This book offers an alternative reading of the relationship between an American mission and an African church in colonial South Africa. The author argues that mission and church were partners in this relationship from the beginning and both were transformed by this experience.

Waking Up to God's Missionary Call In the pages of this book, Rev. Leonidas A. Johnson eloquently shares how God's missionary call, like an aromatic stew, has been simmering within the African American church. According to him, "The African American church will play a critical role in spreading the gospel message to people groups living in areas of the world that represent the last strongholds and citadels of satanic power attempting to stop God's Mission."

During the nineteenth century, as Western scientists were busy carving humanity into separate races based on allegedly immutable biological traits, Protestant missionaries in Africa defended an older, biblical perspective affirming basic human unity. This study contextualizes the "civilizing mission" of Western missionaries in sub-Saharan Africa within American debates over race between 1830 and 1910, tracking scores of missionaries and African converts as they journeyed, textually and physically, across the Atlantic Ocean, and back again. More than just interpreters of sacred texts for Africans, missionaries and African converts also became leading interpreters---"God's interpreters"---of African peoples for Americans. While most missionaries were highly critical of the cultures they encountered in Africa, their work caused them to affirm the full humanity of the continent's inhabitants. Without transcending the racialized thinking of other white Americans, they resisted the determinism at the heart of racial science. At the same time, religious and scientific understandings of human difference were co-constituted throughout the nineteenth century. Polygenists, Darwinists, and anthropologists drew on missionary reports to construct their theories, and as the century progressed, a new generation of white missionaries absorbed these theories and became increasingly pessimistic about African capacities, producing sharp disagreements within missionary circles over matters of race, faith, and culture. The stakes were high as Americans fashioned their concepts of human difference, for they were arguing over nothing less than the role of race in defining personhood and its rights. Missionary reports from Africa were often cited in domestic debates over the capacities and rights of African Americans, disputes embedded in the social and political contexts of slavery, emancipation, Reconstruction, and segregation. Protestant missionaries and African converts were critical participants in these discussions, drawing on their expertise in African language and culture to define race in a process that knew no national boundaries. This study shows that American racial orders were both built and resisted with evidence gathered through missionary labor in sub-Saharan Africa.

This thought-provoking book shares the historical and present-day role of the Black Church in the Great Commission of Jesus Christ.

Last Call for the African-American Church revisits the commandment Jesus left his followers to proclaim the gospel worldwide until his return, one that by all accounts is no longer a priority in the contemporary African-American church. Despite the presence of euphoric praise-and-worship celebrations and the proliferation of diverse ministries it advertises as “cutting edge,” the implosion of missions has occurred in this church's pulpits and pews. Selected biblical foundations of missions are provided for those new to the parlance, and for others needing a refresher course. Along with conventional missions’ distinctions, Chester Williams logs some concepts in the glossary he himself has constructed, for readers and for collegial review. They include the feminization of missions, rummage sale missions, missions without Jesus, and window dressing missions. For the most part, these concepts represent a radical departure from apostolic missions and are viewed as biblical tinkering and convolution, most importantly, as obstructions to the Great Commission—world harvesting.

As a young man in South Africa, Nelson Mandela aspired to be an interpreter or clerk, noting in his autobiography that “a career as a civil servant was a glittering prize for an African.” Africans in the lower echelons of colonial bureaucracy often held positions of little official authority, but in practice these positions were lynchpins of colonial rule. As the primary intermediaries among European colonial officials, African chiefs, and subject populations, these civil servants could manipulate the intersections of power, authority, and knowledge at the center of colonial society. By uncovering the role of such men (and a few women) in the construction, function, and legal apparatus of colonial states, the essays in this volume highlight a new perspective. They offer important insights on hegemony, collaboration, and resistance, structures and changes in colonial rule, the role of language and education, the production of knowledge and expertise in colonial settings, and the impact of colonization in dividing African societies by gender, race, status, and class.