Today Caribbean countries are ablaze with evangelical religious fervor. This is evident not only in the long listings of worship services, workshops, prayer meetings, evangelical conferences and revival campaigns advertised constantly in Caribbean popular media but also in public testimonies and proselytizing on the streets by believers. Placed prominently on the counter of one of Grenada’s major post offices is the caption: JESUS SAVES. Forty to sixty years ago, few locals would have expressed their religiosity so publicly. Besides, with its strong Anglican influences, the British Colonial Office that oversaw these islands’ postal services would have banned such captions if anyone had dared to mount them. Like the religious advertisement posted strategically on a lamppost, on the roadside of Lucas Street, one of the major roads leading into the center of St. George’s, Grenada’s capital. Mounted in full view of pedestrians and passengers in vehicles, it reads: Are you miserable? Do you want to be happy? Try Jesus. Although Pentecostals worry constantly about the absence of God in the lives of the people in the island state, the salvation story is being proclaimed everywhere, and politicians, posters, and evangelical religious events testify to the cultural infusion of a new form of Christianity in the region. 1
Back in the 1940s and 1950s, while en route from North America to win the rest of the world for Christ, evangelical missionaries stopped off in the Caribbean, and their influence in the region has grown steadily. The Caribbean was a natural jumping-off point for North American evangelical missionaries who began to work there in earnest in the 1950s. The Caribbean region (also called the West Indies) is located between one and four hours away by air from Florida, other eastern US seaboard states, and Toronto, Ontario, Canada; regions with large, immigrant Caribbean populations. Besides, North American politicians and social scientists have been known to describe the Caribbean as America’s backyard, America’s Third Border, and as being within the US sphere of influence. Proselytizing and evangelization initiatives by North American Pentecostal missionaries that began in the 1950s in the Eastern Caribbean bore plentiful fruit, and by the end of the century, Pentecostal church plantings were dispersed across the entire region. As has been true for a long time in the USA, now too in the Caribbean, a smorgasbord of Pentecostal worship offerings fulfills the varying evangelical tastes of Caribbean Christians.
The conversion experience is at the core of the Christian voluntary faith impulse. Conversion in the lives of evangelicals refers to a dramatic and memorable life-changing event, a spiritual encounter with God and God’s power and love experienced through the Holy Spirit. For evangelicals, conversion describes a moment of complete surrender to God on the part of the sinner. It is then that the sinner admits his/her sinfulness, accepts the offer of mercy, salvation, the assurance of God’s permanent presence in the sinner’s life and a new identity and status within the community of ‘the saved.’ Caribbean Pentecostals admit that people can “backslide,” or “fall from grace” after having been saved. However, for many, conversion is such a powerful, emotional, and often public experience that it gives new converts immediate spiritual power that is confirming and contagious, and draws converts into the company of other saved and sanctified evangelicals where they find support for daily struggles and difficulties. 2
The Christian religion has had a long history and much influence in Caribbean society. Various groups of European Christian clergy began arriving in the West Indies in the fifteenth century during the peak of Spain’s colonial expansion. From the sixteenth century on, Roman Catholic missionaries worked among enslaved Africans in the Spanish Caribbean colonies. France soon became Spain’s main European rival in the West Indies, and beginning in the seventeenth century, French Roman Catholic clerics in the French Caribbean colonies often baptized the growing numbers of enslaved Africans put to work in the French colonies of St. Domingue (now Haiti), Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Grenada (Garraway 2005).
British Anglican clergy began arriving in Barbados, Britain’s first West Indian colony, in the middle of the seventeenth century, and began establishing parishes and administering the confessional forms of Christian membership for British settlers there. 3 In Roman Catholicism and Anglicanism, infant baptism is the religious ritual that welcomes new family members into the Christian faith. In confessional forms of Christianity, infant baptism begins the process that conducts Christian individuals through other religious rites of passage, traditions, and practices that, at death, take faithful church members to heaven and God’s promised rewards.
In the eighteenth century, a steady flow of non-conformist, Protestant missionaries from Europe began arriving in the northeastern Caribbean islands. Non-conformists rejected the traditional forms of religion dispensed by the Church of England. They were mainly evangelicals who posited new forms of piety and a different process through which individuals could gain God’s favor. 4 This voluntary form of salvation required that individuals have a personal relationship with God. By the middle of the eighteenth century in Britain, John Wesley and the small sect that came to be known as Methodists had accepted and spread this evangelical, voluntarist, message of salvation among the country’s working class. In the 1750s, lay people from Antigua who had been converted while on a visit to England, on their return to Antigua, took Methodism’s evangelical message and forms of piety to enslaved people on the island (Pritchard 2013).
