EMQ » April–June 2019 » Volume 55 Issue 2
By Gary Corwin
The official beginnings of SIM are commonly dated to the arrival of the SS Accra in Lagos harbor on December 4, 1893. On board were three young men, two Canadians and one American: twenty-five-year-old Walter Gowans, the acknowledged leader of the band, twenty-three-year-old Thomas Kent, and twenty-one-year-old Rowland Bingham. Kent, the lone American, died along with Gowans in 1894 while on their first trek inland seeking to reach Kano, while Bingham was convalescing from fever in Lagos.
Though Kent is equally honored for his courage and sacrifice in the cause of Christ, the focus of this article is on his Canadian colleagues. That is an advantage to the author because the sources available to explore the spirituality of his colleagues is much greater and more readily available. For Gowans the sources include a fairly well-documented history of his family, a limited amount of correspondence, and his journal. For Bingham the most important sources are gleanings from his writings as editor for several decades of the Evangelical Christian and its predecessor periodicals, two books by him, and several books and articles about him and SIM[i]
Of the two men, Gowans’ spirituality is much simpler to discern and describe. He was very expressive, even emotional and transparent, in his writings. Bingham, by contrast, was more reserved about personal feelings, although he held strong convictions and opinions and could be quite expressive when addressing what he viewed as wrong. The depths of his spiritual commitment is hinted at in many quotes by him, but is most apparent in his perseverance and in his entrepreneurial pursuits to address the spiritual needs that God placed before him. Both men shared the blessing of being raised by parents with strong spiritual commitments, and both shared the challenge of emigrating from Britain to Canada in the years prior to their departure for Africa.
Formative Years
Walter H. Gowans was born September 17, 1868 in Kilmarnock, Scotland, in the same area from which David Livingstone had come. He was the fifth of nine children. His parents, John and Margaret, both of Presbyterian stock, raised a close-knit and devout Christian family.
Clearly Margaret seems to have been the dominant spiritual influence in the lives of her children, managing to establish strong bonds with each one. She mentored them in the Bible, in prayer, and in concern for those in distant places who had no knowledge of the Lord Jesus. In later years she would be a strong influence in the decisions of both Walter and his older sister Anne to enter missionary service, as well as being a key factor in persuading Rowland Bingham to join Walter in reaching the Sudan.
There is less information concerning John’s life and his interaction with his children, but what there is seems to indicate a quiet and humble man, a brewer by trade, who loved his family and provided well for them. He emigrated with his family to Toronto in 1877. Walter still referred to him fondly as Papa at age twenty-five.[ii]
Rowland V. Bingham was born December 19, 1872 in East Grinstead, in the county of Sussex in southeast England. This is the same place where seven years previously the China Inland Mission had been founded. He grew up in a God-fearing “dissenting” home (probably Methodist), one of the older of eight children. When his father died suddenly he felt an inner compulsion to do what he could to help support the family. Although his father believed he had made good provision for his family in the event of his death, an unfortunate legal ruling kept the estate unsettled for twenty-one years, with only a meager allowance being provided for his widowed mother and her children.
Providentially, because Bingham had convinced both his mother and teacher to allow him to start school at age three with his older brother, he was able to secure a position as “pupil teacher in an endowed school” at age thirteen, earlier than would normally have been possible. The school, where the local Anglican clergyman and curate alternated in presiding over chapel, was low church in approach and presented Bingham no crises of conscience for two years. A new high-church headmaster, however, introduced numerous rituals which Bingham described as “flummeries,” and said, “my puritan blood revolted.”
When he ceased attending the local Anglican church and began attending a nearby Methodist chapel, the headmaster threatened to fire him. After conferring with his mother, Bingham resigned instead, giving a three-month notice. Bingham described this time as “one of the most decisive periods in my life.” He was unsatisfied with all his efforts to be righteous, and abhorred unconquered sin in his life. It was during this period that he became acquainted with the Salvation Army. It was in hearing their message that he came to trust Christ alone for salvation and gained the assurance of sins forgiven.
When he shared what had happened in his life with his mother, she was mortified that her son had found among the simple people in the derided Salvation Army what he had not found in the Church. In the months that followed he began reading Scripture at breakfast, often with his siblings paying very little attention. Eventually, however, a woman visiting his mother responded with great interest in what he was reading, and the fifteen-year-old had the joy of leading her to faith in Christ.
