German Missionaries in Australia

 

The Evangelical Missionary Society of Basel contained members from the Lutheran church in Württemberg (bordering Switzerland) and of the Reformed Church of Basel (Switzerland). The uncertainties of the Napoleonic wars recommended Basel as a seat for this venture, out of the way of active German-French hostilities. Moreover, Basel was recognized as the seat of Calvinism (Reformed Church), and its leading citizens were wealthy and well connected transnational merchants with an interest in the expanding empire and its trade, and the resources and networks to facilitate connections.

 

Its founding president Reverend Nikolaus von Brunn and subsequent chroniclers of the Basel mission society emphasized the non-denominational pietist character of the society, and explained the purpose, timing, and location of the society with reference to a threat by the French to blow up Basel. According to the Basel chronicles, a group of faithful Christians, both clergymen and laymen, Württemberg Lutherans and Basel Calvinists, made a promise to God that if he spared their city, they would establish a seminary, train missionaries, and preach the word of God to the world.[1]

 

Although much is made of the pietist inspiration of the Baselmission by chroniclers, Waltraud Haas characterizes the Baslers as basically order-loving. Pietism refers to a direct relationship between the individual and God, not one that needs to be mediated by worldly organization. However, in 1868 Basel director Josenhaus proclaimed:

 

How can the missionary know what God wills him to do?

By knowing what the Committee wills him to do!

(Wie erkennt der Missionar den Willen Gottes? Am Willen der Comitee!)[2]

 

The Baslers formed a solid relationship with the major Dutch and British mission societies. The Church Mission Society of the Anglican church in London financially supported the venture by initially sponsoring between 4 and 9 Basel graduates per year. The key contact in Londonwas Steinkopf at the German Lutheran Savoy Church in London.

 

Carl Friedrich Adolf Steinkopf (1773-1859) - highly educated and well-connected, known for his business acumen, diplomacy , clear judgment and sense of duty and loyalty - was a member of both the CMS (Church Mission Society) and the LMS (London Missionary Society), and also influential in making contacts to the continent for the London bible societies, helping to found the British and Foreign Bible Society (1804) and bible societies on the continent. He was also instrumental in forming the Basel committee and facilitated the placing of candidates from Berlin. He advocated an entirely global, transnational and supra-confessional view of protestant missionising – among heathen, Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, and emerging Christian communities.  This supra-confessional stance led him to channel £1,000 in 1815 to the director of the Catholic Regensburg preacher seminary  Georg Michael Wittmann (1760-1833, later bishop, beatified in 1833), whose seminary was burnt down during the conquest of Regensburg by Napoleonic forces, and who was himself infected by the typhoid breaking out among the French troops in 1813. [3]

 

Despite Steinkopf’s efforts to build bridges across confessional and national boundaries, factionalism took hold of the movement in the 1820s. In 1817 the CMS set up its own training institute at Islington. From 1821 Basel candidates were therefore sent to the impoverished German and Swiss migrant colonies on the Volga River in the Caucasus, on the Caspian Sea and the Mediterranean until Tsar Nikolaus I of Russia terminated this missionary activity in 1835.

 

One of the support societies set up to assist Basel, in Barmen (1818) started a preparatory school to prepare candidates for Basel, which became an independent training seminary in 1825, collaborating with the LMS and Dutch societies to place missionaries at Sumatra, Borneo, Nias, and at the Cape Colony. When Germanyacquired its own colonies in the 1880s the Rheinische Missionsgesellschaft (1828) became its largest mission society.

 

The Basel Society meanwhile turned its attention towards Africa: Liberia (1827-31) Ghana (1828), and in 1833 the count of Schönburg-Waldenburg[4] offered the society 10,000 Taler to establish a preacher seminary in India. The first three candidates to India, including Samuel Hebich, founded the missions Kanara, Mahratta und Malabar. Later the Basel mission extended to China (from 1847), to Cameroon (1886) and to other fields. Today, Mission 21 at Basel is one of the largest and oldest German-speaking Protestant mission societies, extremely well organized and hospitable, with an extensive and partly digitized archive.   

