She regarded universities as 'hot-beds of infidelity' and was opposed to women entering them. from Sydney and Katoomba, New South Wales, and made lengthy annual visits to the islands until 1926 when her modest autobiography, Pearls from the Pacific, was published in London. Miss Young administered and dominated the expanding S.S.E.M. That year, singing hymns during the crossing, she helped to settle White missionaries on Malaita in the Solomon Islands in the hope of nurturing an indigenous church. in 1904 in response to appeals for help from repatriated Q.K.M. Despite a nervous breakdown, she recognized her work as a preparation for the South Sea Evangelical Mission which became a branch of the Q.K.M. Between 18 she had spent six precarious years with the China Inland Mission. Tall and slender, with her hair worn austerely, the clear-eyed evangelist dressed in well-cut suits and bore herself confidently. As she embraced departing converts, Florence exhorted them: 'No forget 'im Jesus'. engaged nineteen missionaries and 118 unpaid 'native teachers', and claimed 2150 conversions. Reassuring in its message of hope, its open-air hymn singing and its mass baptisms in local rivers, at its height in 1904-05 the Q.K.M. aimed to prepare the Melanesians for membership of established Christian churches after their repatriation and employed paid missionaries and members of Florence's extended family. Relying on unsolicited subscriptions and stressing 'salvation before education or civilization', it spread to other plantations and won considerable approval. Under Miss Young's guidance, the Queensland Kanaka Mission was formally established at Fairymead in 1886 as an evangelical, non-denominational church. Asking that God instruct 'the teacher and the scholars', she conducted classes in pidgin English, using pictures, rote biblical phrases and a chrysalis to explain the resurrection. Her attentions were increasingly devoted to the Melanesian sugarworkers whose responsiveness to kindness she applauded and whose 'heathen' customs and 'addictions' to 'white men's vices' she abhorred. With timidity, she began to hold prayer meetings for planters' families and, with one assistant, established the Young People's Scriptural Union which eventually attracted 4000 members.
Settling in Sydney in 1878, after the death of her parents Florence moved in 1882 to Fairymead, a sugar plantation near Bundaberg, Queensland, run by two of her brothers. Educated at home and for two years at a boarding school in England, at the age of 18 Florence experienced 'a crisis' during a prayer meeting at Dunedin: perceiving God's powers of forgiveness, she asked to be baptized. Florence Selina Harriet Young (1856-1940), missionary, was born on 10 October 1856 at Motueka, near Nelson, New Zealand, fifth child of Henry Young, farmer, and his wife Catherine Anne, née Eccles, both Plymouth Brethren from England.
0 kommentar(er)
