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The following are notable Christian missionaries:
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The following are notable Christian missionaries:
These are missionaries who predate the Second Council of Nicaea so it may be claimed by both Catholic and Orthodoxy or belonging to early Christian groups.
This timeline of Christian missions chronicles the global expansion of Christianity through a listing of the most significant missionary outreach events.
Carl Christian Reindorf was a Euro-African-born pioneer historian, teacher, farmer, trader, physician and pastor who worked with the Basel Mission on the Gold Coast. He wrote The History of the Gold Coast and Asante in the Ga language; scholars consider the book a “culturally important” work and an increasingly important source for Ghanaian history. The work was later translated into English and published in 1895 in Switzerland. He used written sources and oral tradition, interviewing more than 200 people in the course of assembling his history.
The Basel Mission was a Christian missionary society based in Switzerland. It was active from 1815 to 2001, when it transferred the operative work to Mission 21, the successor organization of Kooperation Evangelischer Kirchen und Missione (KEM), founded in 2001.
Christianity in the 18th century is marked by the First Great Awakening in the Americas, along with the expansion of the Spanish and Portuguese empires around the world, which helped to spread Catholicism.
Characteristic of Christianity in the 19th century were evangelical revivals in some largely Protestant countries and later the effects of modern biblical scholarship on the churches. Liberal or modernist theology was one consequence of this. In Europe, the Roman Catholic Church strongly opposed liberalism and culture wars launched in Germany, Italy, Belgium and France. It strongly emphasized personal piety. In Europe there was a general move away from religious observance and belief in Christian teachings and a move towards secularism. In Protestantism, pietistic revivals were common.
Alexander Worthy Clerk was a Jamaican Moravian pioneer missionary, teacher and clergyman who arrived in 1843 in the Danish Protectorate of Christiansborg, now Osu in Accra, Ghana, then known as the Gold Coast. He was part of the first group of 24 West Indian missionaries from Jamaica and Antigua who worked under the aegis of the Basel Evangelical Missionary Society of Switzerland. Caribbean missionary activity in Africa fit into the broader "Atlantic Missionary Movement" of the diaspora between the 1780s and the 1920s. Shortly after his arrival in Ghana, the mission appointed Clerk as the first Deacon of the Christ Presbyterian Church, Akropong, founded by the first Basel missionary survivor on the Gold Coast, Andreas Riis in 1835, as the organisation's first Protestant church in the country. Alexander Clerk is widely acknowledged and regarded as one of the pioneers of the precursor to the Presbyterian Church of Ghana. As a leader in education in colonial Ghana, he designed curriculum and pedagogy, co-establishing with fellow educators, George Peter Thompson and Catherine Mulgrave, an all-male boarding middle school, the Salem School at Osu in 1843. In 1848, Clerk was an inaugural faculty member at the Basel Mission Seminary, Akropong, now known as the Presbyterian College of Education, where he was an instructor in Biblical studies. The Basel missionaries founded the Akropong seminary and normal school to train teacher-catechists in service of the mission. The college is the second oldest higher educational institution in early modern West Africa after Fourah Bay College in Freetown, Sierra Leone which was established in 1827. Clerk was the father of Nicholas Timothy Clerk, a Basel-trained theologian, who was elected the first Synod Clerk of the Presbyterian Church of the Gold Coast from 1918 to 1932 and co-founded the all boys' boarding high school, the Presbyterian Boys' Secondary School established in 1938. A. W. Clerk was also the progenitor of the historically important Clerk family from the suburb of Osu in Accra.
Nicholas Timothy Clerk was a Protestant theologian, clergyman and pioneering missionary of the Basel Evangelical Missionary Society in southeast colonial Ghana. His father was the Jamaican Moravian missionary Alexander Worthy Clerk, who worked extensively on the Gold Coast with the Basel Mission and co-founded in 1843 the Salem School, a Presbyterian boarding middle school for boys. Born on the Gold Coast, N. T. Clerk was elected the first Synod Clerk of the Presbyterian Church of the Gold Coast, in effect, the chief ecclesiastical officer, equivalent to the chief administrator, leading the overall strategic operations of the national church organisation, a position he held from 1918 to 1932. A staunch advocate of secondary education, Nicholas Timothy Clerk became a founding father of the all-boys Presbyterian boarding school in Ghana, the Presbyterian Boys' Secondary School, established in 1938. As Synod Clerk, he pushed vigorously for and was instrumental in turning the original idea of a church mission high school into reality.
