Page 167 - LD215 History of the Church in Africa A4 final

Nineteenth-Century Challenges and Progress

students were taught the normal academics and also how to plant cotton
and other practical subjects. Venn asserted that Christianity and
commerce would stop the slave trade and
develop the continent. He saw the building
of the African church as the key to this
strategy. Sanneh describes the process of The Colony
transferring control of the church from (Sierra Leone)
the Missionary Society to the Native
Church Pastorate: successfully
started a number
On All Saints Day, 1861, the CMS
handed over nine parishes to the of schools.
Native Church Pastorate, with
support for the work of the latter
supposed henceforth to rest mainly on local parishioners. Only
Freetown and a few outlying parishes were retained. The nine
pastors became clergy of their own church, not employees of the
CMS in England. (1983, 64)

Henry Venn influenced other missionary authors such as Roland
Allen and Melvin Hodges who wrote extensively about indigenous
church principles. Some of the foundations for rapid church growth in
the twentieth and twenty-first centuries can be traced to these concepts.

Other mission agencies arrived in Sierra Leone in the early nineteenth
century, including Methodist missionaries who arrived in 1811. The
Methodist missionaries also started a school and planted churches.

Hannah Kilham, an outstanding English Quaker woman with a special
interest in West Africa, learned the Wolof and Mandinka languages from
sailors in England. She was convinced that Africans should be taught in
their “heart language.” She arrived in Freetown in 1830 and “opened
a school for recaptive girls in Charlotte village, teaching in Mende and
‘Aku,’ the latter probably a variety of Yoruba” (Sanneh 1983, 66). Kilham
possessed remarkable insight into missions. In addition to the use of the
local languages, she advocated developing English as a second language
for the purpose of spreading the gospel. Unfortunately, in 1832, while
returning from a visit to Liberia, she became sick at sea and died.

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