshment for hard-pressed menand women, and to discover at depth the meaning of love in rela-tionship. It seemed an exciting adventure as they hunted for aplace in which to begin, and as they settled into an incovenient bu trent-free house in lovely Surrey countryside.
They wrote together later:We were very green, and did no t realize the deep selflessness thatwas required of everyone. We were overburdened with self-centredness to an extent that we only began to realize when we gotgoing. What kept us together was not that we immediately got ontogether. We did not. What carried us through was that we had saidthat we would not leave if we found ourselves in a bad patch, andthat we would not accept defeat.
They were all people who had previously got on quite well withothers in ordinary relationships; bu t now, living at very closequarters with none of the usual escape routes, and determined notto make "easy adjustments at a surface level," they were thrustdown to a much deeper level, the level of conflicting wills andtemperaments, which is so often the arena of human disaster.They had to get beyond "the sticking point," "the check thatcomes in human relationships," as Florence pu t it. "A t times itseemed intolerable," one of the group wrote later.
We knew hate and malice and that dreadful desire to hi t back hardif we had been hurt. . . . Such deep resentment, perhaps, that oneknew that one could not forgive, and yet saying every day theLord's Prayer. . . . When people talk about starting communities welook at each other. They seem to us like people starting for theNorth Pole without even knowing that they need a warm coat.
Through all the difficulties the four held together, graduallybecoming a real community' united in a common purpose and in agrowing experience of "the peace which lies at the other side ofconflict." From the beginning the house was filled with people ofall sorts, both individuals and groups, grateful for an oasis of peace
January 1984
and order in the harshness of wartime Britain, and also looking fohelp in their ow n relationships. The community began to discovethat, in a way they hardly understood, their guests seemed to finrenewed strength and fresh vision just when their own strugglewere most acute. This gave them confidence that they were beinled in the right way, untried as it was.
Within three years the experiment was sufficiently established for a Trust to be formed and a larger house to be bought oa mortgage: the community grew to eight and then twelve, anlaunched into the running of a farm and the beginning of a children's house. This was all accomplished during the exigencies othe war and of the drab war-weary period that followed it. Thosof us who came to stay at St. Julian's Community can still remem
"[Florence] wrote to a friend inAfrica: 'You'll love this placewhen you come home. It couldbe a lovely place for God'schildren for a hundred years.' "
ber the sense of vitality, of gaiety of spirit that met us, as well the warmth of hospitality and the ordered beauty of the house angarden, somehow achieved in those penurious years: a qualityliving that communicated the hope and grace of God much moeffectively than words.
By the end of the decade the lovely old house at Barns Greewas becoming too cramped for its purpose, and at the beginning1950 the community moved to its present location at Colham, neHorsham in Sussex, a spacious house, with outbuildings and cotages, in beautiful grounds looking ou t over a lake and wide fielto the South Downs. It was a brave and risky act of faith, fraugwith financial difficulties, bu t has proved to be a most blessed onfor the community and the thousands of people who have visitit since then, not only for rest and quiet bu t to work alongside thcommunity, learning from them and with them.
Florence was undaunted as on e seemingly insuperable obstcle after another was surmounted. When the move to Sussex wfinally accomplished, she wrote to a friend in Africa: "You'll lovthis place when you come home. It could be a lovely place fGod's children for a hundred years:" But Florence was not well; May she developed an acutely irritating skin rash, which was fnally diagnosed as Hodgkin's disease, and after some weeksvery painful illness she died on July 3, 1950. She was sixty-two.
It was a desolating shock to the community and all the frienfor whom Florence Allshorn ha d been a strength, a challenge, ana light. Many thought that St. Julian's could hardly continue witou t her. But Florence ha d the ability, often lacking in strong pesonalities, to inspire rather than control; an d because thinspiration came through her from beyond herself, from the Mater she loved, it did not die with her. Many of the experimentscommunal living that were made in the postwar years have passinto oblivion. But the strong foundations that were laid at mucost by Florence and her companions have enabled St. JulianCommunity to live and grow, through the years since he r death,a center of refreshment and re-creation for men and womenmany walks of life and of varying religious allegiances, or of nonMany things have altered in those years, in response to changi
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