OUR ORIGINS

St Augustine’s Foundation was established in 1979 in order to support theological education throughout the Anglican Communion, particularly in the Majority World. Its origins lie in Canterbury, in the shadow of Canterbury Cathedral, where a Missionary College was established in the nineteenth century.

St Augustine’s Missionary College was founded as a solution to difficulties global Anglicans faced in the 1830s and 1840s. William Broughton (1788-1853), the first Anglican Bishop in Australia, had oversight over a diocese almost the size of Europe but with less than twenty Clergy. He called for ‘a College somewhere’ to train and supply missionary priests. The Revd Edward Coleridge (the nephew of the poet and Anglican theologian, Samuel Taylor Coleridge) heard the call and raised over £25,000 in support of the venture. In 1844, Alexander James Beresford Hope purchased the ruins of Saint Augustine’s Abbey – the site of original missionary foundation to the English dating from 597. William Butterfield, the soon-to-be-famous architect, was hired to design the buildings. Saint Augustine’s Missionary College was subsequently inaugurated in the notorious ‘year of revolutions’, 1848. 

Although the majority of the students came from England, others came from Anglican churches around the world. Within a little under 50 years, the College had trained and sent out 422 missionaries, mostly with the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG). One of several missionary societies, the SPG typically representing high church sympathies. SPG records show that students received a broad theological and practical education in Canterbury:

The College course of three years embraces instruction in the Holy Scriptures (original languages), the evidences of Christian Religion, the Standard Divines, the Prayer Book and Thirty-nine Articles, Church and Missionary History, Elementary Hebrew, the composition of Sermons, some Latin and Greek Classics, Mathematics and Physical Science, Medicine (at the County Hospital), Oriental languages (for students going to the East), and in various branches of manual labour and mechanical arts.

In the early days of the College, an important part of any student’s technical training involved the printing press. Use of technology was evidently an essential aspect of missionary work, whether in the production of religious texts, for widespread communication, or to support educational work. Many student records indicate work founding and maintaining schools across the world. 

St Augustine’s was founded in the years before the political formalisation of the British Empire in the second half of the nineteenth century, at a time when the expansion of Anglicanism was both ordered and untidy. It also pre-dates the formalisation of the Anglican Communion itself (though the term had occasionally been used for some 15 years, the Anglican Communion should arguably be dated from the first Lambeth Conference in 1867).  In its early years the College played a part in the story which enabled Anglicanism to spread across the world, developing from national churches to a global Communion. It is important to recognise that the early years of the college were tied up with a colonial history that today many will find problematic. We cannot run away from history, and its acknowledgement, though painful, is a precondition for transformation and reconciliation. Neither should we forget that at least some missionaries were themselves critics of the imperial project; there were cases when the Gospel was used in prophetic witness against colonial racism. Ultimately, Anglicanism was changed by the peoples of the Americas, Africa, Australasia, Persia, the Pacific, India, and China into something new: this very real transformation is something we today celebrate.

As we move onwards together, the St Augustine’s Foundation continues in a new role, offering help to support theological education across the Anglican Communion: a household of faith with some 80 million adherents now spread across 164 countries.

We are grateful to Dr Ralph Norman and Dr David Vannerley, Canterbury Christ Church University, for their work on the history of the College and biographies of its alumni.

We have brought together a representative sample of student biographies that cover the globe – New Zealand/Aotorea, Africa, India, Central America and England. Each of these characters began their career in Christian ministry at the College and we show photographs from the College archive albums, biographical notes and sources so that readers can search out further information about these remarkable people.

The main sources used by the project at Canterbury Christ Church University are: 

• the detailed list of former students in the history of the College by  Preb. R.J. E. Boggis;

• the college Archive, including the students’ personal files, now held in the Canterbury Cathedral Archives;

• our own detailed mapping of the memorials in the chapel crypt.

Information from these sources have been brought together for the first time into a single database. The project has been funded from university research funds and a generous grant from the St Augustine’s Foundation; we express our gratitude for this support.

Dr. Ralph Norman, Principal Lecturer in Theology,
Canterbury Christ Church University