 

There was constant promotion of missionary work and from 1828, a missionary magazine called the Evangelischer Heidenbote (Protestant Heathen Messenger) was published to keep friends and family back home in touch with what was happening in the missions abroad.[5] Annual reports from the mission headquarters were also released to keep people in touch with the institution’s endeavours. To boost the society’s work, support groups (Hilfsvereine) were established in Switzerland and southern Germany to raise money for mission work through gifts and donations. The support groups and the magazine raised awareness among the German and Swiss public of the hardships, stress, and other difficulties endured by the missionaries and encouraged people to pray for them and provide financial assistance.[6] The support societies were soon spread beyond Switzerland (Basel, Zürich, St. Gallen, Bern) and Württemberg (Stuttgart, Leonberg, Tübingen), across the nearby borders into France (Strasbourg, Toulouse, Montpellier) and as far afield as Saxony (Dresden, Leipzig) Frankfurt,  Bremen, Halle, Krefeld and Barmen, all centres of strong Lutheran communities. This far-reaching networking caused some consternation with other missionary training institutions (such as Rückert, see Gossner and the Berlin Mission Societies). However, it meant that Basel was initially in a good financial position. By 1819 the support societies subscribed enough funds to support twenty funded places at the seminary.

 

 

The mission school opened in August 1816, capable of catering for between 10 and 15 young men, who needed to be at least 20 years old to be accepted into the three-year course. Loosely modelled on the Jänicke institute in Berlin, it was to provide specialised professional training with a thoroughly practical bent in view of the mission purpose which was to be the destiny of its graduates. The first director (‘Inspektor’) of the college was Christian Gottlieb Blumhardt (1779-1838), himself the son of a shoemaker in Stuttgart. His Wuerttembergian biblicism placed great emphasis on the bible, but the college initially refrained from instruction in the bible languages. A sample timetable is not extant, but the students were offered 8 subjects in their first semester, and 4 subjects in their sixth, so that presumably 4 subjects represented a full load.

 

 

 

 

 

To what extent this ambitious program was ever delivered is questionable, since the seminary started out with only one inspector and one assistant, increased to three staff in 1824, and to four in 1826.

 

The Basel training model represented a new paradigm – training for ordination without an expensive theological university education, which was out of reach for young men from artisanal and peasant backgrounds. It was therefore important to allay fears of the high church, upon which the ordination of graduates depended - that their training was deficient.

 

The procedure for acceptance into the seminary was highly formalized. Aspirants were interviewed by the institute president who then submitted reports for consideration by the Mission Committee. They were then interviewed by a mission teacher and conditionally accepted by the committee for a trial period of between 3 and 6 months. At the conclusion of the trial period they were accepted as novices by the Committee in a handshake ceremony. They were required to pass an exam after the first semester, and at the end of the sixth semester underwent an oral exam in the presence of all candidates. They were then presented for a final interview with the Mission Commission, whereupon the Committee considered the results and recommendations. To graduate, successful students were ceremoniously sworn to dedication to their pious work.[8] They were then ready for ordination.  Depending on their ‘calling’ (Berufung), they might be ordained in a Lutheran or in the Anglican church, vowing unlimited obedience to a bishop. This is what some of the earliest graduates, including Christopher Eipper in 1837, refused to do.

 

 

Emerging friction with the English

From the beginning there was tension between the pragmatic orientation envisaged by Blumhardt’s curriculum and the demands placed on missionaries by the ordaining churches and the missionary societies in charge of placements. Particularly for placement in India the British demanded candidates of higher education, and with a knowledge of the bible languages.

