Alexander Duff Lectureship

Alexander Duff was the first official missionary of the Church of Scotland, sailing for Calcutta in 1829. He put his focus on higher education and had great influence in Bengal and throughout India, not only among those who became Christians but in the development of the whole educational system. Along with all but one of the missionaries of the Church of Scotland in Bengal, he adhered with the new Free Church in 1843 and built a parallel structure in Calcutta, but continued to work cooperatively with the new Church of Scotland colleagues sent out to serve in Calcutta after the split. He returned to Scotland in 1849 to take up what has been described as the first Chair of Missiology to be established anywhere in the world – at New College in Edinburgh. 

After his death in 1878, using the proceeds of his personal property which he had instructed to be used for this purpose, his son, William Pirie Duff, and daughter, Rebecca Jane (Duff) Watson, established in his memory this series of lectures and were active in choosing the lecturers to continue their father’s interests and to ensure ‘full justice was done to his very strong and earnestly held Evangelical sentiments’ (Trust Deed, 30 June, 1879).  

Originally it functioned rather like a visiting professorship with the lecturer in residence for several months over a four-year period, repeating the lectures in Edinburgh and Glasgow. The Trust Deed allows for a broad range of interests with the lecturer at liberty to choose their own topic, ‘such subject being within the range of Foreign Missions and cognate subjects.’ 

For some reason the lectureship stopped in 1966, and it was not until 1987 that the series was reorganised, with the Church of Scotland working in association with the Centre for Christianity in the Non-Western World, now the Centre for the Study of World Christianity. Kwame Bediako of Ghana was the first lecturer under the new arrangements, which has consisted of one lecture, delivered in Edinburgh and sometimes in Glasgow, with the aspiration that it would be published subsequently. 

There has been a distinguished series of lecturers over the years, e.g. A. T. Pierson, James Stewart, R. E. Speer, J. H. Oldham, V. S. Azariah, A. G. Hogg, Stephen Neill, James S. Stewart, M. M. Thomas up until 1966, and since the re-organisation, Kwame Bediako, Jyoti Sahi (plus a 24-canvas exhibition), Naim Ateek, Vinoth Ramachandra, Tinyiko Maluleke, Dana Roberts, James Tengatenga, Kwok Pui Lan and Ruth Padilla DeBorst.

Ian W Alexander, Church of Scotland