William Gibson Sloan (1865 – 1914), Evengelical Missionary from Dalry

The Brethren Church in the Faroe Islands is the largest Christian group outside of the Established Church.  It was begun by missionary William Gibson Sloan of Dalry in 1865.  In September 2013, on the 175th anniversary of his birth, a large group of Faroese people visited Dalry to commemorate his memory.

William Gibson Sloan was born 04 September 1838 in Dalry, the fifth of eight children born to parents Nathaniel Sloan, a handloom weaver, and Elizabeth Orr.  He was baptised in the Church of Scotland on 16 September 1838.  The 1841 census reveals that Nathaniel and Elizabeth were living at Bridgend of Rye, Dalry.  His mother, Elizabeth, died between 1847 and 1851.

After leaving school, he found work as a storeman in the Calder Iron Works, Longriggend, North Lanarkshire.  Able to play the viola, he often played at local dances.  In 1857 his younger brother Matthew died, aged 16, after a very short illness.  Although aged only 18, this event caused William to begin looking for purpose in his own life.  Coming into contact with the Brethren Church, he attended some evangelistic meetings where he was converted and began attending ‘kitchen’ meetings at a home in Coatdyke.  In 1861 he quit his job, opposed to the store’s sale of alcohol, after which he became involved in evangelical outreach closer to Dalry, where he was influenced by 96-year-old Free Church Missionary Samuel Dodds, who had been blind since the age of three after catching measles.  William applied to the Edinburgh Religious Tract and Book Society and was sent to the Shetland Islands arriving in Lerwick on 17 January 1863.  Over the course of the next two years he heard about the Faroe Islands from the Shetland fishermen.

The Faroe Islands which lie 180 miles north-west of Shetland, were part of the Danish realm and its 8,000 inhabitants spoke both Faroese and Danish.  In 1865 William visited the Faroe Islands equipped with a Danish-English dictionary and several bibles written in Danish.  In 1866 he gave up his job with the Edinburgh Book and Tract Society and moved to Tórshavn, Faroe Islands where he ‘lived by faith’.  For the next decade he worked between the Faroe Islands, Shetland, Orkney, Britain and Norway. 

Change takes time.  The islanders, used to traditional, ritualistic church services, were slow to respond to William’s evangelical style of religion.  However, this was also a period of major political upheaval and the Islanders began to want a more personal, intimate religion.  In 1878, thirteen years after William’s first visit to the Faroe Islands, the Faroese Brethren church got its first member, and on 17 July 1879 the first service was held in the newly built “Ebenezer Hall”, with the first baptism taking place in 1880.  Since then the church has been rebuilt twice, in 1905 and again in 1963 opening as the Ebenezer Evangelical Church.  For forty years the Brethren’s were the only evangelical movement in the Faroes.  Since then, they have been held up as a shining example of modern Christianity to later missionaries going to the Faroe Islands.

Although Faroese was the everyday language of the Faroese people, who had a rich oral tradition, Danish was taught in the schools and used by the Danish clergy and officials.  The Brethren church was the first to use the Faroese language at their meetings.  In 1822 the first book written in Faroese was published, but the Bible wasn’t translated into Faroese until 1949.  Today 48,000 people live in the Faroe Islands.

William married Elsebeth (Elspa) Isaksen I Geil of Tórshavn, Faroe Islands at a Brethren meeting hall in Glasgow on 11 October 1881.  The couple had six children, Poul (1882); Elisabeth (1887); Archibald (1890); Cathrine (1892); Anna Elisabeth (1895) and Andrew (1896).  William Sloan Gibson died 04 September 1914 on his 76th birthday and is buried in Tórshavn.

A copy of William Gibson Sloan’s diaries are held by John Rylands University Library, Manchester.  The originals are held at the Faroese National Archives.

Further Reading

  1. www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk
  2. 1841 and 1851 census www.freecen.org.uk
  3. https://www.jogvanz.org/single-post/2018/02/26/A-Fisher-of-Man-in-the-Faroe-Islands
  4. https://www.evangelical-times.org/30853/the-quiet-revival-in-the-faroes/
  5. William Gibson Sloan Diaries
    https://archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk/search/archives/89a4e26e-c6af-31ed-a8ea-f91fef883983
  6. Joansson, Tordur (2012) Brethren in the Faeroes: An Evangelical movement, its remarkable growth and lasting impact in a remote island community. PhD thesis.  http://theses.gla.ac.uk/3647/1/2012joanssonphd.pdf
  7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Gibson_Sloan
  8. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C3%B3rshavn
  9. http://www.ayrshirehistory.org.uk/Bibliography/pdfs/an47.pdf