 

To the initial three-year training course of 36 hours of tuition plus three hours singing per week, a preparatory year was added in 1821 into which candidates were accepted on probation. From 1822 Basel started to collaborate with the LMS, which accepted up to 8 brothers per year for training. Basel now started to run parallel classes, one tier for more practical training and one for more academic training. However, the Anglicans were increasingly less inclined to accept Germans for missionary placements. They advised that the English skills of Basel graduates was inadequate for placements in many mission fields. The governor of Sierra Leone had advised that only English missionaries could be accepted for placement there, (Handt was sent there in 1827), whereas in west India the church raised objections, and in Jamaica and Barbados it was the CMS itself that confined placements to English missionaries ordained in the Anglican church.

 

Blumhardt now abandoned the parallel classes resigning himself to the fact that he was not in the business of training the cosmopolitan people of higher education (‘weltgewandte Leute von höherer Bildung’) which the CMS demanded for its east India and Mediterranean placements. He observed, moreover, that the CMS was short of candidates and therefore had to accept Baslers, unable to find suitable young men among their own people (‘taugliche junge Männer aus ihrem eigenen Volk’).  In ‘their lovely mission house in London’s Islington precinct’, equipped to offer room for 50 candidates, he found only 12 candidates.[9]  He felt that the catholisizing high-church affectation (‘hochkirchliche, katholisierende Bewegung’) emerging at Oxford was not confidence-inspiring. This comment was related to a dispute over the inclusion of the Apocrypha in Bibles. In 1824 Pope Leo XII condemned the protestant initiative of distributing bibles freely and widely, bringing about an ‘Apokryphenstreit’ in the Protestant movement in 1825/26. The Church of England banned the Aprocrypha in its bibles, with the result that the bible societies in England split from their continental sister societies.

 

In 1839 Blumhardt was succeeded by Wilhelm Hoffmann, a highly regarded theologian with greater academic aspirations for the college.  The curriculum gradually became far less skills-oriented under pressure from university trained theologians, who considered this second-tier training without the essential bible languages as inadequate and not deserving to be recognised through ordination. (Basic surgery for one semester must have always appeared somewhat ambitious). The Bible languages were incorporated, took up much of the teaching time, and the workload ballooned under the added pressure of delivering a more ambitious theological training.

 

th anniversary of the Basel college in 1865 the CMS sent its cordial congratulations, recollecting that 80 Basel graduates had entered into CMS service,  but the relationship with the CMS gradually subsided, and by the time Germany entered into the colonial field in the 1880s the CMS had sufficient recruits of its own.  

Five Baslers had been sent to Australia, and the German communities there started to send Australian-born young men to be trained in Basel. In 1913 Basel received financial contributions from Australia to the value of 20,000 Franken.[10]

 

Meanwhile, other missionary training colleges had emerged in Germany, with the establishment of the Berliner Missionsgesellschaft (1824), Rheinische Missionsgesellschaft (Barmen, 1825), Norddeutsche Missionsgesellschaft (Hamburg 1836), Gossner Mission (Berlin, 1836), Neuendettelsauer Missionsgesellschaft (1841, sending its first candidates to Australia in 1878), Hermannsburger Missionsgesellschaft (1849), and the Niesky college at Herrnhut (1869).

 

A four-year training course had to first instil basic school knowledge - reading writing, arithmetic -  and then impart bible knowledge, some theological insights, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, English and perhaps an oriental language. It was also highly desirable that candidates had some basic medical knowledge. While the expectations of training at Basel ballooned, other institutions were founded with a back-to-basics approach (Gossner, Hermannsburg).  

 

The basic tension was never satisfactorily resolved between offering an alternative path to ordination for candidates who did not have a basic education and at the same time satisfying the bottom-line expectations of university-trained theologians who were in charge of the churches. This tension resulted in an extremely demanding curriculum.

