An Illustrated Look Back over the first Ninety Years of the Church Missionary Society

Paul Jenkins, former Basel Mission archivist and lecturer in African History at the University of Basel

The three volumes of The Gleaner Pictorial Albums are a good place to begin looking at the nineteenth century history of the CMS. They are a concise statement of what had happened in almost all the overseas fields in which CMS was working before 1890 – printed on just 250 pp. with on average two to three nicely printed pictures per page. These Albums really are richly illustrated. But why “Gleaner”?

The first very simple answer is that from 1841 to 1922 the CMS had a regular periodical called first the Missionary Gleaner and from 1874 the Church Missionary Gleaner. You can explore these in this resource by clicking here, to see what they are like, and how they change over the years. My impression is of a magazine for people with some education working at the parish level, issued monthly, each issue with perhaps twelve printed pages covering two to three themes in a no-nonsense way, often with a story from overseas, or minutes of a conversation, and usually a picture.

That simply pushes the question a step backwards, though, and makes it even more urgent: what is a “gleaner”? And why was the word so important for CMS publication policy?

Judging by the newest big English dictionary on my shelves people nowadays may come to the simple conclusion that “gleaner” is an appropriate name for a magazine whose aim was to be informative. In that dictionary “gleaning” first of all describes work like that of a journalist, collecting information of various kinds from various sources in order to put together an interesting and challenging story.  

Older readers will know that gleaners were the poorest of the poor. They were so poor they gathered grain which had somehow been missed or lost in the process of being harvested and stored. We’re talking old-fashioned agriculture. Gleaners went into the fields after the harvesters had done their work with their sickles or scythes. They collected stalks of grain which had been missed, or were growing on the fields’ margins. They collected the loose grain which had fallen to the earth while the ears of corn were being put in stooks, and then later when they were put into wagons to be carried to the barns, or perhaps were left lying on the ground when the wagons were emptied. Did the readers of the Gleaner think of themselves as poor people whose missionaries were picking out rare grains of success in their encounter with the world of heathenism?