This book has been a long time in the making, grounded as it is in David Emmett’s personal experience and erudite use of the English language, having been a teacher for many years. It was a real privilege for me to supervise the PhD thesis on which this book is based. Emmett was a doctoral supervisor’s dream researcher – strongly motivated to ever dig deeper into both archival and oral sources with his ability to express his findings clearly and profoundly. So he did not need a great deal of ‘supervising’. All this not only made this book an extremely interesting read, but also undoubtedly makes this a benchmark study that will stand as the prime biography of an unusual Pentecostal missionary pioneer, although it is much more than a biographical study. The author is no armchair academic, but writes from his own intimate knowledge of the Congo Evangelistic Mission that he and his parents worked in, and his personal knowledge of Congolese people and the Basongye language through a decade spent there in the 1980s.
Western Pentecostal missionaries went to Africa from as early as 1907, but William F.P. Burton was amongst the first in the southern Congo, arriving there in 1915 during the First World War in which this remote part of central Africa was relatively untouched. The Belgian Congo, what we now know as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, probably had the cruellest and most oppressive colonial regime in the whole of Africa, as was observed by people like John Alexander Dowie and Frank Bartleman (and of course, many others). This vast stretch of Africa was considered the personal property of the Belgian king. It also meant that Protestant missionaries were barely tolerated, which may explain some of Burton’s virulent opposition to the Catholic Church, who were clearly favoured by the Belgian administration. Burton was not ‘just’ a missionary however, but by profession an engineer, he was an extremely talented man. Among other skills, he was ethnographer, adept linguist, author of many books, and a skilled builder, artist, poet, photographer, surveyor and cartographer. He had benefitted from a middle class background and private school education in England.
But above all, and this is the thrust of this book, Burton was passionately a missionary, a towering figure in early Pentecostal history, and an atypical, rather controversial one at that. He might well be the most significant person to come out of British Pentecostalism, when considered from a global perspective. His influence in the progress of Pentecostalism in central and southern Africa, particularly in the Congo, one of Africa’s largest and most populous countries, was nothing short of enormous. As far as Pentecostal missionaries
I must flag up the influence of Roland Allen (1868–1947) on these pioneers. It is conceivable that with their Anglican background Burton, Luce and Polhill may have read this Anglo-Catholic missionary in China’s book, Missionary Methods: St Paul’s or Ours, published in 1912, the second edition in 1927. Allen was a radical, provocative mission strategist far ahead of his time. He tirelessly advocated a post-western Christianity and mission methods that focused on local rather than foreign talent. Allen went further than earlier mission strategists had done in advocating an indigenous church completely independent of foreign influences. What would have resonated so much with Burton and those who directly or indirectly encountered Allen’s principles, was his focus on mission as primarily the work of the Spirit. Allen constantly emphasised that the Holy Spirit who came at Pentecost both empowered and motivated ordinary believers to propagate the Christian message. He opposed the mission station model because it perpetuated the missionaries’ foreign culture and their permanence. The mission station model was followed by the Congo Evangelistic Mission, and only the violence that followed the independence of the Congo in 1960 was to change that. Allen believed in the spontaneous expansion of ‘indigenous’ local churches as a result of a proper understanding of the role of the Holy Spirit and that of the missionary. As he predicted, it was years after his death before his critique was appreciated. Allen’s strategies undoubtedly would have resonated with Pentecostal convictions.
Burton, who we must remember was in the Belgian Congo for forty-five years, discussed the principle of indigenisation. In his When God Changes a Village
Missiological writing sometimes is limited by an ideology that sees the mission enterprise in terms of successful procedures and strategies. This might have been behind Burton’s practice of mission. But he was not alone; it appears that the ideal of a three-self independent church was slow in being achieved in many expatriate mission efforts, with only occasional exceptions. By the middle of the twentieth century, amongst denominations planted by western Pentecostals, the great majority of converts in Asia and Africa remained objects of mission and had been marginalised when it came to the ‘three-self’ principles. Fortunately, these same converts are now producing scholars who challenge the presuppositions of the past and are not content to blindly follow foreign mission ideologies and strategies. Missionaries like Burton placed their emphasis on aggressive evangelism and church-planting, and the training of
William Burton was in the end a western Pentecostal mission strategist ahead of his time, and his ideas about an indigenous church have been promoted in mission training, particularly in the American Assemblies of God through their missiologist Melvin Hodges. Hodges’ views expressed in his The Indigenous Church had a profound impact on the subsequent growth of this denomination. It might go without saying, but attaining ‘three-selfhood’ does not guarantee that a movement has achieved real contextualisation, a different concept. This can only happen when the ‘three-self’ principles are no longer patterned on foreign forms but are grounded in the thought patterns and symbolism of the local culture. Yet Burton’s story and that of Ngoloma, Shalumbo and other indigenous Congolese pioneers presented in this book demonstrate Pentecostalism’s religious creativity and spontaneously contextual character. As David Emmett beautifully puts it in the conclusion to this book, ‘Burton was the harbinger of a form of Pentecostalism that took root and spread rapidly in Congo, but it only did so through Congolese agency cheered on by Burton himself’.
Allan H. Anderson
William F.P. Burton, When God Changes a Village (London: Victory Press, 1933), 127–128.