The Presbyterian College of Education, Akropong, is a co-educational teacher-training college in Akropong in the Akwapim North district of the Eastern Region of Ghana. It has gone through a series of previous names, including the Presbyterian Training College, the Scottish Mission Teacher Training College, and the Basel Mission Seminary. The college is accredited by the National Accreditation Board of the Ministry of Education, Ghana as a Degree Research Institution affiliated to the University of Education, Winneba.
The Salem School, Osu, or the Osu Presbyterian Boys’ Boarding School or simply, Osu Salem, formerly known as the Basel Mission Middle School, is an all boys’ residential middle or junior secondary school located in the suburb of Osu in Accra, Ghana. The Salem School was the first middle school and the first boarding school to be established in Ghana. The school was founded under the auspices of the Basel Mission in 1843 and supervised by three pioneering missionaries and schoolmasters, Jamaican, Alexander Worthy Clerk and Angolan-born Jamaican Catherine Mulgrave together with the German-trained Americo-Liberian George Peter Thompson.
The Ebenezer Presbyterian Church, formerly known as the Basel Mission Church, Christiansborg, is a historic Protestant church located in the suburb of Osu in Accra, Ghana. The church was founded by the Basel Evangelical Missionary Society in 1847. Previously near the Christiansborg Castle at a hamlet called Osu Amanfong, where a commemorative monument now stands, the church relocated northwards to its present location near the Salem School when a new chapel was constructed and consecrated in 1902. The church is affiliated to the Presbyterian Church of Ghana. Liturgical services are conducted in English and the Ga language.
The Christian Messenger is an English-language monthly publication and the official newspaper of the Presbyterian Church of Ghana. It is the oldest continuously operating faith-based news journal in Ghana, and one of the oldest newspapers in the country. It was set up on the Gold Coast in 1883 by the Basel Evangelical Missionary Society. The first issue was published in Basel on 1 March 1883 under the editorship of the German missionary and philologist, Johann Gottlieb Christaller who had then retired from the mission.
The Christ Presbyterian Church, formerly known as the Basel Mission Church, Akropong, is a historic Protestant church located in Akropong–Akuapem, Ghana. It is the first Presbyterian Church to be established in Ghana. It was founded in 1835 by Andreas Riis, a Danish minister and missionary of the Basel Mission who was the only congregant at the time. After years of dormancy, the church began to flourish after the arrival of the Moravian missionaries from the West Indies in 1843. The Basel missionary, Johann Georg Widmann was appointed the minister-in-charge of the Akropong church in 1845. The Jamaican missionary, John Hall, who had served as an elder in his home church in Irwin Hill, Montego Bay, became the first Presbyter of the church while Alexander Worthy Clerk became the first Deacon. Liturgical services are conducted in English and the Twi language.
Theophilus Herman Kofi Opoku was a native Akan linguist, translator, philologist, educator and missionary who became the first indigenous African to be ordained a pastor on Gold Coast soil by the Basel Mission in 1872. Opoku worked closely with the German missionary and philologist Johann Gottlieb Christaller as well as fellow native Akan linguists, David Asante, Jonathan Palmer Bekoe, and Paul Staudt Keteku in the translation of the Bible into the Twi language.
Catherine Elisabeth Mulgrave also Gewe was an Angolan-born Jamaican Moravian pioneer educator, administrator and missionary who accompanied a group of 24 Caribbean mission recruits from Jamaica and Antigua and arrived in the Danish Protectorate of Christiansborg, now Osu, Accra in Ghana in 1843. Mulgrave was a leading figure in pedagogy and the education programme for girls in both Jamaica and on the Gold Coast. She was the Basel Mission’s first female teacher active on the Gold Coast. Under the auspices of the society, she played a pioneering role in the Christian women's ministry of the Protestant movement in colonial Ghana. Catherine Mulgrave was also one of the first African woman teachers in the missionary educationalist system in Africa.
Regina Hesse (1832–1898), also Rottmann, was a Euro-African schoolteacher in colonial Ghana. As an educationist, she was one of first women exemplars on the Gold Coast to become a school administrator. Hesse was trained by the Angolan-born Jamaican Moravian pioneer woman teacher, Catherine Mulgrave who set up three girls’ specialist boarding schools at Osu, Abokobi and Odumase and was active in the women's Christian ministry in Christiansborg, Accra.
Rose Ann Miller was a Jamaican-born educator pioneer who worked extensively on the Gold Coast in both Basel Mission and government-run schools. As a child in 1843, Miller relocated to the Gold Coast with her parents and siblings, as part of a group of 24 West Indian settlers recruited by the Danish minister, Andreas Riis and the Basel Mission to augment evangelism efforts in Ghana.