In May 1843, around two-fifths of the clergy of the Church of Scotland resigned in protest over the ‘intrusion’ of the state in matters relating to ecclesiastical governance. The greatest single challenge facing the newly established Free Church of Scotland was financial: how to pay the stipends of its ministers. The solution was the Sustentation Fund, the aim of which was to guarantee a minimum stipend for all ministers by redistributing funds raised. This article describes and analyses the development of the Sustentation Fund, highlighting its critical role in financially cross-subsidizing congregations in peripheral rural areas. In analysing the direction and scale of cross subsidy, the results throw new light on two questions. First, the extent to which, across geographical location and time, rural congregations were dependent on urban cross subsidies. Second, the geographical location and financial commitment across time, of the church’s urban, net contributor, congregations.

This article investigates personal and public facets of the life and work of Hannah Whitall Smith (1832–1911) as a lens through which to explore the complexities of marginalization and belonging within the late nineteenth-century Holiness movement. Despite her significant contributions as a lay Christian leader, prolific author and social activist, Smith’s legacy remains largely understudied. Examining selections from her extensive collected works, including correspondence and Smith’s file of ‘fanaticisms’, this article investigates how supposed margins and peripheries are not places of obscurity or insignificance, but fertile contexts of religious dialogue and innovation.

This article examines the role of the Catholic Church in the Brazilian city of Recife, in the aftermath of the Republic’s Proclamation and the subsequent separation of church and state in Brazil. The study focuses on Friar Casimiro Brochtrup, OFM, who arrived in Brazil in 1894 and settled in Recife. His efforts in the impoverished Santo Amaro neighbourhood, particularly at Sítio da Macacheira, involved founding a church, chapels, schools and associations. The study aims to understand the Catholic Church’s impact on urban territorialities amid ecclesiastical transformations and political shifts before the emergence of the theology of liberation in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It argues that the church’s expansion from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century involved territorial boundary expansion and rationalization of social assets. Drawing on diverse sources, including newspapers, ecclesiastical documents, reports and personal correspondence, this article illuminates the dynamic interactions between the Catholic Church, urban development and societal changes in Brazil during this period.

The Chinese Civil War (1946–9) and the Korean War (1950–3) contributed to the beginning of Hong Kong’s evolution from a British colony occupying a geographically peripheral position in South China, to a world centre for Chinese Protestant Bible publishing and distribution in the Cold War era. In 1948, the China Bible House (CBH), the de facto national Bible society of China, decided to establish an emergency office in Hong Kong, responding to the prospect of the Communist takeover of China. Subsequently, as the Korean War unfolded, the CBH, owing to political pressure, desired to sever its connection with the emergency office in 1951. This resulted in the transition of the emergency office into the Hong Kong Bible House (HKBH), the British and American Bible societies’ agency for Chinese Bible publishing and distribution. Thanks to the work of the HKBH, Hong Kong came to be the major source of Bibles for Chinese Protestants outside mainland China.

During the Second World War, the West Ukrainian region of Eastern Galicia came under Soviet rule. In 1946, the Stalinist regime banned the church of most Ukrainians in the region, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (UGCC), by ‘reuniting’ it with the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC). Whereas most Greek Catholic clergymen joined the ROC under state pressure, the opponents of ‘reunion’ endured arrests and other forms of persecution. The church of several million believers became a persecuted religious minority on the margins of Soviet society. Upon their return from the Gulag in the mid-1950s, the ‘non-reunited’ Greek Catholic priests usually encountered numerous bureaucratic obstacles when trying to settle down and secure their livelihoods. Based on archival and oral history material, this article focuses on the clandestine clergy’s experiences of social marginalization.

Under the 1980s authoritarian regime of Doo-Hwan Chun, a young Christian group emerged from the evangelical majority of Korean Protestantism. On the margins of Korean evangelicalism, this group started to redefine what it meant to be evangelical and to challenge its conservative-leaning socio-political and missiological orientation. This theme of ‘new evangelicals’ or ‘the evangelical left’ has been covered by many scholars in relation to America and Latin America, but not in Asian contexts. This article illuminates the Korean story by analysing the new evangelical experiments of Korean students from 1986 to 1989. It looks at their socio-political and ecclesial background, the tensions between this group and mainstream evangelicalism, and their contribution to the wider Korean evangelical community. Based on in-depth research of Korean primary sources and oral interviews with its key members, this article explores how a new evangelical group at the margins of Korean evangelicalism challenged the centre.

Bible smuggling, the illicit transportation of religious contraband into the Communist countries of the Eastern bloc, was a marked Cold War phenomenon. At first a peripheral, amateurish pursuit, over the course of the 1970s and 1980s Bible smuggling developed into a transnational network of training camps and safe houses, which used recruitment practices and specially doctored objects and vehicles resembling those of state intelligence agencies. Bible smuggling also became a mode of perception. Professional Bible smugglers, reliant on student volunteers, preached a distinctive worldview. They developed their own literature, theology, moral codes, trade routes and criminal methods. Bestselling books, comics, advertisements and personal testimonies gradually came to shape how millions of conservative Christians, mainly evangelicals, viewed Communist Europe. Bible smuggling became a multi-million-dollar business and a televangelist staple which influenced US foreign policy. This article uncovers, for the first time, the scale, methods and significance of Cold War Bible-smuggling and argues for its enduring influence on conservative Christian thinking.