 

In 1881 a reduction of a syllabus was thought advisable, and this was again raised in 1885. One of the teachers, who had returned from missionary activity in India, felt that although rigorous, the training did not impart basic general knowledge, let alone theological understanding. It produced few very successful candidates, because the standards were simply set too high, with too much emphasis on rote learning. Hesse,one of the teachers, observed that the level of education reached by most candidates stood in no relation to the invested time and exertion. It left candidates with poor general knowledge, and without a gift of the gab. He cited the following exam questions as exemplars of this teaching approach:

 

- If proceeding from north to south in the Red Sea, which countries appear to one’s left and one’s right?

- Which was the first general persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire, which the next, and which the last?

- How did Christianity actually spread in the Roman Empire between the years 100 and 3245?

- In which of his letters does Paul convey the greetings of the imperial house? [11]

 

 

The impact of German colonialism

Whereas the founding concept at Basel had contained a strong emphasis on learning English, since Germany acquired its own colonial possessions in the 1880s, there was increasing pressure on conducting mission schools in German in the German colonies, something which all Protestant mission societies resisted, because they preferred that their missionaries teach in vernacular languages. In 1904 the Protestant mission societies formulated their united position that forcing a foreign language on peoples has the effect of de-nationalising them. The freedom of Protestant missions to shape the schools after their own principles without being dictated by political or commercial purposes must be maintained. If the German government wanted to promote education in German for indigenous peoples, this must be based on competence in their own languages.[12]

 

A curriculum draft circulated to the Basel teaching staff in 1908 shows that the skills orientation of the founding curriculum had by now been entirely swallowed up by languages, with the introduction of bible languages. The early linguistic focus on German, English, Dutch and philology had by now been replaced with Latin, Greek, English, Hebrew and German (in reducing order or priority), and these languages now accounted for 52% of the curriculum.

 

There were still about the same number of theological studies subjects, and their load still occupied about 42% in the curriculum, but instead of the initially more practical approaches to theology, such as ‘pastoral care’, ‘scriptures for homiletic use’, ‘mission history and methods of missionising’, they were now far more akin to a theological training at universities. The only skills course offered was in mathematics.[13] Still, staff members continued to raise criticism of ‘our lack of theological studies compared with an academic training course’ and the lacking philosophical underpinning of the courses, because increasingly the missionary training seminary was seen as an alternative pathway to ordination and service in Christian communities.

 

World War I aborted the German colonial aspirations, so the missionary training colleges returned to a renewed focus on home mission.  By 1920 the Basel directors emphasized the impoverishment of the German people, the suffering of the Protestant communities in the lost German territories, the Baltic and south-east Europe, and increasing secularism. It was time to place greater emphasis on home mission, to withdraw from India, and to only continue the east-African missions for as long as they were tolerated by the British. There was now a lack of employment opportunity for missionaries abroad, so that the intake was capped at 40 candidates biennially, rather than annually. Following the example of the American training colleges, aspirants had to have a basic education, and the theology courses would be outsourced to universities.

 

The inflationary pressure on the Basel curriculum arose from the fact that many of the Basel graduates eventually reached the same position as university-trained priests. Most Basel graduates who entered the Lutheran church in Württemberg after the war continued on to pass the 2^nd theological Exam, and their overseas mission years were credited towards their church service. After a while they reached positions equivalent to the academically trained clergy.[14]

 

In 1925 there was a renewed proposal to reduce content, reduce emphasis on rote learning, and profile critical analysis, giving over more time to active private study and reducing the variety of courses offered in any semester. It sounded cutting edge. One of the staff members annotated the memo: ‘good luck’. The proposal was discussed again by the teachers in 1926, observing that the old languages and bible studies consumed the available teaching hours. They resolved to reduce the old languages, possibly drop Hebrew altogether, certainly reduce Latin and limit the offer of Greek to New Testament Greek, dropping classical Greek. The languages should be offered only for two, not three years, but taught more intensively during those two years, and there should be altogether less class time and more time for private study.

