Do Numbers Count? A Report on a Preliminary Study of the Christian Converts of the North Henan Mission, 1890-1925

DO NUMBERS COUNT? A REPORT ON A PRELIMINARY STUDY OF THE CHRISTIAN CONVERTS OF THE NORTH HENAN MISSION, 1890-1925 by Margo s. Gewurtz Project Description Although conversion was the ostensible objective of the entire missionary enterprise to China, very little of the considerable scholarly effort concerned with analyzing that enterprise has been devoted to the converts themselves. A major reason for this omission must surely be the considerable methodological problems confronting the researcher. Aside from a few well-known individuals, the identities of the larger mass of converts remain obscure, inhibiting efforts to study _or generalize about conversion patterns, motivations or other pertinent aspects of the Chinese Christian experience. I am currently developing a method and a data base that may enable me to overcome these problems, and I hope by presenting some preliminary results in a forum such as Republican China to elicit helpful criticisms as well as to stimulate thinking about the need and the ways to refocus our research towards "Chinese Christianity• as it was developed and lived in the late Qing and Republican periods. My own work, part of a larger project investigating the Canadian missionary experience in East Asia,[1) attempts to identify and collect data on as many individual converts as possible. These are the converts of the large Canadian Protestant Missions to China from 1890 to 1949, that is, the North Henan Mission, the West China (Sichuan) Mission, the South China Mission (Guangdong) of the Methodist and Presbyterian Churches, and the South Henan Mission of the Anglican Church, using the Archival materials of those churches as my starting point. Given the rather late arrival in China of the Canadian missionaries, most of this work falls within the Republican period, but there is a sufficiently broad time frame as well as geographic scope to allow for both regional variations and change over time. This paper is a first report on this project, and will emphasize the methodology employed and its problems, as well as detailing some preliminary results. To date, data has been collected from the files of the North Henan Mission of the Presbyterian Church of Can~da, one of the oldest Canadian missions to East Asia,_ and only for the period from the Mission's founding in 1888 until the Presbyterian and Methodist Churches joined together to form the United Church of Canada in 1925. The North Henan Mission lay in the northernmost corner of the province. Bounded by Shanxi and Hebel, the Mission territory formed something of a triangle, located in a rich flood plain between the Yellow River and the Taihang mountains. The territory was bisected 18 by the Beijing to Hankow railway, and the main mission station was at Weihui, although Changte to the north (later known as Anyang) became increasingly important. While the missionaries were located in the six urban central stations, the Chinese Church that took rqot here was predominantly rural. Modelling themselves on the structure of their home Church, the Canadians encouraged the development of selfsupporting and largely autonomous parishes within the villages. By 1928, there were seven such self-supporting parishes each with its own pastor, and an additional thirty-nine villages having a •called evangelist• salaried jointly by the village and the Mission. One source states that there were six thousand baptized converts on the Church roles by 1938, but it is not yet clear if that is the total in that year, or a cumula~ive figure for the fifty years of missionary effort.(2] The specific methodology for studying these converts is still being developed and is outlined here in general terms. Missionary sources are perused for reference to specific converts. When a reference is made, the name and information is entered on a card file and the pez~on assigned a number. As at least some aspects of the study are designed for quantification and/or key word recall systems, I have developed a data form on which to enter the accumulated data. The broad areas covered are: Personal (sex, marital status, etc.), Geographical, Details of Conversion, Employment history, Education, and any •additional notes.• Aside from being very time consuming, the limitations of this method are many and obvious...