Mission – Not for the faint of heart

By Anne McCormick, NZCMS Archivist.

Whether way back when or more recently, mis­sion­ar­ies face many varied chal­lenges. Ref­er­ences to so-called “one-way mis­sion­ar­ies” abound in his­tor­ical records on mission. Aware of the dangers on the field, these people booked one-way tickets to their loc­a­tion. Expect­ing to die over­seas they sens­ibly and prac­tic­ally packed their belong­ings in coffins in anti­cip­a­tion of needing them one day.

While I can’t be sure that the earli­est NZCMS mis­sion­ar­ies actu­ally did travel with a coffin, I do know that over the years many have faced sig­ni­fic­ant chal­lenges. Take, for instance, Miss Della Hunter-Brown, the second mis­sion­ary to be sent out by us who, along with Marie Pasley, went to Japan. Della went first to Naga­saki and later to Kagoshima, where she taught English. This work provided much scope for evan­gel­ism and it is recor­ded that “four bank clerks, who really came to learn English, were so moved by the story of Christ’s life as recor­ded in the Japan­ese Bible, that they dropped English in order to learn more of Him. Of the four, two def­in­itely became Chris­ti­ans.” (N.Z.C.M.A. Annual Report, 1896).

“The Devil seems to have resen­ted this, for both these mis­sion­ar­ies were ship­wrecked on a small Phil­ip­pine Island on their return from fur­lough in 1900 but were rescued after a week” (Stretch­ing out Con­tinu­ally: a history of the New Zealand Church Mis­sion­ary Society 1892–1972” by Kenneth Gregory).

A search of the spread­sheet of archival inform­a­tion I have worked on over the last few months, reveals other chal­lenges faced by Mission Part­ners, of which the fol­low­ing is merely a small selec­ted sample:

 

• Rev. C. Godden was murdered in Norfolk Island by a tribal person in 1906.
• Violet Latham worked in India in 1918 against heavy odds of plague, cholera and famine.
• Mar­garet North was interned from China to Hong Kong by the Japan­ese in 1942.
• Jocelyn Broughton was sent home from Pakistan due to malaria in 1955.
• Dr Ian Hulme-Moir died of an infec­tion con­trac­ted per­form­ing surgery on a patient in 1980.
• Pilot Paul Sum­mer­field was killed in a plane crash in Papua New Guinea in 1985.
• Murray Rud­den­k­lau died from injur­ies sus­tained in a fall in Cairo in 2006.
• Health events took the lives of Jane Mor­rison while in Tan­zania in 2000, and Allan Cous­sell in an undis­closed loc­a­tion in 2017.

Many Mission Part­ners suffered ill health on the field, pos­sibly the least of these being tem­por­ary ail­ments such as diarrhoea, vari­ously “Delhi belly” or the “Murree Hurries” and undoubtedly other col­lo­qui­al­isms depend­ing on the loc­a­tion. Trop­ical com­plaints such as giardia, malaria and dengue fever were also common.

Engage any returned Mission Partner and they will no doubt recount various chal­lenges ranging from humor­ous incid­ents to real dramas. Whether in 1900, 2021 or any time in between, these chal­lenges were all par for the course for Mission Part­ners while still always being under the watch­ful eye of a sov­er­eign God.