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  • The Essence of Mission:Conversion and the Child-Like Heart on the Georgia Frontier
  • Dorinda Outram (bio)
Rowena McClinton , ed. The Moravian Springplace Mission to the Cherokees, 2 vols. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007. Vol. 1: 1805-1813, xxvii + 648 pp.; vol. 2: 1814-1821, 635 pp. photographs, maps, appendices, glossary, and indices. $170.00.

When Brother John and Sister Rosina Gambold arrived at Springplace Mission in frontier Georgia to bring the Cherokee to the Moravian version of Christianity, they were already heirs to a rich tradition of theology and practice in mission. The Moravian church, originating in the central European province of Moravia, had survived decades of persecution since the fifteenth century and had been re-formed as a missionary church in the 1720s. Surviving Moravian communities took refuge on the Saxon estates of Count Nicholas Ludwig von Zinzensdorf and built their first town, Herrnhut (God's protection). Zinzendorf developed the Church's theology and gave it an ecumenical purpose. Obeying Christ's injunction in Matt. 28: 19-20 to preach the gospel throughout the world, during the eighteenth century Moravian missionaries went out to places as distant as the eastern North American colonies, Greenland, Labrador, the Caribbean, and the Cape of Good Hope. By the time the Diaries were written, the Unitas Fratrum (Union of the Brothers), as the Moravians were otherwise known, was the only Protestant Church carrying out this geographical spread of mission work. This is why John Gambold prayed for "the whole human race" (2:260, 6 January 1819), and convert Margaret Vann could talk about Christ's "great desire to save all humans" (2:310, 15 August 1819) The Gambolds' mission was one small piece of this effort. The Diaries provided part of the glue that held together this vast mission field. All missions produced diaries, which were copied several times. Some were placed in the Unity Archives in Salem, North Carolina and Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and copies circulated throughout the mission world. They would be read aloud to other Moravian missions, as Rosina Gambold read aloud from the White River (Indiana) mission diary of 1803 (1:96-97, April 20-28, 1806). Anna Rosina Gambold, whose first language was German, regularly read (in English) to the mainly half-Cherokee children in the mission from the school [End Page 455] reports of work in the distant missionary fields. (See 2:402, 19 January 1821: "On the nineteenth we remembered our dear congregations in Greenland with special compassion, but also our other heathen congregations and all the missions where His great gospel is proclaimed through other servants of Christ." Diaries were powerful technologies of continuity, polyvalent documents produced not only for their home audience, but with the ever-present idea of their being read aloud to other missions.

The diaries contain not only spiritual exhortations and descriptions of conversions, though they certainly do that, but also a surprising mundaness. Anna Rosina Gambold, who wrote the majority of the Diaries' text in Spring-place Mission, carefully recorded the weather for each day. What food could not be produced on the small farm attached to the Springplace Mission had to be bartered for with Indians and white traders, and details of each barter are carefully recorded. Details of working the farm, reclaiming forest, plantings, and gatherings are dense. The legalities of farm-holding placed the mission firmly in the Cherokee world. It stood on land leased from Cherokees, and the missionaries, as the editor points out, also paid their near neighbor, the wealthy half-breed James Vann, for their improvements of the land. The mission, standing near the federal road from Nashville to Savannah, received large numbers of visitors: Cherokees, white people, and Negro slaves; and the names and numbers of visitors are no less carefully noted. The hospitality could be stressful. Numbers sometimes threatened to overwhelm the scanty resources of the mission. Many visitors, both Cherokee and white, arrived intoxicated; some carried weapons, and others were abusive and difficult to get rid of. (See, for example, 2:102, January 1816.) So why all the detail? What possible interest could it be to a mission in Labrador to hear these things read aloud about a mission in...

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