When several French colonies in the southeastern Caribbean—specifically Grenada, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Dominica and Tobago—were ceded to Britain by France in 1784, British Wesleyan Methodist missionaries soon arrived to evangelize enslaved Africans laboring on the new British possessions, named the Ceded Islands, and now known as the Windward Islands. By the 1790s, Methodist missionaries had been stationed on Barbados, St. Vincent, and Grenada. 5 However, the French colonists and their slaves in the Ceded Islands (particularly Grenada) held firmly to Roman Catholicism and strongly resisted the imposition of the new evangelical form of Christianity. Therefore, for decades, the work of the Wesleyan Methodist mission in the Ceded islands was limited both by the powerful presence of the established Anglican Church, especially on Barbados, and Roman Catholic clergy and missionaries on some of the Ceded Islands.
The Church of England or the Anglican Church was, until the nineteenth century, the only recognized established Church in the British West Indies, and it exerted authority over the Roman Catholic and other forms of the Christian religion in the colonies. Therefore, until the early nineteenth century, the terms established and mainline church or denomination, in regards to Britain’s West Indian colonies, referred only to the Anglican denomination there. However, by the mid-nineteenth century, the term was extended to include Protestant, Non-conformist denominations such as Wesleyan Methodists, Moravians, Presbyterians, and British Baptists. These, along with Roman Catholics, together came to be seen as branches of the colonial Christian church. 6 After 1838, when slavery officially ended, tens of thousands of free but impoverished people began creating their own settlements and communities throughout the former slave colonies. Clerics and missionaries from these Established Churches in the West Indies became responsible for the religious and educational development of the freed people and their descendants.
In this chapter, I revisit and present the sociohistorical contexts in which the evangelical missionary projects began. I also examine the differences in theological stances and emphases that directed and informed the two evangelical campaigns that are my focus, and that were organized by Christian missionaries from separate continents during different historical periods. The earlier evangelization project undertaken by British Wesleyan Methodist evangelicals began in the late eighteenth century with much zeal, and although it petered out considerably in influence over the next century, its weakened presence and direction continued into the first half of the twentieth century in the British West Indies. A second missionary project, this time promoted by North American evangelicals, began in the region in the mid-twentieth century, and eventually expanded to include local indigenous Pentecostal pastors and evangelists. 7 Like the British Wesleyan Methodists before them, the North American Pentecostal missionaries began serious evangelization efforts to save the unsaved and un-churched in the very same islands on which Wesleyan Methodists had done mission.
For centuries, European Christian clerics and missionaries claimed responsibility for civilizing non-European, non-Christian people, including the enslaved, and later, emancipated blacks in the British West Indies (Porter 2004; Cox 2008a; b). For centuries too, a European presence, much of it British, was evident in the material and non-material religious culture throughout the West Indies. For example, although intended for use in the tropics, established church structures (such as still is very evident in Anglican Church design on Barbados) generally incorporated British and European architectural styles, complete with ostentatious ceilings, exalted pulpits, dimly lit naves, towering bell steeples, huge pipe organs, and large rectories and manses or parsonages occupied by their clergy families (Diocese of Barbados Liturgical Calendar 2004). By the mid-twentieth century, all the established churches had acquired much valuable real estate, even though the general poverty of their membership made it difficult for all of the churches’ properties to be well-maintained. By the mid-twentieth century, most mainline, religious denominations in the region were experiencing financial difficulty in the management and upkeep of their buildings and lands.
Beginning in the 1960s, Grenada, Barbados, and other eastern Caribbean islands experienced steady increases in the numbers of evangelical church plantings and growth in evangelical congregations. Such increases were particularly noticeable in the Windward Islands and Barbados. Barbados and Grenada share geographical proximity; they are separated only by 100 nautical miles. Barbados has a population of 260,000, Grenada 110,000. Both islands have also been important in the regional spread of Pentecostalism and have contributed to the vibrancy of international Pentecostalism through the migration field that exists between that region and eastern seaboard cities of the USA, such as Miami and New York, and of Toronto and greater Ontario, Canada, places where thousands of Caribbean immigrants have settled.
