Note: The photos
below are all from the scrapbooks of Stanley
Kline. Kline (1911-1999) kept scrapbooks with photos and clippings
of almost all of his fellow AIM missionaries, arranged alphabetically.
"Times have changed. The sky is red and lowering. Are we aware of these signs in the African sky? Let is not be said of us, as of the Pharisees and Sadducees, 'You can discern the face of the sky, but can you not discern the signs of the times'" From Ed Schuit's talk to the annual meeting of the United States home council of the Africa Inland Mission, September 6, 1958.
In 1958, Africa was in the midst of historic changes. Politically,
the governments of European colonial governments which had ruled most of the
continent for most of the last two centuries and more were going or already
gone. In terms of church history, Africa was in the middle of an incredible
mass conversion to Christian belief. In 1900 there were 10 million Christians
in Africa of all denominations, 9 percent of the total population. In 2000,
there were 360 million, making up 46 percent of the all the people in the continent.
A new era in the global story of Christianity had begun.
The human agents of of the growth of African Christianity had been hundreds
of indigenous Christian movements and foreign mission agencies. And one among
the latter had been the Africa Inland Mission (AIM),
founded in the United States by Peter Cameron Scott in 1895. The first party
of five missionaries had been almost entirely wiped out by disease, including
Scott, but the members and supporters of the mission in America and Europe (joined
later by supporters in Africa and Oceania) had persisted. By 1958, there were
AIM mission stations were scattered through Kenya, the Congo, Tanzania, French
Equatorial Africa and others parts of east Africa. And the congregations founded
by these missionaries had formed and were forming Africa
Inland Church (AIC) denominations in different countries. These
African institutions, too, were on the verge of independence from Western control.
On this page are links to voices from that turning point era. They are selections
from the recordings of AIM's annual meeting for United States staff, board members,
and supporters, held September 4-7, 1958
at America's Keswick Conference Grounds on the coast of New Jersey, in the United
States. Every year, the American staff and supporters of the mission gathered
to pray, encourage, make decisions, conduct business, and plan.
The audio files on this page consists of portions of tape recordings which includes
the reports of missionaries from different countries given to this group of
supporters. The complete tapes of T280
and T281,
are in Collection
81, the Records of Africa Inland Mission International. They can be listened
to in the Archives Reading Room, along with the other tapes in the collection.