Native Apostles

Abstract

This book needed to be written. Native Apostles: Black and Indian Missionaries in the British Atlantic World pulls together insights from scholarship published in recent decades about the spread of Protestant Christianity around the British Atlantic. Collectively, these works have transformed our understanding of the history of religion in the western hemisphere during the colonial period-particularly the role both Indians and Africans played in shaping Christianity's meaning and character in the Americas. Continuing this trend, Edward E. Andrews persuasively argues in Native Apostles that during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, throughout the British Atlantic, African, African-American, and Native American missionaries "sought to evangelize [other] blacks and Indians" (2). The vast majority of people working in British missions, Andrews declares, "were not actually British" but rather what he calls "native" missionaries who "generally came from the same population as their potential converts" (2). He then marshals overwhelming evidence demonstrating that they were indeed ubiquitous. This story sheds light on how colonized peoples responded to, rejected, shaped, and appropriated Christianity and demonstrates that Native missionaries were at the heart of the cultural exchange we most associate with colonialism. Anglo-American missionary groups invested a great deal of time, money, and effort to train and support hundreds of Indians and Africans in the hopes that they would convert the denizens of the Atlantic borderlands to Christianity. While historically they have been overlooked, some historians in recent years have begun to reexamine a few of the betterknown members of this cadre, such as Mohegan minister Samson Occom. Yet before Native Apostles no attempt has been made to look at them as a group, assess their role in the expansion of Christianity, or try to place them in a larger Atlantic framework. 1

Clergy in the early modern Caribbean (ca. 1650–1800)

“…Scholars have also acknowledged the significant role that less immediately visible missionaries (such as free and enslaved Africans, indigenous peoples, and women religious) played in attempts to Christianize among their communities (Andrews, 2013;Clark, 2007;Clune, 2008 andFrey & Wood, 1998;Meier, 2001;Sensbach, 2006, Sensbach, 2007. In plantation-based Caribbean societies where missionary work was carried out by Protestant evangelizers, these individuals have been referred to as "national helpers," "elders," and "plantation exhorters."…”