It was not long after that a crisis of conscience led to his departure to Canada. The predicate for the move was the need to sell tobacco in the small shop that his mother ran. Though his father was a heavy smoker himself, he had warned Rowland as a small boy never to take up the habit which had enslaved him. Additionally, as the Salvation Army also took a firm stand against smoking, he was put in a difficult position when boys he was dealing with in the Salvation Army would come in wanting him to sell them tobacco.
When his mother insisted in spite of his concerns that the store must continue to sell tobacco in order to make ends meet, Bingham quietly began to plan his departure, and at age sixteen boarded a boat for Canada. “I recognized from the Scriptures that I owed a duty to my mother; but there was also a duty to my conscience.” He went on to say that he never told his mother the reason “as it would only have caused her needless pain.”[iii]
Life in Toronto
Walter Gowans was nine when his family emigrated to Toronto. The family quickly became part of St. James Square Presbyterian Church, a flourishing body of middle-class folk, known among other things for their keen interest in foreign missions. Walter became very active in the young people’s society, also known for many years as Christian Endeavor. One of those whom Gowans was instrumental in leading to Christ through that ministry was Thomas Kent of Buffalo, NY.
While Walter’s interest in missions was fostered by his parents’ passion for the unreached, and that was an integral part of his upbringing as a child, it was the reinforcement of the mission emphasis at his church that led to his decision to become a missionary. In particular, it was the influence of its prominent pastor, the Rev. Dr. Samuel Henry Kellog, a Princeton-educated former missionary to India who had been instrumental in translating the Bible into Hindi. Besides stoking Walter’s missionary fervor, he also passed along his premillennial views on eschatology as well as his understanding of faith healing.
Walter’s moment of decision occurred sometime between 1886 and 1890. It most likely coincided with the great outburst of missionary enthusiasm in 1888, when dozens of young men and women from Toronto were stepping forward for missionary service. This was the same year in which Gowans turned twenty years old, and Hudson Taylor came to Toronto spawning the beginning of a great movement in Canada for foreign missions. The key to the movement was that finally there were clear outlets for the missionary zeal that already existed, certainly through the China Inland Mission, but also through the denominational and faith missions that caught the vision.[iv]
That same year of 1888 found sixteen-year-old Rowland Bingham sailing alone to Canada. He first worked on a farm for about a year, and then found a job as a clerk in Toronto. In the evenings he played his autoharp in a Salvation Army band. He became troubled though, that while the Salvation Army was effective in leading many of the poor and derelict to Christ, it was ineffective in grounding them and building them up in the faith.[v]
One day in 1890 while selling the Salvation Army magazine, The War Cry, on a main street of Toronto, he was approached by “a venerable looking gentleman in clerical garb.” Alvyn Austin describes the interchange and its result:
“Tell me first if you are saved, Captain Bingham?” Pastor Salmon asked, “How do you know it?” Haltingly, Bingham answered that he had the witness of God’s Spirit, but Pastor Salmon persisted and took out his New Testament, “and there on Toronto’s busiest street undertook to drill the youthful Christian worker on the scriptural basis for assurance of salvation.”
