Looking back at the guidebooks to the ‘missionary furlough’ from olden days

Sir Robert was a key figure in China’s 19th Century history, and on the same page that his story was shared a reader confirmed that furloughing was ‘invented’ for missionaries in the early 1800s.

Author and local historian Robin Masefield, who’s writing a book about Hart, sent a note to Roamer’s mailbox.

“How fascinating to learn about furloughing - that’s what got Hart to China in the first place! Indeed in 1854, he wrote (in his daily diary) about attending (preacher) Dr Urwick’s lectures on China in Donegall Street Primitive chapel in Belfast.”

Since at least the early 1800s missionaries took 12 or 15 months off every four of five years to come home from foreign lands on a ‘working holiday’ called a furlough, reporting on their work in numerous public meetings and thus raising money for, and interest in, their mission.

Without the furlough the famous explorer Henry Stanley would never have made his historic greeting in Africa in 1871 - “Dr Livingstone I presume”!

In 1839 a Scottish missionary called Robert Moffat was home on furlough from Africa when the young David Livingston attended one of his meetings and was inspired to go to Africa. (And also to marry Moffat’s daughter Mary!)

A copy of an old Presbyterian Furlough Manual dated 1921 makes for intriguing reading, beginning with the introduction - “the importance of the furlough in relation to missionary efficiency cannot be overstated” - and dealing with the missionaries’ time at home “in a truly scientific fashion.”

The manual was instigated in 1911 by the cumbersomely-named Board of Missionary Preparation of the Foreign Missions Conference of North America “to make a thorough study of the many problems involved in adequate preparation for foreign missionary service in all fields.”

The Furlough Manual was one of dozens of booklets and pamphlets issued to would-be missionaries about “the various phases of missionary preparation” such as the “presentation of Christianity to people of other religions” including Hindus, Moslems, Buddhists and “Primitive Peoples and Roman

Peoples”.

There were manuals on the spiritual, physical, intellectual and social life of missionaries, and even one entitled ‘The Missionary in his Public Relations.’

The series of publications was intended to offer “helpful guidance to the young missionary on the field during the first term of service and in anticipation of the first furlough.”

The Furlough Manual partly outlined here today went into print following a conference held in 1919 by the Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church in the USA.

The main focus of the conference was “the most profitable use of the Missionary Furlough” and interestingly, in light of another of today’s much-used terminologies, delegates dealt “efficiently with the furlough problems of the alert missionary”!

The Manual covered all sorts of intriguingly-titled subjects, with just a few here today but more in the near future, such as “physical reinvigoration, mental upbuilding, contact with the homeland, the maintenance of a perspective, the cultivation of the home church and the magnifying of the cause of missions.”

The introduction stated that the total number of foreign missionaries supported by the American Presbyterian Church in 1921 was “well above eleven thousand” and with the “increasing frequency of furloughs deemed wise under modern missionary administration…not less than twenty-five hundred missionaries will soon be coming annually to their North American homeland for regular furloughs.”

With the average duration of a furlough at around 15 months, the Manual’s authors calculated that each year brought “some three thousand years of North American missionary time, which means an investment of more than a million dollars.”

Thus all the training, preparation and “painstaking planning” outlined in the Manual.

In the past, the principal objectives of the furlough were “the maintenance of the health of the missionary, his possible

contribution to the education of the (home) churches and the raising of his missionary budget.”

But the 1921 Manual further emphasised “the bearing of the furlough opportunity on the adequate preparation of the missionary to deal with his ever-broadening task.”

Unlike today’s workforce, furloughed here and in other countries by Covid-19, America’s Presbyterian missionaries in the early 1900s valued the furlough for relaxation, recuperation and reuniting with family and church, though there were some similarities with today.

Roamer’s initial perusal of the Manual ends with its two main aims of missionary furlough, though more will follow in the near future.

“Physical Reinvigoration” came first, defined as “the maintenance of vigorous bodily health, to restore or to enhance the physical well-being of the missionary and of his family.”

An important value of regular furloughs for missionaries was considered to be “relaxation from the responsibility that work on the field always involves.

The second main aim was called “Mental Upbuilding” explained as “fresh mental stimulus.”

The Manual stressed that “every missionary, in order to be fitted to grip his own responsibilities afresh, and to broaden his vision of the missionary program, needs to meet a new group of minds, to be confronted with other problems than his own, and to realize how his homeland has moved along since his last contact with it.”

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