The History of a Modern Millennial Movement by Jane Shaw Philip Lockley

Author:Jane Shaw, Philip Lockley [Jane Shaw, Philip Lockley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781784538460
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Published: 2017-05-30T00:00:00+00:00

Conclusion

By the 1860s, the Israelite preachers had taken the Southcottian prophetic message of preparation for the millennium across an expansive portion of the globe. The first arrivals and activities of Israelite preachers in New Zealand and South Africa are poorly recorded compared with those in Australia and North America, yet communities in these further British settler locations are evident by Wroe’s death. In January 1854, while in Sydney, Wroe assigned John Cartwright to be a preacher to New Zealand and John Bagwell to ‘the Cape of Good Hope’, apparently via Mauritius.116 In 1863, John Doidge, a carpenter, was listed in the printed Directory of ‘Wroeite’ congregations as the leading Israelite in Port Elizabeth on the Cape; James Lye of Freeman’s Bay, Auckland, and Theophilus Daniel in Riverton, Southland, held equivalent positions at the opposite ends of New Zealand.117 One preaching endeavour for which there is no further evidence beyond the departure of preachers occurred in 1851 when Charles Robertson sailed with a companion to China, his port of arrival unknown (though almost certainly a British treaty port).118

There are few ways to conceptualise this global expansion by Southcottians other than a mission – a mission to gather God’s people ‘from amongst all, for they will know his voice’, as originally declared in 1825.119 An obvious comparison to be made with such a missionary millennialism is contemporary Mormonism, and the competition between these prophetic traditions indicated in New York bears this out. However, Mormonism in this period sought to recruit believers to travel to its Zion in the American West, to prepare for the millennium there.120 The Israelite preachers, sent out on their international mission only after the fall of Wroe’s ‘Jerusalem’ at Ashton, had no such migratory message. Rather, they sought to convince people to adopt new beliefs and new, rigorous religious practices where they were: to live kosher lives, grow their hair, keep the Sabbath and remove images from their homes. When it is acknowledged that these locations were almost exclusively English-speaking parts of the world – indeed, they were either British or locations of British migration – the alternative comparison with the specifically ‘colonial’ motivations and interests of British Church and Chapel traditions in this same period becomes more apposite.

Wroe and his fellow Israelites’ ideas of who ‘Israel’ were, or from among whom God would ‘gather his people’, were patently bound up with British origins in these middle decades of the nineteenth century. Even when sending preachers to the United States, specific reference was made to gathering ‘those who have gone out’, implying a connection to emigration.121 As Hilary Carey has shown, in the nineteenth-century British world ‘emigration and colonisation had a religious dimension’; the colonial missionary societies of Anglican, Nonconformist and Roman Catholic churches were deeply committed to following white settlers leaving the British Isles for the Empire, planting their theological and social distinctions along with a common ‘Christian ethos’ within colonial communities.122 Such Church missions were each motivated to make British settlers ‘a better, more Christian, people’, retaining their own specific vision of what constituted Christian life and practice.

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