This was a formative moment of Bingham’s life. Although they did not encounter each other for two years, Pastor Salmon invited him to live in his home and he became his pastoral assistant at Bethany Chapel. Pastor Salmon was the founder of the Dominion Alliance, the Canadian branch of The Alliance founded by Rev. A. B. Simpson in New York, that later became the Christian and Missionary Alliance in 1897.[vi]
After a breakdown of his health and experiencing divine healing, Simpson left the Presbyterian church he was pastoring in New York City. He not only established what became a new denomination, but also articulated what became a new theological formulation—the “four-fold gospel:” Christ the Savior, Christ the Sanctifier, Christ the Healer, and Christ the Coming King. This man and his teachings became very important in the lives of all three of SIM’s founders, especially his understanding of divine healing and of premillennial eschatology. Gowans and Kent attended Simpson’s New York Missionary Training Institute in New York City from 1891–1982.[vii] The Institute had been founded in 1883, the first in North America modeled after Grattan Guinness’ East London Training Institute, which in turn was founded in 1873 as the first interdenominational mission training institute.[viii]
Interestingly it seems to have been a visit by H. Grattan Guinness to North America and pleadings by him on behalf of the unreached millions of the Soudan that helped to solidify Gowans’ leaning that direction, though the great majority of those becoming missionaries from Toronto were heading to Asia. His mother would later comment that Walter had been drawn to the Soudan “because he felt he should go not just to the needy, but to those who needed him most. So he studied the great mission fields of the world and concluded that the interior of the Soudan, with its sixty-ninety million unreached people was to him the place of the divine call.”[ix] The place where Gowans studied to learn about the “great mission fields,” and where his desire to go to the Soudan in particular developed, was Simpson’s Missionary Training School.[x]
In 1895 Bingham also enrolled in Simpson’s Institute to gain more theological training. This was after his return from Africa following the deaths of his friends, and before the founding of a formal Council and structure for the mission in 1898. It was also during this time at Simpson’s Institute that Bingham pastored a Baptist church in Newburgh, New York, and came to worship as a Baptist for the rest of his life.[xi] Over the next decade he also moved away from Simpson’s understanding of Divine Healing, culminating in his formal repudiation of the view with his publication of The Bible and the Body in 1920.[xii]
Africa and Beyond
The landing of the three SIM founders in Lagos harbor December 4, 1893 marked a pivotal moment in their lives—one that set a tragic trajectory for Gowans and Kent humanly speaking—but one that set in motion a divine plan that has achieved amazing things. To get there they had been rebuffed by numerous missions in both North America and Britain, and been told that their desire to enter the interior of the Soudan was unrealistic and unworkable. They had also gone with minimal financial resources in hand and little assurance, beyond their trust in God, that adequate funding would be available as needed. They were also told by Bryan Roe, the Superintendent of the Methodist Mission in Lagos, “Young men, you will never see the Sudan; your children will never see the Sudan; your grandchildren may.”[xiii]
The heart and spiritual temperature of Walter Gowans are captured in certain entries from his diary and in a letter he wrote shortly before his departure for Africa to the Young People’s Society of the St. James Square Presbyterian Church in Toronto, with which he had a strong connection. Four very passionate and courageous spiritual commitments shine through:[xiv]
- Burden for the least reached: “As most of you are aware, I anticipate going to the Soudan—a pioneer for Christ. The Soudan, with a population of from 60 to 90 million, is, of all foreign fields, the most destitute of the gospel, being almost entirely without a representative for Christ.”
- Love for the lost more than for life: “Our success in this enterprise means nothing less than the opening of the country for the Gospel; our failure, at the most, nothing more than the death of two or three deluded fanatics.… After all, is it not worth a venture? Sixty million are at stake? Is it not worth even risking our lives for so many?”
- Faith over fear: “It is said that God has closed the door to the Soudan. Beloved! God closes no door to the Gospel. It is not God, it is the enemy who closes the door. With God no door is closed. We have simply to march forward in the name of Jesus, and in the faith of God, and the doors must and will fly open every time. Hallelujah!”
- Maintaining an eternal perspective: “Diary for 9 August 1894: I am 3 days from Zaria. I would have been at Kano long ago were it not for the repeated delays caused by the war on the road. Written in view of my approaching end which has often seemed so near but just now seems almost imminent, and I want to write while I have the power to do it.… “I have no regret for undertaking this venture and in this manner my life has not been thrown away. My only regrets are for my poor Mother, and for her sake I would have chosen to live.… “Don’t mourn for me, darling dearest Mother. If the suffering was great remember it is all over now and think of the glory I am enjoying and rejoice that ‘your boy’ was permitted to have a hand in the redemption of the Soudan.”
