James JEFFERIS

JEFFERIS, JAMES (b. Bristol, England, 4 April 1833; d. Encounter Bay, SA, 25 Dec 1917). Congregational minister, lecturer and journalist.

The elder son of a carpenter, James Jefferis was raised in a conservative Anglican home. Nothing is known of his early schooling but he spent a year at the reopened Bristol Grammar School in 1848, after which he left to work for his father as a clerk. About this time the family changed from Anglicanism to Congregationalism, attending the Brunswick Square Congregational Church, which Jefferis joined as a member and where he taught Sunday school. He had entertained the idea of entering the ministry from childhood and his wealthy Anglican uncle, W H Townsend, sought unsuccessfully to induce him to enter the Church of England with an offer of education at Oxford or Cambridge and the promise of a benefice afterwards.

A convinced Congregationalist, Jefferis entered New College, London as a lay student in 1852, becoming a full theological student in 1853. He graduated in arts (taking honours in science), and law at the University of London he subsequently obtained the LLD from the University of Sydney. He became a minister of the Congregational church at Saltaire in Yorkshire in May 1858. Following a chest injury his physicians pronounced him consumptive and advised a warmer climate. He accepted the invitation to become the founding minister of a Congregational church in North Adelaide, SA. He was ordained by the Colonial Missionary Society in Westminster Chapel on 17 Dec 1858 and sailed for SA with his wife Mary Louisa Elbury, whom he had married in Bristol on 21 Oct 1858.

Jefferis began his ministry at North Adelaide in the Temperance Hall in Tynte Street in May 1859 and soon attracted a large congregation. He formed the church fellowship in Oct 1859 and accepted its call as pastor in Dec. He influenced the design of the Italianate church opened in Brougham Place in 1862. As a student he was exposed to the liberalising tendencies in mid-century Congregationalism and his preaching in North Adelaide, regarded as very liberal at the time, filled a large church. Early in his ministry he engaged in controversy over the relationship of science and religion, demonstrating his acceptance of the theories of contemporary geology, especially on the antiquity of man. He dismissed the current harmonies of Genesis and geology and counselled openness to the Darwinian theory of evolution without actually embracing it himself. While he did not subscribe to the theory of the verbal inspiration of the Bible, he regarded himself as an evangelical and remained within the boundaries of theological orthodoxy. He was a keen supporter of missions, having contemplated a career with the LMS, which he supported in SA, as well as BFBS and various philanthropic agencies.

Jefferis was one of the organisers of the Evangelical Alliance formed in Adelaide in August 1869. He argued for a more general basis of membership than that of the British Evangelical Alliance which the majority supported. He did not vote against the adoption of the British basis but as a secretary of the Evangelical Alliance he gave the basis a liberal interpretation. He became president of the Alliance in 1872, making Christian unity the theme of his presidency.

Jefferis also helped to found Union College in 1872 to provide higher education for youth, especially candidates for the ministry, and was a founder of the University of Adelaide. He taught mathematics and science and later church history at Union College. He also wrote many leading articles for the Advertiser, but declined to become its third editor.

He left Adelaide in 1877 to become minister of Pitt Street Congregational Church, Sydney, where his Sunday Evening Lectures on applied Christianity attracted large congregations. Through these lectures he inculcated the Protestant virtues of thrift, industry and temperance (but not teetotalism) and promoted a cultured Christianity, embracing all the arts but the theatre. He was critical of the revivalist campaigns of itinerant evangelists and sought to win his hearers to the Christian faith through apologetic sermons in which he invoked evangelical themes in an undogmatic and sometimes imprecise way. He also vigorously contested the claims of the Roman Catholic Church from his pulpit. Late in his Sydney ministry he publicly embraced the Darwinian theory of evolution as consistent with belief in God as Creator and Man as the special object of his favour.

Jefferis left Sydney in Dec 1889 and became minister of Belgrave Congregational Church, Torquay, England, after a brief ministry in London. He earned some notoriety at Torquay for his attacks on ritualism in the Church of England and for his defence of the Protestant reformation against Anglo-Catholicism. He left Torquay in March 1894 to return to his first church at North Adelaide.

Soon after his return he preached a sermon which rejected pre-millenarianism in favour of a post-millenarian view of the coming kingdom of God. He was a founder of the SA Council of Churches in 1896; under his presidency it became a strong supporter of Australian federation, which he had persistently advocated. In doctrinal sermons preached late in his ministry to counteract the prevailing ignorance of 'the great underlying truths' of Christianity he dealt with redemption through the blood of Christ without a clear theory of the Atonement. His emphasis of the freedom of the human will to respond to divine grace and its importance in the ongoing Christian life was more Erasmian than Lutheran. But he continued to consider himself an evangelical Protestant.

By the time he retired, in April 1901, Jefferis had accepted the findings of higher criticism in a cautious way, regarding some of its destructive work as a necessary refinement of Christian understanding of the Bible. But he remained orthodox, especially in his belief in the Person of Christ. When Congregationalism was troubled by the New Theology of R J Campbell of the City Temple, London, Jefferis deeply moved the SA Congregational Union with his testimony to the divinity of the Saviour, delivered in 'awe-stricken accents'. But he resisted the attempt of J C Kirby (q.v.) to drive the adherents of the New Theology out of Congregationalism, although he continued to contend against their reductionist theology.

After his death it was stated misleadingly he kept to the old paths theologically. He was a liberal evangelical who revised his view of the inspiration and authority of the Scriptures in the light of what he regarded as the established findings of science and biblical scholarship. In theology he was closest to the Congregational theologian R W Dale, to whom he acknowledged his debt.

Jefferis was survived by his second wife, Marian Turner, whom he married in 1866, two children from his first marriage, and seven from his marriage with Marian. She was his supporter in philanthropic work and active herself in the welfare homes of destitute children in NSW. His portrait, commissioned by his church, hangs in the Uniting Church, Brougham Place, North Adelaide.

James Jefferis, Papers, Mortlock Library; ADB 4; E S Kiek, An Apostle in Australia (London, 1927); W Phillips, Defending "a Christian Country" (St Lucia, 1981); W Phillips, 'Religious Response to Darwin in Australia in the Nineteenth Century', JAS 26 (1990): 37-51.

WALTER PHILLIPS