Biography
Rowland Victor Bingham was born on January 14, 1872, in Sheffield, England, in a working-class family. His father was a laborer and a Methodist. He left school at an early age and worked in a variety of jobs. As a young man, he was converted in a Salvation Army meeting. He joined the Army and took part in its street work. In 1890, at the age of eighteen, he emigrated to Canada and settled in Toronto, where he worked as a laborer and a farmhand. He continued to attend the Salvation Army and became a lay preacher. He felt a call to missions.
He studied for a short time at the Missionary Training Institute run by A. B. Simpson, in Nyack, New York. At Nyack, he met two young men, Walter Gowans and Thomas Kent, who shared his burden for the Sudan, the great region of central Africa that was then almost unreached by the gospel. The name Sudan was used for the whole belt of Africa south of the Sahara. In 1893, the three men sailed for Africa, without the backing of a mission board. They went to Lagos, in Nigeria, and began to make their way inland. It was a hard beginning. Gowans and Kent died of fever within a few months, and Bingham was struck down with illness. He returned to Canada, in despair, a failure.
He did not give up the vision. In 1898, he founded the Sudan Interior Mission, with the aim of taking the gospel to the interior of Africa. He wrote of the vision of a chain of stations across the continent. He raised support through the churches of Canada and the United States. In 1900, he led a second party, and they settled at Patigi, on the Niger River, in Nigeria. They worked in difficult conditions, and many fell ill and died. But the mission survived. It spread through Nigeria and into Niger, Ethiopia, Ghana and other lands. It was a faith mission, which did not ask for money.
He was a man of wide influence and a prolific organizer. He served as the general director of the mission for forty years, from 1898 to 1942. He saw it grow from a handful of workers to over a thousand. He started a magazine, The Evangelical Christian, which he edited. He was one of the founders of the Canadian Keswick Conference. He was a friend of other mission leaders. He wrote a number of books, including Seven Sevens of Years and a Jubilee, which told the history of the mission.
He had weaknesses. He was a man of strong will, who held the reins of the mission tightly. He was criticized by some of his colleagues for being autocratic. He also was prone to depression and overwork. He suffered from health problems for years. He was a man who felt the weight of the failures of the early years. He said that the failure of the first party was the foundation of the later success.
He died on January 17, 1942, in Toronto, at the age of seventy. The mission that he founded became one of the largest in Africa. It later joined with other groups to form SIM International. His life shows the effect of a man who failed and who refused to be defeated. A Salvation Army convert from Sheffield became the founder of a great mission.