Conventional explanations about the work of early evangelical missionaries in the West Indies often suggest that well-planned missionary programs were envisioned and organized in Britain by non-conformist sects such as the Moravians, Wesleyan Methodists, and Baptists, and that each sect then established a program among the enslaved populations in the West Indian colonies. Yet the facts show otherwise. Eighteenth-century evangelical Protestant missions to West Indian slave societies were introduced quite serendipitously. Two separate and unplanned events led to Dr. Thomas Coke’s momentous decision to begin a missionary program to enslaved heathen slaves (as he called them) on West Indian plantations. His arrival on Antigua occurred by chance when the ship taking him to North America was blown off course and landed him and others on one of Antigua’s beaches. 8 On the very morning of his unplanned landing on Antigua in 1786, Coke was able to join in worship with a small but lively congregation of Methodists (the majority enslaved Africans) on the British colony. The establishment of a Methodist mission to evangelize enslaved Africans in the Windward Islands developed from Coke’s strange, visit to Antigua and his first-hand observation of the mission to enslaved Africans there. In 1787, a mere four years after the Ceded Islands had become British, and even as the British political administrative structure in these islands was being established, Coke hurriedly began plans to install what he envisioned as a Wesleyan Methodist mission on the newly Ceded Islands and Barbados. Dr. Coke felt called to offer enslaved people in the new British-owned islands, the gift of the gospel as he had noticed it being received among the slaves on the Gilbert estates in Antigua. At that time, there existed no official Wesleyan Methodist Society with a Board of Directors, or a seminary with programs that could train men for mission. Worst of all, Coke had no predictable or dependable financial support for the proposed missionary project. However, he was determined to proceed with his plans. The absence of sufficient funds to run the project would remain a perpetual problem for the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary program in the West Indies.
Each missionary project in the West Indian slave colonies was designed specifically to evangelize the slaves even as the missionaries tried to circumvent conditions that threatened its operation. For example, an earlier evangelical project led by Moravian missionaries arrived in the Leeward Islands early in the eighteenth century and concentrated much of their evangelical work among slave populations on plantations operated by their own mission in the Danish-owned Virgin Islands. 9 In the late 1780s, a black former slave, George Liele, a converted Baptist lay preacher, took the evangelical message of salvation to enslaved Africans in Jamaica. Liele found his way to Jamaica some years before the Wesleyan Methodists, and British Baptists had expanded their missionary efforts into the British slave colonies.
Jamaica, located in the far north-western Caribbean, lies relatively close to the southern USA and was well-known by American slave owners and traders. There was constant shipping of slaves and produce along the sea lanes connecting Jamaica to North America. Indeed, Liele had been a slave to a British officer who had granted him his freedom. Unfortunately, Liele’s former master, a Royalist, was wounded fatally during the American War of Independence (1776). The former slave managed to arrange his own evacuation to Jamaica as the routed British soldiers and British sympathizers fled. Its geographical location, its size as the largest of all Britain’s West Indian slave colonies, and Jamaica’s geo-political status as one of Britain’s prized colonies, together made Jamaica an obvious choice and a safe haven for Liele as it was for the defeated Royalists fleeing the American colonies. Once on Jamaica, as he had done in the American slave states, Liele began preaching his evangelical message to slaves (Sernett 1999:44–51).
On Antigua, a British slave plantation owner, Nathaniel Gilbert, happened to be converted by evangelical Methodists while he was on a return visit to England. Once back in Antigua, Gilbert began preaching the evangelical gospel to enslaved people on his two estates. For years, a Methodist evangelization mission led by lay people, many of them slaves, was confined within Antigua and neighboring Leeward Islands since, until the end of the eighteenth century, except for Barbados, the Windward Islands (the smaller islands in the eastern Caribbean) were viewed internationally as being within France’s sphere of influence. 10
The success or failure of the evangelization project begun by the Wesleyan Methodists was strongly affected by the religious history and political power structure existing in each colony. The dominant Anglican Church in the British colonies assigned statuses to all religious denominations, sects, clergy, and missionaries in the colonies, and for a long time, the Anglican establishment assigned a very low status to the Methodist sect. The particular conditions under which enslav...