In this innovative and energetically written book, Edward E. Andrews argues that “native” (Indian and African) missionaries, not white ones, were at the center of colonial Atlantic missions in the British Atlantic. Historians have given too much credit to white, middle-class Anglo-European missionaries who were often culturally ignorant of the peoples they were trying to convert. Instead, noting the “astonishing ubiquity of native preachers,” whose numbers almost always far exceeded those of white missionaries, Andrews emphasizes the ways in which these Indians and Africans “not only encouraged Christian missions, but actually led them” (228). This reality, Andrews argues, reminds us that the adoption of Christianity was not simply “passive subjugation to imperial and colonial authority” (6). Instead, drawing on a wide range of letters, sermons, and reports, this book shows how these indigenous Christian participants “employed Christianity as spiritual and rhetorical weapons” to fight against “colonization, dispossession, and racial slavery” (7). As further evidence of the ownership of such missions, “native apostles” inserted themselves into the wider expanse of Christian history, constructing a “sacred genealogy,” by which they looked to the first generation of Christian missionaries as described in the New Testament book of Acts (11).

The primary strength of Native Apostles is its expanse. Focussing on the wider British Atlantic, this book considers individuals from Africa, New England, the mid-Atlantic, the Carolinas, and the Caribbean and includes Anglicans, Congregationalists, Moravians, Presbyterians, and independent Indian and African congregations and movements, with a few sideways glances at global Protestant and Catholic contexts in Asia and South America. Religious historians of North America have had a difficult time incorporating a wider Atlantic perspective into developments in the English North American colonies, particularly as they relate to American Indians. Andrews's gift to the reader is a wider perspective and a linking together of stories we already mostly knew. Many of the primary individuals the book discusses will be familiar to historians of the period – Hiacoomes, John Sassamon, Hendrick, Rebecca Protten, Philip Quaque, Samson Occom, John Quamine – although Andrews also pulls in a wide range of lesser-known people as well. Andrews insightfully reveals connections and points of crossover and overlap that are often underemphasized, such as the way in which Ezra Stiles and Samuel Hopkins built on and yet differentiated themselves from the ill-reputed “Grand Design” of Eleazar Wheelock when promoting their own scheme for John Quamine and Bristol Yamma to return to Africa as missionaries in the 1770s.

The book's scope is impressive, and the interpretive framework compelling. But at times it is not clear how well the emphasis on Indian and African agency and independence works across such diverse chronologies and geographies. Andrews wants to give full credit to natives as agents, except when natives choose not to be apostles. Chapter 1, for example, gives in exquisite detail the ways in which New England Indians were the engine behind the growth of Native Christianity, so much so that the reader is urged “to take celebrated missionary John Eliot out of the picture” (53). But in the very next chapter, when no parallel indigenous Christian leadership emerges in the same period in the mid-Atlantic and southern colonies, the blame falls squarely on the shoulders of Anglicans, who mistakenly focussed on “native royalty,” leading to a non-story in terms of native leadership. But it's hard to have it both ways. If the story is native agency from start to finish, then wouldn't Indians and Africans in southern colonies just create their own institutions and Christian networks, despite the failings of Anglicans? Or, even closer to Massachusetts, why is it that Indians in Rhode Island and Connecticut virtually ignored Eliot during the seventeenth century while indigenous leadership flourished in parts of Plymouth and Massachusetts? All of this suggests a more complicated, dialectic relationship that is rooted in local, contextual circumstances. This book almost assumes that native acceptance of Christianity is a foregone conclusion, and that “Native apostles” sprang up everywhere. And yet they didn't, as Andrews briefly notes (5). But this point is an important one and needs more consideration throughout. His impressive Appendix lists 275 black and Indian Christian “missionaries,” and yet given the millions of blacks and Indians in the wider Atlantic world, this list inadvertently serves as a reminder of Native apostles' relative scarcity (although many more existed off the record, as Andrews notes). The more vexing question still remains how to explain why some Indian and African individuals and groups adopted Christianity and why others (usually the majority) did not, and what the in-between options looked like over time.

Other small issues of terminology exist as well, such as Andrews's recurring use of the Anglo-centered term “Moor's Indians” for the diverse group of Natives who attended the Indian Charity School in Lebanon, Connecticut during the mid-eighteenth century. Similarly, to group under the rubric of “missionaries” the diverse collection of ministers, teachers, and preachers somewhat conflates the actual roles individuals played over time and obscures the ways in which these roles were often filled in somewhat temporary ways.

But overall, Andrews's points are important, gracefully made, well taken. This book is an excellent and much-welcomed addition to the growing literature on religion in the early modern Atlantic world, one that will surely be appreciated by scholars in the field and profitably used as an accessible introduction to colonial missions for undergraduates and graduates alike.