By the Rivers of Water

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Book Review

“Of making many books there is no end. . . “ Ecclesiastes 12:12 NRSV

By the Rivers of Water
by Erskine Clarke
(New York: Basic Books, 2013, $29.99)

Reviewed by Darold Morgan

hile browsing through our public library recently, I discovered a new prize-winning book on early 19th century mission ventures in West Africa. It turned out to be one of those gems, not only of exciting and informative reading, but a book brimful of rare insights about the challenges the first generation of American protestant missionaries faced on distant shores.

The hero and heroine of this mission story, interestingly related to the influence of the famed “haystack prayer meeting” of Congregational-Baptist fame, were a husband-wife team of Presbyterians, James Leighton and Jane Wilson. These natives of Georgia and South Carolina, products of a slave-owning society, lead us in their life story through the clash of North-South cultures in their decision to go to West Africa. That era of the 1830s of American history and protestant life is vitally important when related to the crumbling influences of New England’s rigid Calvinism, along with the anti-missions theology it spawned, which also resulted in a groundswell of mission energy in the mainline protestant churches.

Sadly, some of this motivation was attached to a dead-end solution of the American slavery dilemma which was the widespread effort to return slaves to their native African shores. Complex and tangled issues are discussed in this book and the result is some original insights about these strains of American history.

Some of the issues in conflict include the Wilsons’ freeing their own slaves in Georgia, an action violently opposed by their neighbors. Then comes the somewhat unsuccessful effort to encourage both slaves and freedmen

to emigrate back to Africa with them. This strategy prepared the way for Presbyterians, Methodists and Baptists to support this work financially and to give it a spiritual rationale.

The heart of this engaging book is the actual travel to the mission field as it were, preparing supplies for the work, overcoming massive difficulties of getting to Africa, deciding where to settle, obtaining land from indigenous persons, and determining how to establish a Christian work in the context of a superstitious and violent culture. The initial plans included mission schools, medical services, and churches. Felt almost immediately was the impact of African diseases on the new missionaries. The Wilsons survived, but many of their associates did not. They faced the strange enigma of local slavery as well as the continued presence of European slave ships transporting newly-captured slaves to the New World supplied by the very people the missionaries were working with. These were unexpected challenges to be sure.

But the resiliency of these pioneer missionaries is powerfully depicted in the pages of this book. The erratic financial support from America complicated things greatly as did the infrequency of mail from home, the depths of the cultural differences and the superstitious beliefs, and the arrival of new missionaries who were unprepared for the challenges in Africa. But still, the sheer tenacity and dedication of this first couple and those who followed them shines through the telling of their story.

After 20 years of overseas ministry with only a brief trip or two to America, the Wilsons, with their health severely weakened, returned to America permanently. They were restored with rest and time with family and their ministries turned to leadership of missionary support throughout America for the Presbyterian denomination.

The third and final chapter of their work developed with brutal suddenness as America was plunged into Civil War. The reader can sense the conflict the Wilsons experienced as Southerners living in New York as the nation divided. As the war began, they moved back to Georgia to be with their families despite their strong convictions about the evils of slavery. During the years of the Confederacy, the Wilsons were able to move about throughout the territory organizing the Southern Presbyterians into a new and separate denomination. They raised money for missionary support abroad, and this small but vibrant effort at organized support for world missions survived throughout the war and functioned even with the emergence of the Ku Klux Klan and the era of Jim Crow.

All of these disjointed facts are woven together in a competent style that holds the reader’s attention throughout. This book about missions in its infancy gives us some rare insights into American missionary development and the business of getting Jesus to people everywhere. One comes away from reading this book with genuine and helpful insights from the bleak history of slavery to the place of the church in the post-war South. Problems which were endemic then are still with us today to a disturbing degree. But as God raised up the Wilsons to do a truly remarkable work, so today is the calling and empowering people to do the work of Christ still valid.

Darold Morgan is retired Southern Baptist executive and a member of the board of Christian Ethics Today Foundation.