Search

[German Version] (Aug 9, 1841, Grantham, Lincolnshire, England – May 26, 1928, Kew, Victoria, Australia) migrated to Geelong, Australia, in 1849. The limited education which Fitchett had received as a child, he supplemented by wide reading and so worked his way into the Methodist ministry (Methodists) in 1866 and took his B.A. at the University of Melbourne in 1872. Fitchett was the first president of the prestigious Methodist Ladies College, Kew (1882) and president of the Wesleyan Methodist Conf…

[German Version] (Feb 2, 1890, Dover – Oct 24, 1958, Sydney), Anglican missionary and bishop. After studies at King's College, Cambridge, he was ordained deacon for colonial service in 1913; he served as deacon at Wycliffe College, Toronto, until 1922, when he became assistant bishop of West China. In 1933 he was elected archbishop of Sydney, where his opposition to liberal modernism made him very popular. He succeeded in raising Moore Theological College under Thomas Chatterton Hammond to the lev…

[German Version] (c. 1753 Welton, Yorkshire, England – Mar 13, 1827, London). First chaplain to the ¶ British colony of New South Wales, Johnson was a product of the evangelical revival and influenced by leading evangelicals such as the Milners, W. Wilberforce, and J. Newton. Primitive conditions, state interference, convict opposition, and his own melancholic character restrained the influence of his somewhat prosaic and unimaginative evangelical preaching. He served without assistance until S. Marsden arrived …

[German Version] (Aug 25, 1870, Ballarat, Victoria, Australia – Jan 14, 1953, Ashfield, New South Wales, Australia), Presbyterian minister. Educated at Ormond College in Melbourne and ordained in 1899, McGowan was influenced by the revival movement initiated by John MacNeil and Reuben Torrey. During his pastorate in Ashfield (1907–1949) McGowan built up the congregation there to become the largest in the Presbyterian Church in New South Wales and became a principal activist in the support of missi…

[German Version] (Apr 16, 1866, Melbourne – Jun 24, 1952, Kew, Victoria) was a leading Australian doctor and promoter of the faith missions of the Plymouth Brethren. Kitchen followed his father in support of the China Inland Mission (Australia) as treasurer, then as secretary, and home director. He was fundamental in founding the Melbourne Bible Institute (now Bible College of Victoria), the Upwey Convention, the Prayer Union for Israel, the Poona and India Village Mission, and the United Missiona…

[German Version] (Aug 25, 1799, Grennock, Inverclyde, Scotland – Aug 8, 1878, Sydney, Australia), Presbyterian minister, politician, educationalist, and propagandist. The first Presbyterian to the mainland of Australia (moving to Sydney in 1823), Lang helped local independent churches adapt to Presbyterian structures and link with the Established Church of Scotland. Evangelical, energetic if troublesome, Lang was responsible for the migration of most of the first generation of Australian Presbyter…

[German Version] (Jun 25, 1765, Bogly, England – May 12, 1838, Windsor, New South Wales, Australia), clergyman, agriculturist, and missionary leader. Marsden received an Anglican college education at Hull and Cambridge with the support of the Evangelical Elland Society (W. Wilberforce), which sent him to Australia in 1793 as second chaplain for the colony of New South Wales. The society considered the colony a potential base for the conversion not only of the convicts shipped to Australia but of t…

[German Version] (Nov 25, 1880, Moliagul, Australia – May 5, 1951, Sydney), son of a schoolteacher, attended University High School in Carlton and became a state schoolteacher in Victoria. Already entrusted with mission rural missions, Flynn trained for the Presbyterian ministry. His successful text, Bushman's Companion (1910), made Christianity relevant to land workers in the shearers' camps. His impressions of the vast Smith of Dunesk Mission (1911), which he conveyed to the Presbyterian Church in Australia, led to the founding of the Au…

[German Version] (Jan 24, 1879, Bendigo, Victoria – Jul 13, 1935, Sydney), an Anglican priest, converted under the influence of Herbert Smirnoff Begbie. He studied at the Moore Theological College in Sydney, Australia, and was ordained in 1905. Kirkby became well known as a pioneer of the Protestant mission and as a campaigner for political issues. In 1920, he was a founding missionary of the newly established Bush Church Aid Society, which aimed to meet the challenges facing the missions of the H…

[German Version] (IVF) is a worldwide evangelical Christian student movement, which emerged out of the British biblicist reaction to the ecumenical Student Christian movement. Formed in 1928 by three evangelical leaders, H.W. Guinness, Douglas Johnson, and Hugh Gough, and influenced by medical and faith missions, the Cambridge Inter-Collegiate Christian Union (CICCU), the Plymouth Brethren, and the Keswick Movement, the IVF formalized existing inter-university evangelical union links, which had be…