 

As missionary training receded into the background in the purpose of the college, the quandary intensified, because as a preacher seminary the training was inadequate. New academic disciplines had by now emerged, such as ethnography, cultural anthropology, or ethno-psychology. These as well as a philosophical education including German literature and natural sciences, were neglected in favour of bible studies.

 

World War II made further inroads in the opportunities to place missionaries abroad, particularly in Africa. Mission training was discontinued, and the last mission candidates graduated in 1955. Only a few mission training institutions (including Hermannsburg and Neuendettelsau) were still accepting candidates without High School Certificate. The only path to ordination now was a normal university theology study or a preacher seminary. The Baselcollege would continue to assist candidates with vocational qualifications to reach university entry. Including a final stay in England, the training period would be six years, during which candidates should carry their own costs as far as possible. They did not have a right to employment after completing their education. The time of the missionary had passed.

 

 

Missionary women

Basel candidates were expected to be bachelors but were required to be married before being posted. If they strayed from celibacy they faced dismissal from the seminary - until well into the 1880s, when there was much discussion around the question of women missionaries, since Catholics and the British were already sending women into the mission field.[15] A personal conflict that had emerged in 1856 between two missionary women in Ghana (Minna Maurer and Katharina Rüdi) became the exemplar to demonstrate that women could not be successfully placed into missionary service, although of course there was no shortage of conflict between male missionaries under the difficult conditions in which they were operating. From being a pioneer institution, Basel started to lag behind developments in Germany where women were already able to be trained as deaconesses - in Kaiserslautern since 1836, and in Neuendettelsau since 1854 - and were sent into missionary service as teachers and nurses.  

 

Under the pressures of social and economic change, continental women were increasingly leaving the confinement of family and village life, and in the first wave feminism culminating in the 1890s women’s associations were formed agitating for a recognition of change, which also fomented in the Basel< mission society. The Baselmission society finally started to send women into the mission field but required that sisters remain unmarried for four years after posting. From 1896 it also enrolled missionary wives in a compulsory five-months midwifery course. Women in the mission field performed some remarkable medical feats, such as Sister Greta Kalmbach, a missionary wife in Cameroon, who performed a life-saving caesarean operation on Mrs. Basedow in 1899.[16]  Still, Basler women were excluded from missionary conferences and station meetings except when matters were discussed that directly affected them, at a time when English missionary women already fully participated in their missions. This, again, contrasts with the attitudes of the Herrnhut Moravians.

 

 

Basel Missionaries in Australia

Johann Christian Simon Handt, 1827

Source: Basel Mission QS-30.001.0054.01

Australia remained a very minor field of involvement for Basel, as indeed for all German missionary training institutions, but at the Australian end, they were quite influential until the Prussian Kirchenstreit so divided and fragmented German Lutherans that the new immigrant German communities in Australia, many of them religious refugees displaced by the Kirchenstreit, started to object to pastors who were ‘supra-denomnational’ (the term preferred by Gossner) or ‘pietist’ (the label preferred by Basel). They were better served by Lutherans from Hermannsburg or Neuendettelsau.[17]

 

 

The very first Basler sent to Australia was J.C.S. Handt, followed by J.W.  Günther, and C. Eipper, all of them in pioneering roles. Handt was the very first minister sent to the new penal colony at Moreton Bay and Eipper, arriving a year after Handt, was part of the Gossner delegation orchestrated by J.D. Lang to establish the first Aboriginal mission in Queensland, at Zion Hill.  Handt and Eipper then collaborated on acquiring the local Aboriginal language.

 

 

 

Christoph Eipper, 1836

Source: Basel Mission QS-30.001.0127.01

Handt and Günther were both posted to the CMS mission in Wellington Valley (see Earliest Missions) instigated by Rev. Samuel Marsden, where the rivalries between German and English speaking protestants surfaced with great clarity.  

