Discovering the Work of the Church Missionary Society in China, Japan and India through the Region-specific Periodicals

Phillip Cantrell, II, Longwood University

Founded in London on April 12, 1799, the Anglican Church Missionary Society (CMS) began its overseas work in 1804. Over the course of the next two centuries, and continuing presently, the CMS has engaged in missionary work in nearly every corner of the globe, including Africa, the Middle East, South America, India, China, Japan, New Zealand and numerous places in between. With its far-flung involvement around the world, the CMS produced a voluminous written record, much of which was made digitally available to teachers and scholars by Adam Matthew Digital of Wiltshire, England (www.amdigital.co.uk) in 2015. Among the periodicals included in the first release were the society’s primary bulletins, which started with the CMS Gleaner and finished withYes Magazine. Also included was the CMS Intelligencer, which changed to the Church Missionary Review. These periodicals contain essays and reports from a variety of mission fields around the world, including the society’s work in Asia and the Far East.

Absent from the 2015 release, but now digitized and made available to scholars and teachers alike is more than a dozen region-specific titles related to the CMS’s work in Japan, China, and India. The materials included on Japan are three collections which each offer a different perspective on CMS activities; two of them, The Church’s Call to Action and the Tokyo Newsletter, provide insights from the perspective of Chinese and Japanese students and a third, lengthier journal written by CMS missionaries on the ground, the Japan Quarterly. The materials on China are more extensive and varied. The periodicals included come from the work of various CMS sites, fields, and dioceses across China. Among the collections are newsletters and publications from the Diocese of Western China, the Central China Mission, and the dioceses of Kwangsi Hunan, Chekiang, Fukien, and Chengtu.