Christian Unity (the book) - The Maranatha Community

ehind some of the criticism of the work, but Nasmith said he refused torecognise a divided church: the denomination of his workers was irrelevant.Eventually he withdrew from the work he had founded but it continued tominister to the poor.City Mission workers were deliberately not called missionaries but ‘agents’,and were supervised by an agent elected by the subscribers to the Mission.The tasks of the mission were to evangelise (their slogan, often seen on theirAnnual Reports, was ‘to evangelise, not to proselytise’), to teach the converts,to supply basic needs of the poor, food and shelter, and to make them selfsufficientwhere possible by running sick-clubs and burial societies.Holy Communion and the Christening of children were not at first observed bythe City Missions, but as the converts were reluctant to go to the parish or anyother church (most converts were among the ‘unchurched’ or among lapsedchurch members), the people the Mission helped tended to see it as their‘church’. By the 1940s the Mission’s halls had become recognisablenonconformist churches, having the sacraments and their own membership.Denominations began to form their own home missions by the middle of the19 th Century and one famous denomination was born out of this time. By 1878the Christian Mission in the East End of London was called the Salvation Army.It was founded as a non-sacramentalist body, storming Satan’s strongholds asan army and not trying to be a ‘church’. Today, at the beginning of the 21 stCentury, the Salvation Army now calls itself a ‘Church’.Nasmith wore himself out in the service of his vision of a non-denominationalmission, dying a poor man at 39 years of age. He was buried from a WesleyanChapel with prayers led by a Presbyterian and an address given by aCongregational minister. The interment was conducted by an Anglican inBunhill Fields Cemetery, the Dissenters’ burial place in City Road, London, justopposite Wesley’s Chapel. Several cities in Britain still have City Missionsworking as part of the City Mission network, though now some Mission Hallshave been given up and some have become independent congregations.The Evangelical Alliance was founded in 1846, when Evangelicals were at theirmost influential in Britain but were feeling they needed to consolidate theirposition. This was in part to counteract the threat from the growing Catholicinfluence of the Tractarian (Oxford) Movement. It was a remarkable alliance ofPage 144