 

Renner identifies 49 Baslers who were sent to Australia, mostly to German immigrant communities rather than missions. Some of these were sons of German immigrants in Australia sent to Germany for training. Among the better known are F.W. Basedow (born in Australia), E.O. Maier, E.V.A. Gutekunst, Hermann Herlitz, and Dr E.J. Eitel. Perusal of the Basel archives suggests that the less promising candidates were sent to German migrant communities in Australia and the United States rather than into the mission field.  A much publicized theological dispute in India rendered it evident that to engage with highly erudite native philosophers and theologians in India and China, only the best candidates could be sent into these fields.

 

The most outstanding pastor trained at the Basel Mission was Herman Herlitz, with his personal testimony being published in the 2001 Friends of the Lutheran Archives Journal in Adelaide. In 1868, he was appointed the pastor of Trinity Lutheran Church in Melbourne where he succeeded Pastor Mathias Goethe and served there until 1914. As President of the Lutheran Synod of Victoria, Herlitz made significant contributions to Lutheranism in Victoria, Queensland, and South Australia.[19] In 1867, he was appointed editor of the Lutheran church paper Christenbote and remained until 1910. In his writings, Herlitz demonstrated and proudly shared with his readers great literary and theological skills and constantly confirmed that he was well versed in local and international political, theological, and social issues. He worked very hard to bring unity to the Australia Lutheran scene, but he was bitterly disappointed that some pastors and Lutherans did not view his actions as bringing such unity. Instead, they saw him as drifting away from traditional Lutheran roots. A strong feature that distinguished Baslers generally and Herlitz in particular from other Lutheran pastors was that they saw every protestant denomination as part of a unity - not divided by names such as Presbyterian, Baptist, Methodist, Church of England – united by the common goal of walking with God and following His teachings.[20]

 

Another noteworthy Basler in Australia was Dr E.J. Eitel. He had previously served in China and was later the Head of the Education Department in Hong Kong. Eitel was pastor at St Stephen’s church in Adelaide for nine years and during his pastoral work, he lectured at the University of Adelaide. He was a gifted linguist and wrote fluently and beautifully in English. On 23rd July 1900, Eitel gave a lecture entitled “China and the Far Eastern Question” to the Royal Geographical Society of Australasia (South Australian Branch) at Stow Hall, relating his experiences in converting Asian people to Christianity.[21]

 

Renner observes that pastors trained at the Basel Mission institute were recognized for their beautiful praying ability so that they were often asked to pray at church conferences and conventions. The Basel training ensured that pastors were flexible in liturgical practice and this distinguished them from other Lutheran pastors, for their words of prayer flowed freely without being pre-written. Renner comments that many talented, great but humble, well-rounded, intelligent, and faithful servants of God emerged from the Basel Mission.[22]

 

 

In chronological order of their arrival, the Baslers in Australia were

J.C.S. Handt

J. Günther

C. Eipper
F. Meischel

H. Herlitz

C. G. Hiller

G. W. Wörner

E J. Eitel

J. Reusch

G. Heyer

J. Frank

F. Leypoldt

T. I. Egen

E. O. Maier

H. Fischer

C. F. Braun

G. Schenk

G. Simpfendorfer

F. Drauz

J. Spanagel

C. Siegle

J. G. Hegelau

G. Hees

H.W.E. Bemmann

F.W. Basedow

E. Hiller

G. Engel

T. Frank

K.E .Treuz

C.W.J. Meier

K.E. Gutekunst

R. M.Onz

W.C. Seybold

A. Hiller

R.T. Rohde

E.V.H. Gutekunst

T. Goehner

J.E.C. Zwar

R. Held

F. Bay

K.F. Michel

G. Stierle

J. Koch

J. Schaber

E. Rohde

H. Eyler

J .Simpfendorfer

F.F.W. Finger

M.T. Renner

 

 

 

 

 

 

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A Neuendettelsau pastor destined for migrant mission, Meischel, arrived in Adelaide in 1860, but the first Neuendettelsau missionary in Australia was Johann Flierl.