I have just got round to reading the September issue of The Briefing and Martin Pakula’s article ‘Is the gospel still first for the Jew?’ in which he refers to “the London Missionary Society (later known as the Church Missionary Society)”. This is quite wrong.
The Missionary Society was formed in London in 1795, and was renamed the London Missionary Society in 1818. Its founders included Anglicans such as Thomas Haweis, as well as Nonconformists, but it soon became almost entirely a Congregational body. In the 1970s, it was absorbed into what became The Council for World Mission, and has entirely lost its original evangelical identity.
Four years later in 1799, the Society for Missions to Africa and the East was formed at a meeting of the Eclectic Society, supported by members of the Clapham Sect (including Henry Thornton and William Wilberforce, who became the first President; the first Secretary was the Bible commentator Thomas Scott). It became the Church Missionary Society for Africa and the East in 1812. In 1922, the leadership in the UK passed into ‘liberal evangelical’ hands, and some left to form the Bible Churchmen’s Missionary Society, now known as Crosslinks.