Rowland Bingham’s Perseverance
The story for Rowland Bingham was much longer, and as a result could be written about in multiple chapters. Bingham’s own book, Seven Sevens of Years and a Jubilee, was written in such a way and tells the story of the Sudan Interior Mission from its beginnings in 1893 until 1942, shortly before Bingham’s death. We pick up the story here with Bingham’s two-year pastorate of the Baptist Church in Newburgh, New York, to which he brought his new bride three days before the mission was reborn. He had taken the pastorate in Newburgh with the understanding that the emphasis of his ministry would be upon missionary work, and his new wife came sharing with him in that passion. He later said of her, “But for her loyal support, wise counsel, undimmed faith, sacrificial service, and able cooperation in every phase of the work, I question whether there would be any Sudan Interior Mission today.”[xv]
Bingham describes the transition from pastoring in Newburgh to giving his complete attention to the work of the mission in this way:[xvi]
During the two years of my ministry at Newburgh I saw several workers go out from the church to the regions beyond, but I could not rest! Again and again I secured leave of absence to go on extended tours to plead the cause of the Sudan. The greatest interest and response came in the city of Toronto … and I was able to form a missionary council there. When God gave a gracious revival in my church I felt it was to set His seal upon my ministry and to release me to take up full-time work for the new Mission.
After moving to Toronto against the advice of his Council, because there were no funds to support him and his wife, Bingham suggested that there be separate accounts for the mission and for their living expenses. He said that they would trust God to supply both, but that the two would be treated entirely separately. He was pleased with the arrangement and said, “I was now where I could devote myself wholly to preparing for the next expedition to the Sudan.”
In 1900 Bingham again tried to penetrate the Sudan accompanied by two young men. Within three weeks, however, he was again stricken with malaria, admitted to hospital, and sent to Britain on a stretcher. The two young men, though assuring him they would continue on, listened to the many naysayers in Lagos, and followed him on the next boat. Bingham called it the darkest period of his life.[xvii]
Despite Bingham’s sense of failure and despair, and the less than enthusiastic support of his Council, he continued to labor and saw four new recruits come forward for the Sudan within six months of his return. In 1901 this third party sailed from England and established the first station of the mission at Patigi, about two hundred fifty miles from Lagos.[xviii] From that humble beginning SIM under Bingham was well on its way to becoming what was arguably the largest Protestant presence in Africa, with over four undred mission members and hundreds of established churches.[xix]
Bingham Summary
Over the next forty-one years Bingham served not only as General Director of SIM, but also as editor of The Evangelical Christian, Canada’s only interdenominational evangelical magazine at the time. From that platform he not only spoke to the pressing theological issues of the day, but tirelessly promoted both foreign and domestic mission and outreach organizations. In addition, he personally initiated and supported several other ministries where he saw particular need including Evangelical Publishers (1912), Canadian Keswick Conference Center (1924), and the Soldiers’ and Airmen’s Christian Association (1940).[xx]
Space does not permit sharing much from the plethora of significant quotes by Bingham during the course of his life. We shall conclude, therefore, with just three by him, and one summary about him by his biographer and close associate, J. H. Hunter. Together they say much about his spirituality:
No Christian can faithfully study the Word of God without being impressed with the solemn obligation resting upon the Church to make Christ known to all nations.[xxi]
The problem of the basis of church fellowship is growing more complex every year, and we question whether it will be greatly relieved by the organic unions everywhere proposed.… In whatever ecclesiastical party one finds himself placed, he is blind who does not recognize that outside it are some of the best saints that God and grace have made, and to whom every yearning of Christian love draws one.… More and more it is being recognized that the lines of fellowship must be drawn horizontally, and that its sweetness will be measured by the plane of our fellowship with our risen Lord—fellowship dependent, not upon knowledge or assenting to common truths, but to “walking in the truth.”[xxii]
Third stanza of three of a poem called “Neutrality”:
Then why go ye limping between the two peoples?
Why not make choice between the two sides?
Why sit ye astride both sides of the fence line,
When rightness and truth on the highway still guides?
Neutrality never a right cause has furthered,
Compromise never made peace that abides,
Quit limping and halting ‘twixt base things and true things,
When truth makes its challenge, take the right of two sides.[xxiii]
“Dr. Bingham’s visits to the field in 1915, 1928–29 and 1937 each gave the work on the field a big push forward. Nothing in the will of God daunted him, no matter what odds were against him. ‘BY PRAYER,’ ‘FAITH MIGHTY FAITH,’ and ‘WAIT ON THE LORD’ were his watchwords.… Dr. Bingham said, ‘It is not my “mighty faith” but my little faith in a mighty God.’”—J.H.Hunter[xxiv]
Gary Corwin is a missiologist, author, and editor, having served with SIM for thirty-eight years and as an editor of EMQ for twenty-three years. He is author/editor of By Prayer to the Nations: A Short History of SIM and a co-author of Introducing World Missions: A Biblical, Historical, and Practical Survey.
