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Recession: the challenge of Robert Arthington

The vast majority of Christian organisations are suffering from the economic recession. They report a drop in subscriptions and have had to downsize their operations.

Some have had to make redundancies in their personnel. At a time when they might have planned to extend their work they need to contract it and wonder how they will recover if at all. Perhaps Robert Arthington is the one who can solve their problem.

Very few British Christians, sadly, know much about him. He lived an obscure life (in the mid to late 19th century) in Leeds, which is nevertheless appropriate and challenging to us today.

World missions

He was born in 1823 to a Quaker family which involved itself in many social causes. This extended to the burgeoning missionary causes of that time and Arthington eventually moved to a Free Church polity, although as far as we know he never became a member of any congregation.

His consuming passion was world mission. He scoured geographical magazines seeking information about their peoples (somewhat after the fashion of William Carey’s Enquiry), always with the intention of discovering how this might aid the missionary movement. He wanted the gospel to be offered to all peoples, as soon as possible. If this meant him living in penury, so be it. From about 1850, he began to live the life of a recluse, allowing himself the minimum of food, to obey the constraints of his conscience and to let him make the maximum use of his growing fortune.

Henry Morton Stanley’s ‘discovery’ of David Livingstone and his epic 999-day journey along the river Congo in 1875-77 further excited Arthington’s ambition to have erected a chain of mission stations across Central Africa. The Congo’s new-found navigability caused him to offer £1,000 to the Baptist Missionary Society (now BMS World Mission) to build and use a steamer for exploratory purposes. The story of the steamer’s transport to Congo and assembly by George Grenfell is the stuff of legend. The Peace transported him over many parts of the Congo basin and led to the establishment of a number of BMS mission stations along the river.

What we leave behind

However, it was after Arthington’s death that he influenced mission development. His will, becoming effective in 1905, left over £1 million to missionary societies. The LMS received £370,000 and the BMS over half a million. Probably no one has ever left as large a sum to missions. It enabled all sorts of pioneering projects to begin in many parts of the world.

It is easy to marvel at his generosity, albeit with some reserve as to his eccentricity. ‘Things were different in those days’, we say and we give in to ‘weak resignation to the evils we deplore’, as Harry Emerson Fosdick wrote. Arthington’s life challenges us to buck the trend, not by imitating the oddities of his life but by following the example of his priorities.

If we really believed that the gospel is the power of God unto salvation, should we not make its propagation the chief aim in our lives? At the (all too easy) risk of sounding self-righteous, this does not seem to be the case. When we compare what we spend on ourselves with what we give to missions, our money does not seem to have gone where our mouths are.

Fred Stainthorpe,
retired Baptist minister, member of Green Lane Baptist Church, Walsall