# The Church Missionary Society  
From 1804, European missionaries were sent to Sierra Leone by the Church Missionary Society (CMS); their efforts were focused initially on preaching outside the colony (Fyfe, 1962, pp. 94-95; Peterson, 1969, pp. 63-80; Keefer, 2019, pp. 45-70, pp. 97-129). Between 1816 and 1824, the CMS assumed formal responsibility for the secular and ecclesiastical management of colony villages where many of the Africans who had disembarked from slave ships were located. In Governor Charles MacCarthy's management plan for the "liberated Africans", the 'Colony was divided into parishes, each to be superintended by a clergyman provided by the CMS, paid by government. The CMS undertook to provide and pay teachers, government to build churches, schools and parsonages' (Fyfe, 1962, pp. 127-131). Unsurprisingly, Christian instruction underpinned every aspect of the curriculum. In needlework lessons, as Silke Strickrodt has demonstrated, African girls embroidered Christian messages into samplers. A sampler embroidered by Charlotte Turner in the village of Bathurst in 1831 included the verse:  
Lord teach a little child to pray, / My heart with love inflame, / That ev'ry night and ev'ry day / I may adore thy name.  
As the design for the embroidery was under the direction of a CMS teacher and was intended as a form of missionary propaganda, it is unclear whether the content reflected Charlotte Turner's own views (Strickrodt, 2010, pp. 214-218).