[i] Sources most valuable for understanding the early history and spirituality of Gowans include “Death Is Not Failure: The Story of Walter H. Gowans,” an unpublished manuscript by Kerry E. Lovering, 1992 (available in SIM Archives, Fort Mill, SC, and online at http://archives.sim.org/); “Walter Gowans’ Family” n.d., SIM International Archives and Records (SIMIAR), BM-2, Box 13; and Walter Gowans, “Diary”, BM-2, Box 13. For Bingham the most valuable sources are his two books, Seven Sevens of Years and a Jubilee: The Story of the Sudan Interior Mission (New York, NY: Evangelical Publishers, 1943) and The Bible and the Body (Toronto: Evangelical Publishers,1920); gleanings from his writings as editor of The Evangelical Christian (also available in SIM archives); J. H. Hunter, A Flame of Fire: The Life and Work of R. V. Bingham, D.D. (Aslesbury and Slough: Hazel Watson & Viney Limited, 1961); and Brian Alexander McKenzie, “Fundamentalism, Christian Unity, and Premillenialism in the Thought of Rowland Victor Bingham (1872–1942): A Study of Anti-Modernism in Canada” (PhD diss., Toronto School of Theology, 1985). Two additional books published recently are helpful for the overall context related to SIM and the lives of both men. They are Gary R. Corwin, By Prayer to the Nations: A Short History of SIM (Grand Rapids, MI: Credo House Publishers, 2018), and Barbara M. Cooper, Gary R. Corwin, Tibebe Eshete, Musa A. B. Gaiya, Tim Geysbeek, & Shobana Shankar, eds. Transforming Africa’s Religious Landscapes: The Sudan Interior Mission (SIM), Past and Present (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2018). The introduction and chapters by Alvyn Austin and Tim Geysbeek in the latter are particularly relevant to this subject.
[ii] Lovering, “Death Is Not Failure,” 6.
[iii] This picture of Bingham’s early life is summarized from his own description written in 1933 and quoted at length in Hunter, Flame, 35–47.
[iv] Alvyn Austin, “‘Toronto the Good’: The Canadian Roots of the Sudan Interior Mission” in Transforming Africa’s Religious Landscapes, eds. Cooper, et al, 42–43; Lovering, “Death Is Not Failure,” 8.
[v] Austin, “Tronto,” 44; Hunter, Flame, 47–48.
[vi] Austin, “Toronto,” 44.
[vii] Matthew Brown Birrel, Matthew Brown Birrel: Missionary to the Chinese (s.n., 1981), 9.
[viii] Corwin, By Prayer, 24–27; Austin, “Toronto,” 45–46.
[ix] Bingham, Seven Sevens, 9.
[x] “A Story of Toronto’s Missionary Martyrs,” The Saturday Globe [Toronto] 51 (13 April 1895): 1–2.
[xi] Hunter, Flame, 65–66.
[xii] Corwin, By Prayer, 25–26; Austin, “Toronto,” 50.
[xiii] Bingham, Seven Sevens, 16–17; Corwin, By Prayer, 29–32.
[xiv] Corwin, By Prayer, 34–35; Lovering, “Death is not Failure,” 55-57.
[xv] Bingham, Seven Sevens, 24.
[xvi] Bingham, Seven Sevens, 24–25.
[xvii] Bingham, Seven Sevens, 25.
[xviii] Bingham, Seven Sevens, 29–31; Corwin, By Prayer, 44–46.
[xix] Stephen Neill, A History of Christian Missions (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books Ltd., 1964), 459. “The first station of the S.I.M. was at Patigi in Nigeria, 500 miles up the Niger river among the Nupe tribe. Today, with 1300 missionaries, it is probably the largest single Protestant missionary organization in the world, and has spread its operations—evangelistic, medical, and literary—across the very heart of Africa.”
[xx] Hunter, Flame, 262–267, 268–274, 285–288.
[xxi] Hunter, Flame, 51.
[xxii] Hunter, Flame, 66.
[xxiii] Hunter, Flame, 311.
[xxiv] Hunter, Flame, 25.