[German Version] (IFES). The IFES is an interdenominational evangelical fellowship uniting national networks of university Christian Unions. It emerged out of the formalization of links between Norwegian (Norges Kristelige Studentlag) and British (Intervarsity Christian Fellowship, IVF) evangelical university missions. Robert Wilder (formally Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Mission, SVM), H.W. Guinness, and Douglas Johnson (IVF) and Ole Hallesby (Norges Kristelige Studentlag Skoleungdomslag…

[German Version] John Northcote (Mar 12, 1875, London – May 10, 1957, Toronto) and Norman Cathcart (1882 – Aug 31, 1980) were brothers from a large missionary family belonging to the Bohemian and Moravian Brethren, which contributed significantly to the South Seas Evangelical Mission (also known as the Deck Mission) and the evangelization of the Pacific. N…

[German Version] (Nov 21, 1891, Sydney, Australia – Apr 8, 1974, Sydney), Baptist theologian. Educated at Sydney University, Morling taught at the Victorian Baptist College from 1915 and was among the first intake to transfer in to the newly opened New South Wales Baptist College. After two brief pastorates, he replaced Alexander Gordon as principal in 1922, a position he kept until 1960 (“Principal Morling”). He also taught in church history at his alma mater. By maintaining a balanced, non-confr…

[German Version] (Nov 22, 1903, London – Jul 28, 1979, Wentworth Falls, New South Wales, Australia) came from a family of noted Irish Brethren evangelists (Plymouth Brethren). Guinness trained in medicine, but never practiced, spending his life rather in missions to school children and university students around the world. He was a co-founder of the London Inter-Faculty Christian Union (LIFCU) and InterVarsity Fellowship (IVF). Sent to Canada in 1928, he worked among the remnants of the Student Vo…

[German Version] (Dec 26, 1916, Adelaide – Jan 14, 1994, Sydney) was an Anglican theological educator. An Oxford D.Phil established his expertise in Reformation historical theology and prepared him to return to Moore Theological College (MTC) as vice-principal (1954) and later principal (from the end of 1958). A strong proponent of preaching from the text, he shaped generations of Sydney Anglican clergy and, as virtual editor of the Anglican Church Record in the 1950s and 1960s, he shaped diocesan lay opinion in such a way as to deeply entrench neo-Reformed Biblic…

Australia is a highly plural, secularized federal Western democracy on the southern rim of the Asia-Pacific. It has a relatively small population (26 million) spread across a vast but largely uninhabitable landmass (and attendant islands). From 1788, British colonization over traditional Aboriginal land decisively shaped the first 160 years of religious culture, with ‘the Big Four’ traditions (Anglicanism, Catholicism, Methodism and Presbyterianism) dominating. Australia was thus an early recipi…

William Francis (Frank) Houston. Born on 22 April 1922 at Wanganui, New Zealand, Frank Houston was the third of four children. Reportedly, in his initial weeks of life he contracted pneumonia and experiencing healing through prayer. The affliction would, however, be recurrent. A small boy teased at school about his stature, he carried the weight of expectation that he would “never amount to anything.” When a friend was converted in a Salvation Army event, and then died young in an accident, Hous…

John Archibald Duncan Adams, 5 April 1844, Lessudden, Roxburgh, Scotland–8 Oct 1936, Dunedin, New Zealand. Second of 13 children born to Irish-born tailor, John James Adams (1818–1894), and his wife Elizabeth Ann nee Noble, John A. D. Adams emigrated from Scotland with his parents in 1848 to New Zealand as part of the first wave of settlers in the new Otago settlement. Farmers and labourers, in 1864 they sold their Taieri Beach farm and returned to Dunedin. Though Scots Baptists, many of the Adams children w…

Sarah Jane Lancaster (née Murrell), (1858–1935). Born in Williamstown, Victoria, Australia, Sarah Jane was the third child (of eight) of master mariner, William Lee Murrell and his wife Mary Anne (née Hume). In December 1879, Sarah Jane married railway “engineer” Alfred Henry Lancaster (31 Jan 1858, Manchester, England–4 Feb 1930). They lived with the Murrells for some years, until they had children (of whom there were seven). Their large family network of Catos, Murrells, Pyes and Buchanans, ma…

Alexander Thomas Davidson, 1902, Granville, NSW–18 Sep 1987, Mitcham, Victoria. The son of Alexander (auctioneer) and Eleanor Annie Davidson, ‘Alec’ or ‘A.T.’ Davidson was born in Granville, and grew up in Auburn, Sydney, New South Wales (NSW), Australia. Prior to his marriage in 1930, Davidson trained and worked as an accountant. The family were members of Auburn Baptist Church, where Alec became a lay preacher. In 1930, in the middle of the Depression, he married Olive Rita Kellaway (1903–1992…